Invoice Plane
Hosting

InvoicePlane is the simpler cousin of Invoice Ninja, and there's a real audience for that. Not everyone wants a Laravel-powered, Vue-front-ended, multi-gateway, time-tracking, project-managing invoicing platform. Some people want to send a clean invoice, get paid, and be done with it. InvoicePlane is for those people.

I host both, and I'd say roughly two thirds of my freelance clients pick Invoice Ninja for the breadth, and the other third pick InvoicePlane because it feels more approachable. Neither is wrong. They're solving slightly different problems for slightly different temperaments.

"There's a real value in choosing software that does less. In over 20 years of hosting I've watched plenty of small business owners spend more time configuring their invoicing tool than actually invoicing. InvoicePlane refuses to be that tool, and that restraint is a feature."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What you get with InvoicePlane: clients, products, quotes, invoices, recurring invoices, payments, basic tax handling, a small set of payment gateways, a simple client portal where customers can view their invoices, and email-based delivery. That's the whole thing. There's no time tracking, no project management, no expense management, no team-of-50 admin features. If you need those, Invoice Ninja is the answer.

What InvoicePlane does well is approachability. Set-up takes ten minutes. The admin layout is clean. Creating an invoice is three or four fields. The PDF templates look professional out of the box and you can edit them in the admin without writing code. New users tend to be productive on day one rather than spending a week configuring things.

On hosting, InvoicePlane is genuinely lightweight. PHP 7.4 is the minimum, PHP 8.0+ is fine, and MySQL 5.6 or higher is supported. It runs on our £5.99 shared plan without breaking a sweat. The database is small, the queries are simple, and even sole traders with several years of invoice history barely register on the resource graphs.

One thing to flag honestly. InvoicePlane's development is more leisurely than Invoice Ninja's. Releases come out, but not as often. The user community is smaller. Some advanced things (like detailed VAT handling for complex B2B EU scenarios, or specific UK Making Tax Digital workflows) aren't built in and aren't likely to arrive any time soon. That's fine if your invoicing is straightforward (which for most sole traders it is), but if you need depth, look at Invoice Ninja or move into the Akaunting/Dolibarr space.

Email deliverability matters here as much as it does for any invoicing tool. Configure SMTP through our email or a transactional service, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC properly, and your invoices will reliably reach inboxes. Skip that step and you'll have client conversations about lost invoices that nobody enjoys. We help with the configuration as standard.

For a sole trader or small contractor sending a few dozen invoices a month, InvoicePlane on our shared hosting is one of the best value combinations I can recommend. It does what it says, costs almost nothing, and the data stays in your database where you can back it up, export it, or take it elsewhere whenever you want.