Zeni vs Puzzle vs Digits vs YourBooks: a comparison for founders outside the US
Search for AI bookkeeping and you get the same three names: Zeni, Puzzle and Digits. They are good products with real engineering behind them. If you run a company in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines or Thailand, none of them will take you as a customer.
That is not a dig. It is the first line of their own documentation, and it is the single most useful fact on this page, because it collapses a two-week evaluation into a ten-minute one.
Everything below was checked on 14 September 2026. Vendors move, so check the source pages before you act on a price.
The wall nobody mentions until you are already in the signup flow
All three state the restriction plainly once you go looking.
Zeni: "Currently, our services are available only to U.S.-based entities." Digits uses close to the same sentence. Puzzle is built for US entities and USD transactions only, and its own help centre says so. Connect a non-USD account through Plaid and, if it connects at all, the balances present as USD without being converted, which is a worse failure than a clean refusal because it looks like it worked.
The reason is the same in all three cases and it is not laziness. These products are assembled on top of a US financial stack: Mercury, Brex, Ramp, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe and Plaid. Rebuilding that for a Malaysian bank is not a feature flag.
What each one actually is
They get grouped together and they are not the same shape.
Zeni is a service with software attached. It requires QuickBooks Online Plus underneath, and if you do not have it, Zeni migrates you onto it first. You are buying a bookkeeping team with a dashboard, and you are also buying QuickBooks.
Puzzle is its own ledger, not a layer on QuickBooks, aimed at venture-backed US startups and priced to be bought by a founder rather than a finance team.
Digits is also its own ledger with AI reconciliation, and it sells to accounting firms as well as directly. It has no in-house accounting team, so the human help is a partner directory rather than staff.
The prices, since nobody puts them side by side
Zeni AI Bookkeeping starts at $494 a month billed annually, with a Growth tier at $719. Its fractional CFO tiers run from
Puzzle runs
Digits is $65,
So the category spans roughly
Four things worth comparing on, instead of feature lists
Entity geography. Ask whether they will onboard a Sdn Bhd or a Pte Ltd, not whether they have users in the region. Those are different answers.
Whose ledger is it. An interface on QuickBooks and a ledger of its own behave differently when you need a prior year restated or a chart of accounts that matches how you think about the business. Both are legitimate, but they are different purchases, and the price of the one you are shown is not the whole price.
Categorisation accuracy, honestly stated. Every product in this category claims automation. The useful question is what happens to the transactions it gets wrong, and whether the correction sticks the next time the same vendor appears. We wrote about what the real accuracy range looks like rather than the marketing number.
What happens after the books are clean. This is the one most comparisons skip. Clean books that only ever produce a P&L and a balance sheet have done half the job. The other half is the ledger feeding a forecast, so burn, runway and variance come off the same numbers you file from. We wrote up why a forecast and a set of books drift apart and what it costs in a board meeting.
Where YourBooks is different, and where it is not
YourBooks is our bookkeeping product, so treat this section accordingly.
Different: it takes Southeast Asian entities and currencies, it is its own ledger rather than a layer on QuickBooks, and the general ledger flows into a forecast on the same platform. That loop is the reason to look at it, and it is the thing none of the three above ship, because a forecast is not on their roadmap.
Not different: it is bookkeeping, and the automation is the same broad class of automation. If you are a US Delaware C-corp banking with Mercury, Puzzle or Digits is a sensible shortlist and we are not the obvious answer.
One more honest note. Moving an existing set of books onto YourBooks is something we run with you, not a self-serve wizard you drive alone at midnight. Your chart of accounts comes across as yours, the full ledger since inception comes with it, and you sign off on a trial balance before anything commits. The switch checklist sets out what you hand over and what you keep.
Takeaway
If you are outside the US, this comparison is shorter than it looks, and the answer is not a feature table. Check entity geography first and most of the shortlist disappears. Then ask whose ledger you are buying, what happens to the transactions the machine gets wrong, and whether the finished books go anywhere other than a filing cabinet.