3,217 stars · AGPL-3.0 · v0.7.6 (2026-09-06) · Track this in Scout
Charts and reports over a plain-text money ledger you already keep.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
Paisa reads a plain-text accounting file and serves a web page of charts, budgets, retirement projections and investment summaries. It ships as a desktop application, a single command-line file, and a container image.
What it is good for. Anyone already keeping accounts in ledger, hledger or beancount format who is tired of reading numbers in a terminal. Also for anyone considering plain-text accounting who wants to see what the reports look like before committing.
- A desktop application for Linux, macOS and Windows, so there is a route that needs no terminal at all.
- It reads all three common plain-text formats —
ledger,hledgerandbeancount— chosen with one line in its settings file. - The
ledgerprogram is included, so that route works with nothing else installed. The documentation is explicit about the other two: "Paisa ships with ledger binary. If you use hledger or beancount, make sure that the binaries are installed."
- You still have to understand double-entry bookkeeping and write the transactions by hand or import them. Its own questions page sends newcomers off to learn the underlying tool first.
- The licence is AGPL-3.0, read from the file — but not at
LICENSEorLICENSE.md, which both return "not found". It is atmaster/COPYING. The text is the standard Affero licence, unmodified, and it names no project copyright holder: the only copyright line in the file is the Free Software Foundation's own. Personal use is unaffected; offering a changed copy to other people over a network means publishing your changes. - The command-line and container routes serve a web page on port 7500 with no password unless you switch sign-in on, so it should not be exposed beyond the machine itself. On macOS you also have to strip the download warning flag by hand. One maintainer, 82 open issues, and no published memory, disk or processor figure.
beancount/favaThe same web interface over a plain-text ledger, covered in Edition 22, but beancount only and a faithful report viewer rather than a money dashboard.
Track this in Scout
firefly-iii/firefly-iiiAlso a self-hosted personal money manager, covered in Edition 28, but with its own database and web entry forms instead of a plain-text file.
Track this in Scout
actualbudget/actualAlso a free money application you run yourself, built around envelope budgeting with its own syncing server and no plain-text file.
Track this in Scout
# Easiest: download the desktop app for your system from the releases page. # On Debian or Ubuntu: sudo dpkg -i paisa-app-linux-amd64.deb # Command line instead: chmod u+x paisa && sudo mv paisa /usr/local/bin paisa serve # then open http://localhost:7500 # Or with Docker: docker run -p 7500:7500 -v /path/to/paisa:/root/Documents/paisa/ ananthakumaran/paisa:latest
