Pilot is a bookkeeping service with software attached. The question is not which product is better — it is whether you want to own your books or hand them to someone and wait until the tenth business day to see them.
Every other comparison here is software against software. Pilot is not that.
Pilot sells bookkeeping as a service. Above the entry tier there is a US-based bookkeeper doing the categorisation, and the deliverable is a set of reports that arrives on the tenth business day.
Some founders do not want an accounting product. They want the problem to go away, handled by someone whose name is on it, and they are right that this is a legitimate thing to buy. Pilot does it well and prices it clearly — $99 a month at the bottom, a bookkeeper above that, tax filing and fractional CFO work available on the same invoice.
If that is what you want, you should buy it, and nothing below is an argument against it.
Latency, and it is structural rather than a service failure. A month-end that closes on the tenth business day means that for the first two weeks of every month you are running the company on last month’s guesses. The sixth business day on the Custom tier is faster and still not the same as looking.
The entry tier gives up more than that. Essentials is cash-basis only and has no human on it — so at $99 you are buying AI categorisation without review, which is closer to our category than to theirs, and cash-basis books that a board or a lender will ask you to restate.
Pilot’s tax plans are US federal, state, and Delaware. The 1099-NEC counts are on the plan pages. The bookkeepers are US-based.
For a Canadian company, or one filing on both sides, that is not a gap in a feature list — it is the wrong service. This is the one comparison in the set where the answer is decided before anyone looks at the software.
We think the choice between “do it yourself” and “hand it to someone” is a false one, and that it exists because doing it yourself has historically meant doing it manually.
Equated proposes the entries and attaches the evidence, and you confirm them. That takes minutes rather than the days it used to, and the books are current on the second of the month because nobody is waiting on anyone. You keep the thing Pilot’s customers give up, which is knowing why a number is what it is without asking.
| Capability | Equated | Pilot |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Software | A bookkeeping service, with software |
| Humans doing the categorisation | No | Core plan and up |
| Accrual-basis accounting | Yes | Core plan and up — Essentials is cash only |
| When month-end reports arrive | When you close | 10th business day · 6th on Custom |
| Vendor bills included | Not metered | 10 per month on Core |
| Year-end filing | $649 flat, optional add-on | $1,000 – $2,450 per year by entity type |
| Canadian tax and filing | Yes | US only |
Both, depending on the tier. The $99 Essentials plan is explicitly AI-powered software with no human staff and cash-basis books only. From the Core plan up you get a US-based bookkeeper, and accrual basis becomes available. The people are the product above the entry tier.
Pilot publishes a reporting SLA rather than a live ledger — reports on the tenth business day on Core, the sixth on Custom. That is a real commitment and it is faster than most outsourced bookkeepers. It is still a different thing from books you can look at on the second of the month.
Its published tax plans are US federal, state, and Delaware filings, with 1099-NEC included by count, and its bookkeepers are US-based. A Canadian corporation filing a T2 is not the customer these plans describe.
Pilot prices tax separately by entity — from $1,000 a year for a single-member LLC to $2,450 for a C-corp, plus $250 to $500 for extra state or city filings. Our CPA-reviewed filing is a $649 flat add-on. The comparison is not clean, because Pilot's price buys a filing service and ours buys review of books an agent already prepared.
Claims about Pilot last verified August 25, 2026