Avalara vs. Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Avalara
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Avalara AvaTax connects to the software that businesses already have and delivers sales tax decisions based on precise geo-location in more than 12,000 taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.
$21
per month
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE is a portfolio of tax and accounting technology for corporations designed to help users boost collaboration with departments and partners and ensure seamless tax compliance no matter where a company does business.N/A
Pricing
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Considered Both Products
Avalara
Chose Avalara
On this in regards to Avalara, I would need to wait to see a bit as both instances the ERP was SAP, and we are in the process of implementing SAP to Avalara. So I cannot compare those at this time. I [can't] compare my use of ONESOURCE/SAP to Avalara/NetSuite +Salesforce, as I …
Chose Avalara
Limited with home rule jurisdictions and taxability categories, it's not a very robust product, but will meet most of the needs of e-commerce end users or a business needing tax calculating on an invoice without having to run the iterations manually.
Chose Avalara
Most of what has been done in the past was paper held in hand. This created many difficulties when trying to look up past documents, and checking the validity of past documents. With CertCapture, everything is at our fingertips.
Chose Avalara
Avalara had more integrations, was the only system at the time that worked with Shopify+, which we are re-platforming our Magento site to, and came in at a price point competitive with Vertex.

Honestly - we liked Sovos and ONESOURCE a lot better. ONESOURCE had the tightest and …
Chose Avalara
Truthfully, it came down to the quoted cost/contracts/implementation costs, and that our point of sale system claimed it had done integrations with Avalara in the past and not with the other firms we were considering. I was not actually a part of the discussion and decision …
Chose Avalara
Avalara as a one stop shop for tax compliance blows away the competition. The level of expertise received for the price is a tremendous value. The user interface is easy to navigate, all of the transactions and returns are conveniently saved in the system for easy recall, and …
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Chose Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
OneSource is behind Avalara in many ways. However, at our time of implementation Avalara could not handle some of the calculations we required. That has changed since.
Chose Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
ONESOURCE blows Sovos out of the water. would take ONESOURCE 10 out of 10 times. The two biggest differentiators are the friendliness and helpfulness of customer support and the overall capabilities of the software.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Type of tax
Comparison of Type of tax features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
8.4
301 Ratings
1% below category average
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
7.7
2 Ratings
9% below category average
Sales and Use Taxes8.9294 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Cross-border Taxes8.364 Ratings8.01 Ratings
VAT / GST Taxes7.755 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Energy and Fuel Taxes8.525 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Tax Reporting & Compliance
Comparison of Tax Reporting & Compliance features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
8.2
279 Ratings
2% below category average
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE
7.8
3 Ratings
7% below category average
Geolocation for Tax Assessment8.7167 Ratings8.02 Ratings
3rd-Party Software Integrations8.0222 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Tax Data Reporting8.3247 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Compliance Administration Management8.3191 Ratings7.03 Ratings
Tax Exemption Processing8.3201 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Tax Document Management8.1192 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Complex Tax Scenario Management7.4127 Ratings7.02 Ratings
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AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 8.4 out of 10
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User Ratings
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(412 ratings)
8.0
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.2
(26 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(404 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.7
(18 ratings)
5.9
(2 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.4
(197 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.1
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.1
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.9
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AvalaraThomson Reuters ONESOURCE
Likelihood to Recommend
Avalara
The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response. I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider
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Thomson Reuters
We use [Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE] to prepare federal and state income tax returns which allows us to complete the work assigned very quickly and allow senior members of the team to review the work before submitting in a very fluid state. While not in the tax or busy season, the program is not as used as much.
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Pros
Avalara
  • Calculates the correct tax regardless of state, county, or local jurisdiction.
  • CertCapture provides a site for managing all resale certificates, updating, renewing, and providing reports/backup in the event of an audit.
  • One stop shop for all things tax makes my life easier!
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Thomson Reuters
  • ONESOURCE is excellent for providing a holistic suite of products that are specifically geared toward tax compliance.
  • ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining a fresh look and appearance to their products, but doesn't change the base functionality just to sell more or improve the look of the product.
  • ONESOURCE also does an excellent job of maintaining current tax information. In an ever changing tax world, this is the most important thing for a piece of tax software to provide.
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Cons
Avalara
  • I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything
  • In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time.
  • In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact.
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Thomson Reuters
  • ONESOURCE absolutely needs to restore their TIN Matching feature. Not having a TIN Matching feature is huge and needs to be addressed immediately.
  • The software interface itself is outdated and clunky. It is way behind in terms of user-friendliness and convenience. Additionally, it is only compatible with Internet Explorer. ONESOURCE is literally the only reason I would ever access Internet Explorer which is notably slower and more prone to freezing than Google Chrome or Safari. A good portion of our business uses Macs which means they are SOL on accessing ONESOURCE.
  • The ability to look at multiple tax years for a single recipient would be huge. Currently, if a recipient asks us to pull three years of data, this means three different searches within each year's ONESOURCE instance. It's tedious and could be improved.
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Likelihood to Renew
Avalara
We need their help with filing and keeping track of things. It is very likely we are in the process of renewing right now. Autumn is our case manager and she has been a great help in keeping us updated on our usage and renewal. I feel we will be using this for a very long time.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Usability
Avalara
The software and addons that we use are very applicable to our operations and the usability of the sotware works great with all of the software we have it integrated with. The certcapture and avatax work great together and has made things very automated for our company as majority of our sales are sales exempt. Navigating through the software is very user friendly and helps when we have to have other individuals go in as it is not difficult for them to find where they need to go within the software.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Avalara
I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Performance
Avalara
We do have trouble tying Avalara's reporting back to our POS, but we just got a new POS system and there are bugs we are still trying to work out within the POS system. I do not believe this is an Avalara issue
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Avalara
Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.
Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.
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Thomson Reuters
The ONESOURCE support has improved significantly over the years. Support sends out emails with the answer provided which helps in the future when the same issue occurs. This reduces the amount of calls to ONESOURCE Support as you can better document the calls and rely on previous answers if the same issue occurs. ONESOURCE support has also implemented a callback feature that reduces the amount of time spent on hold.
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In-Person Training
Avalara
I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Avalara
The videos go too fast; I kept having to pause them and go back. They don't allow for any practice transactions or provide training materials.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Avalara
The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Avalara
When I started with the company, they were using a version of CCH. This was my first experience with that program and I found it very cumbersome. It was unable to calculate multiple tax rates (this may have changed in the last 10 years) and while it filled out some of the tax returns for us, we still had to manipulate many and file them ourselves. Now we just verify that what we show in our system matches Avalara and hit approve and we are done for another month.
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Thomson Reuters
As I said it is an easy-to-use platform and saved us time and money. They have great customer service and have helped our company get new hires checked and in-service faster than our old company. By combining the two services in one place it has made it easier for the new hire and the HR staff to track results. I am a fan!
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Scalability
Avalara
There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
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Thomson Reuters
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Avalara
  • We are positively impacted by Avalara in having a central library to store our certificate files.
  • We spend very little time and resources to calculate and compile tax data for filing.
  • The electronic filing has helped insure we are on time with our filings and avoiding penalties.
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Thomson Reuters
  • Leaves sales tax off invoices from time to time.
  • Reduces the amount of manual work needed to calculate sales tax and to update tax rates.
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ScreenShots

Avalara Screenshots

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