untied is one of the UK's best-known personal tax apps — the first end-to-end app HMRC recognised for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, aimed squarely at sole traders, landlords and other Self Assessment filers. Ledgers takes a different route: it owns the underlying general ledger and is transaction-led, so your books stay correct year-round, not just at filing time. Here's an honest look at where each one wins.
untied was the first end-to-end app HMRC recognised for MTD for Income Tax, with a real track record filing both the four quarterly updates and the final declaration directly to HMRC. If you want software that has been submitting live returns for years, that history counts.
untied handles far more than sole-trade and property: capital gains, CIS, foreign income, non-residency, multiple PAYE, EIS/SEIS, Gift Aid, pensions and partnership income. If your tax affairs sprawl well beyond a single business, untied covers edges Ledgers doesn't yet.
A polished iOS/Android app, automatic mileage tracking (handy for landlords driving between properties), receipt capture and invoicing — all with a strong 4.8 Trustpilot rating. It's FCA-regulated and supervised by the CIOT.
untied deliberately keeps things to income, expenses, real-time tax and filing. For someone who just wants to record transactions and file — without a chart of accounts or double-entry in sight — that focus is a genuine strength.
untied is a personal-tax app — no chart of accounts, journals or formal profit-and-loss and balance sheet. Ledgers is a proper double-entry accounting platform: your books are always reconciled and audit-ready, and the MTD figures fall out of a correct ledger rather than a bag of categorised transactions.
untied is paid-only (from about £64.99 up to £129.99 a year) with just a 30-day trial — you must pay to file. Ledgers offers free public tools and a free tier, so you can start keeping proper books and prepare for MTD before committing a penny.
Ledgers is built transaction-first: every number traces back to a bank line you can see and approve, so nothing is a black box. You get an accountant-grade audit trail and control the edges yourself, rather than trusting an AI summary at year-end.
Ledgers is designed for sole traders and landlords to run themselves, keeping an accountant only for year-end if they want one. Per-property P&L, the general ledger and MTD-ITSA are one system — not a tax layer bolted on top of separate bookkeeping.
If you simply need to file — especially with unusual income like capital gains, foreign income or CIS — untied is a proven, well-loved personal-tax app that does exactly that job today, and its breadth of income coverage is genuinely ahead of Ledgers. But it stops at tax records: there's no real general ledger underneath, and it's paid-only. Ledgers is the better fit if you want your books to be correct and reconciled all year (not reconstructed at filing), value a free tier and free tools to start, and prefer a glass-box, transaction-led system where MTD-ITSA is a natural output of a real double-entry ledger. Choose untied for the widest personal-tax filing coverage right now; choose Ledgers if you want to own accurate books and grow into MTD without paying upfront.
See also: Making Tax Digital for Income Tax · Check your MTD status · For landlords
Comparison based on publicly available information as at mid-2026; check each provider's site for current features and pricing.