Nume vs Digits vs Puzzle (2026)

A proactive "AI CFO" that watches your existing QuickBooks/Xero and bank connections and surfaces alerts — cashflow, runway, waste — without doing the bookkeeping itself. Genuinely useful if you already have clean books; useless if you don't.

A full accounting replacement built around an "agentic general ledger" using custom-trained ML models rather than a general-purpose LLM wrapper. Flat pricing regardless of team size, with MCP support for Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.

Also a full AI-native ledger, but built specifically around startup metrics — burn, runway, ARR — from day one, with the deepest integration into the modern startup stack (Mercury, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, Gusto, Rippling, Deel).

Nume doesn't want to be your bookkeeper — it wants to be the person who taps you on the shoulder before your bookkeeper's monthly report would have told you the same thing, three weeks too late.

Nume's entire pitch rests on a single distinction that's easy to miss: it is not an accounting platform. It connects to QuickBooks, Xero, and over 10,000 banks via Open Banking, reads what's already there, and surfaces proactive alerts — cash running low, an unusual expense, debt that could be restructured — often straight into Slack. For a founder who already pays a bookkeeper or uses QuickBooks and just wants a smarter early-warning system, that's a genuinely different value proposition from Digits or Puzzle, and a cheaper one to add on top of what you already have.

The catch shows up the moment more than one or two people need access. At $100/month per user, a five-person finance team costs $500/month — five times what Digits or Puzzle charge for the same headcount, since neither of those charges per seat. Nume's Teams plan exists for exactly this situation, starting "from $200/month per company," but the exact per-seat math beyond that starting point isn't published anywhere we could verify — budget a conversation with sales, not a formula, once your team outgrows one or two users.

Digits was built on a bet that a model trained specifically on accounting transactions beats a general-purpose LLM wearing an accounting costume — and it's confident enough in that bet to publish a whitepaper claiming a 43% accuracy edge.

Where Nume explicitly avoids bookkeeping, Digits goes all-in on it: an "agentic general ledger" that auto-categorizes transactions, runs reconciliations, and drafts financials, built around custom-trained machine learning models rather than a wrapped general-purpose LLM. Bill pay, invoicing, and dashboards live in the same system, with native Stripe, Ramp, Gusto, and BILL integrations, and — genuinely unusual for an accounting platform — a live MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor query your books directly.

One thing worth knowing before you sign up: the $65/month Essentials tier that gets cited everywhere is marked "Coming Soon" on Digits' own pricing page — it isn't actually purchasable yet. Core, at $100/month flat regardless of team size, is the real entry price today. Digits is also explicitly US-entities-only for now, and isn't built for inventory-heavy businesses like manufacturers or large e-commerce sellers — it's aimed at service and software companies with roughly 250 employees or fewer.

Puzzle's real competitor isn't Digits or Nume — it's the QuickBooks tab a founder still keeps open out of habit, long after the free trial of something better has already proven itself.

Puzzle is also a full AI-native general ledger, but the difference from Digits is in what's native versus bolted on: burn rate, runway, and ARR are first-class metrics from the moment you connect an account, not something assembled from general dashboards. The integration list runs deepest into the modern startup stack of the three — Mercury, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, Gusto, Rippling, Deel — and the free Starter tier genuinely costs nothing until cumulative transaction volume crosses $20,000, making it an easy first move for a pre-revenue founder.

The "50% faster close or your money back" guarantee on the Complete plan is real, but narrower than the headline suggests: it requires completing onboarding within 7 days, connecting only supported live API integrations (no CSV or PDF uploads), running a full monthly close cycle, and applies to single-entity companies only. It's a genuine guarantee, not vaporware — but easy to accidentally void if you're not paying attention to the fine print. Puzzle's pricing page is also the most complex of the three to screenshot accurately, since every tier shows an annual price, a monthly price, and a temporary promo price stacked on top of each other — which is exactly why third-party blogs disagree on what it "really" costs.