After considerable bashing & crashing, both TurboTax and TaxAct produced the same bottom-line number. TA requires considerably more manual intervention in spots where TT simply does the right thing.
The NY state tax refund apportionment issue is entirely non-obvious; if we hadn’t been running TT in parallel we’d have missed that one entirely. The need to manually patch up the maximum IRA contribution limits took a while to figure out, too, as we’d based our contributions on half the total, which put one of us over the “limit” computed by TA.
TA does have linkages to (some of) the source lines used in its calculations, but doesn’t have nearly the same level of hand-holding as TT.
TaxAct is far less expensive overall: $20 with “free” Fed plus $8 for NYS e-file. TurboTax is about $45 with “free” Fed and $20 NYS e-file. Basically, you can buy TaxAct and file both returns for less than the base cost of TurboTax.
You could probably use TaxAct for most personal returns with no problems other than the state tax refund gotcha. It’s marginal for the complexity of our return.
So our bottom line is that we might just continue to run both in parallel next year:
- TurboTax wins hands-down for closely following the gruesome details of the tax code.
- TaxAct wins for cross-checking and less-expensive filing
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
2 responses to “TaxAct vs TurboTax: The Bottom Line”
YO!
Given the occasional discount on TTax and TaxCut it would appear that TaxAct is roughly half the price of either of the big name products. Is that price differential worth the bother of entering the data twice?
Hrap
Nope, but we figured it was worthwhile to verify that the two programs would either get the same answer from the same data or produce completely different answers that would illuminate a misunderstanding of the tax laws.
It Would Be Nice If TaxAct could import TT or TC files, but I can understand why that’s not a priority for them…
As things turned out, the two programs were Close Enough, but TaxAct has enough rough edges that we probably won’t use it again; TT handles the oddities of our return better.
And, alas, the discounts seem to be very late in the tax season; we need it in late December or early January to figure the fourth-quarter estimated tax payments based on some actual numbers.