Key Takeaways About Chargebee Alternatives
- Chargebee offers a number of subscription management features, but their customers are still responsible for handling key tasks like connecting to payment gateways, taxes, payment reconciliation, and chargebacks.
- As your merchant of record (MoR), FastSpring takes on the responsibility for these tasks, including payment processing, remitting taxes across jurisdictions, and more.
- Other Chargebee alternatives include Stripe, Maxio, Zoho Billing, Stax Bill, Zuora, Sticky.io, PayPal Enterprise Payments, Recurly, and Paddle.
Chargebee is a robust subscription management platform — and if you’re looking for Chargebee alternatives, you’re likely already aware of many of its key features.
However, there are certain aspects of collecting recurring payments that you would still be responsible for when using Chargebee, such as:
- Connecting to payment gateways manually. While Chargebee supports several different payment gateways, you have to set up and configure each one.
- Remitting taxes at the end of the year. They will collect taxes for you, but you are ultimately held responsible for filing and paying taxes correctly within each jurisdiction you do business.
- Reconciling payments, fulfillment, refunds, etc. While Chargebee lets you automate many mundane accounting tasks and integrate with account software, you still have to track and record every transaction, refund, etc.
- Responding to and processing chargebacks. Chargebee only offers full chargeback support for limited vendors, so other vendors will need to manage chargebacks for themselves.
In this guide, we present 10 alternatives to Chargebee that help relieve some of these burdens for users, starting with an in-depth review of our solution, FastSpring.
FastSpring handles the entire payment process from checkout to remitting end-of-year taxes for SaaS companies. To learn more about how FastSpring can help you scale quickly, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.
10 Chargebee Alternatives
- FastSpring.
- Stripe.
- Maxio.
- Zoho Billing.
- Stax Bill.
- Zuora.
- Sticky.io.
- PayPal Enterprise Payments.
- Recurly.
- Paddle.
1. FastSpring
As your merchant of record (MoR), FastSpring takes on the responsibility for payment processing, remitting taxes, and more for your software or SaaS business.
To compare, most Chargebee alternatives are either subscription billing platforms or payment gateways.
Some of these providers may be able to help you connect to international payment gateways, alert you to chargebacks, and help you collect VAT and sales taxes. However, you’ll still be responsible for paying taxes, processing chargebacks, and for things like legal compliance, dunning, and more.
FastSpring, on the other hand, handles everything from optimizing your checkout flow to remitting end-of-year taxes by acting as your merchant of record (MoR).
Next, we explain how an MoR is different from other payment service providers.
What It Means to Have FastSpring as Your Merchant of Record
A merchant of record, or MoR, is the business entity that sells goods or services to the buyer. You can act as your own MoR, or you can outsource the entire process to FastSpring. Companies that haven’t thought about who their MoR is are probably acting as their own MoR.
When you outsource your transactions to FastSpring, your customers still visit your website to choose their software and/or subscription, but FastSpring takes over when the customer gets to the checkout. They’ll receive a receipt from FastSpring, and FastSpring will be listed on their bank or credit card statement.
The profits are yours, but FastSpring is the liable party for the sale.
That’s why FastSpring can do more than other types of service payment providers can:
- Collect and remit VAT, sales taxes, and other consumption taxes.
- Comply with local laws and regulations.
- Monitor chargebacks in real time.
- Reconcile transactions, payments, refunds, etc.
- And more, all on your behalf.
If something goes wrong with local or tax compliance, chargebacks, accounts not balancing, etc., FastSpring takes the lead to solve the issue on your behalf.
Instead of juggling multiple platforms and providers for a complete payment solution, you can work with just one provider: FastSpring.
Plus, you can start selling in 200+ jurisdictions almost instantly — because we’ve already established the necessary processes in each region. You can learn more about how FastSpring helps you with international recurring payments here.
In summary, FastSpring focuses on the selling, so you can focus on making a great product.
In the next sections, we’ll dive deeper into how FastSpring helps you:
- Create flexible free trials and recurring billing logic without code.
- Minimize payment failures with advanced payment routing and smart dunning.
- Increase conversions with branded, localized checkout.
We’ll also cover how FastSpring provides all features for one flat-rate price designed to fit your budget.
Flexible No-Code Free Trials and Recurring Billing Logic
Not every business can use the same free trial model. Some businesses will see more success if they let customers sign up without payment details, while others will see more success if they require a payment method to sign up but don’t automatically charge the customer at the end of the trial.
Additionally, what worked for your small business to start may not be the right solution for you long term as you grow and adopt more complex billing. That’s why many software, gaming, digital product, mobile app, and SaaS companies need payment software that can support many different types of trial models, subscriptions, etc.
However, most payment processors (sometimes interchangeably referred to as “payment gateways,” while technically being slightly different) only offer limited recurring billing and basic trial options — e.g., a free trial that automatically turns into monthly billing. This makes it difficult to optimize your trials and subscription plans for high conversions and what works best for your customers. It also makes it difficult to adapt as a business in the long run.
FastSpring, on the other hand, delivers advanced features and a wide variety of flexible options for how you can set up trials, subscriptions, and more. Below, we provide an overview of FastSpring’s subscription management tools.
Trial subscription options:
- Free or paid trial periods of any length.
- Set up free, paid, or usage-based trials.
- Choose whether or not to require a payment method when signing up for a trial.
- Choose to automatically bill the user after the trial has ended or let them manually start a paid subscription.
- Allow subscribers to reactivate expired trial accounts.
- Choose when FastSpring will send reminders of ending trials (e.g., three days before the trial ends).
- Offer a discounted trial period.
- Automatically detect when a single user tries to sign up for multiple trials, and only allow one trial account.
- And more.
Recurring billing options:
- Choose subscription frequency (weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom) and billing date (or let your customers choose).
- Set subscriptions to auto renewal, manual renewal (i.e., customers have to re-enter payment information each time they’re billed), or managed renewal (i.e., your team initiates the charge via the API, which is great for usage-based billing).
- Offer discounts and coupons.
- Allow prorated billing if a customer wants to upgrade, downgrade, or pause the service part-way through the billing cycle.
- Add one time purchases to the initial bill but not recurring billings.
- Manage upsell and cross-sell products at checkout.
- Give customers the option of whether or not to store payment information (or make the decision for all customers).
- Auto-renew to a different subscription.
- Offer subscription add-ons.
- And more.
Fulfillment options:
- Choose whether to share products and resources via a license key, product download, signed PDF, or email.
- Configure multiple fulfillment actions for one subscription (e.g., send a license key and product manual PDF via email).
FastSpring also provides your customers with an easy-to-access self-serve Customer Account Portal, where they can view their entire order history; upgrade, downgrade, or pause their subscriptions; and add or edit payment methods.
This self-serve portal is entirely managed by FastSpring but reflects the visual branding of your checkout for a cohesive and user-friendly interface and customer experience.
Finally, some subscription management tools require a lot of technical skills to set up and use.
But with ease of use in mind, FastSpring lets you set up many of the options mentioned above without code. If you have unique subscription management needs, you can also use our API and webhooks library for more control — our experienced developers are readily available to help you create the best solution for your subscription business model.
Don’t forget: Rules around recurring billing vary across the globe. Without a global MoR like FastSpring, it’s your responsibility to keep track of current and evolving local transaction laws and regulations and ensure your recurring billing model complies.
FastSpring handles this — and the liability for recurring transactions — for you.
Note: If you already have multiple subscriptions set up in another platform, we can help you easily migrate over to FastSpring. For subscription data migration with payment information included, click here for more info. For subscription data migration without payment information, click here for more info.
Advanced Payment Routing and Smart Dunning to Minimize Payment Failures
From the initial purchase to each subsequent rebill, failed payment is one of the main reasons for lost revenue.
Many payment service providers will automatically retry failed payments once or notify customers of failed payments. This is a good place to start, but there are more ways to meaningfully reduce involuntary churn due to failed payments.
FastSpring helps you proactively minimize payment failures and reduce churn with flexible dunning management, which includes:
- Proactive reminders to update payment information (e.g., “Your subscription is due soon”).
- Multiple follow-up notifications (e.g., two, five, seven, 14, and 21 days after their payment method fails).
- A pre-made email template for reminders — or the ability to customize your own messages.
- Multiple payment retries before each follow-up notification is sent out.
- Automatic payment gateway rerouting (this solves many payment failures due to network or system errors.
- An intuitive self-serve portal (customers can easily update payment information from the same portal where they manage their subscription plan).
Plus, you can choose whether to pause or continue the service when a payment fails. If you keep the service going after a failed payment and give your customers a chance to update their payment information, you’ll have less churn and increase retention.
You can also choose to apply a pause rather than a full cancellation of their service after all reminders have been sent out. Pausing makes it easier for your customer to restart their subscription without the hassle of onboarding again.
You can read more about how one of our customers reduced churn by 50% in this case study.
Branded, Localized Checkout to Increase Conversions
Friction at the purchase step can cause customers to fall off before completing a purchase. For example:
- If the price at checkout is different than it was on the website (e.g., different currency or different amount because additional fees have been added without a clear label), customers may decide not to buy.
- If the checkout is visually very different from the website, or if the checkout is on an entirely different website, the customer is less likely to believe the checkout is authentic and secure.
- If they have to create an account in order to purchase but don’t want to.
- If checkout translation and localization is incorrect, inconsistent, or missing, so the customer questions the store’s legitimacy.
These are just a few examples, but there are many reasons why a customer may decide against completing a purchase at the last minute.
FastSpring helps you anticipate objections and reduce friction at checkout in the following ways:
- Customizable checkout UI.
- The most popular payment methods.
- Local currency conversions and language translations.
- Conversion-optimized embedded, pop-up, or web storefront checkout experiences.
- Personalized developer support.
Read on for more details about each.
Customizable Checkout UI
Many subscription management platforms or payment processors only provide checkout templates where you can add your logo and choose basic color schemes. These solutions usually fail to match your visual branding and may not be optimized for increasing conversions.
To create the best experience for your customers and get the highest conversion rates, you need more custom abilities.
FastSpring lets you customize the look and feel of your checkout with pre-built branding tools and CSS overrides. You have complete visual customization with our Store Builder Library (SBL), a JavaScript library that lets you customize, brand, and streamline your entire checkout workflow to build trust and eliminate friction throughout the buyer’s journey. This allows you to create the checkout experience that most aligns with your brand and highlights your product.
The Most Popular Payment Methods
One of the biggest reasons customers fail to complete a purchase is because they can’t use their preferred payment method.
However, offering different payment methods isn’t as simple as adding their logo to your checkout screen.
You have to agree to certain terms and conditions before a payment network or issuing bank will approve transactions with your business. Each payment provider will have different regulations regarding fraud, chargebacks, privacy protection, etc. It can be a huge task to stay in good standing with many different payment providers on your own.
If you want to transact internationally, there will be even more to manage.
While Visa and Mastercard may be popular payment methods in the U.S., buyers in other countries prefer different payment methods. To convert international customers, you need to provide many different types of preferred payment methods — which means more payment providers to maintain.
For instance, Pix is a preferred payment method in Brazil, while AliPay is a preferred payment method in China.
FastSpring takes care of all of this — from staying in good standing with payment networks, to managing fraud and chargebacks — for you.
FastSpring already has good relationships with many different payment networks and issuing banks around the world, which means you can accept your customers’ preferred payment methods right away.
Local Currency Conversions and Language Translations
Customers are more likely to trust a checkout experience that uses the same language and currency as what’s shown on your website. That’s why FastSpring lets you translate checkout into the local language and convert prices to the local currency.
You can let each buyer select their preferred language from a dropdown menu featuring 21+ supported languages. Or, you can lock the language and FastSpring will automatically select the appropriate language based on the buyer’s location.
You also have the option to set custom pricing strategies in each currency or let FastSpring automatically convert prices to the local currency (FastSpring supports 23+ currencies).
If you choose to let FastSpring convert product prices for you, we match the format of the original price. For example, if the original price is $12.99 and the conversion to Euros is €14.29, FastSpring would change it to €14.99.
Learn how Nelio increased growth by 50% with localized checkout in this case study.
Embedded, Pop-Up, or Web Storefront Checkout
With FastSpring, you can embed checkout directly on your website, insert a pop-up checkout, or send customers to a secure web storefront managed by FastSpring. This gives you the flexibility to choose the solution that’s best for your team and customers.
To compare, embedding checkout directly on your webpage ensures less disruption and typically decreases the likelihood of your buyers abandoning. Pop-up checkout requires less setup — simply insert a few lines of pre-written HTML and Javascript in your webpage.
Learn how DaisyDisk was able to spend less time managing their checkout while significantly increasing conversions by using FastSpring’s pop-up checkout, in this case study.
To outsource the entire checkout process to FastSpring, you can choose the web storefront option.
With the web storefront option, customers will be redirected to a webpage entirely managed by FastSpring — but customized to match your visual brand identity — where they can view their cart and complete the purchase.
Personalized Developer Support
Many payment service providers only help with the initial setup and when something goes wrong with the software. Some companies only provide personalized support to their largest clients. This leaves you on your own to manage ongoing payment operations.
FastSpring is dedicated to providing you with the best experience throughout the entire engagement.
Our team is always available to help — regardless of how big or small your operation is. Whether that’s helping you build the best checkout experience for your business or expanding into a new region, our friendly customer support team will help you find and build out the best solutions for your business.
Robust Analytics and Reporting Dashboards
FastSpring’s Reporting and Analytics is a robust suite of reports and visualizations to keep you informed of important stats such as MRR, churn rate, new customers by product type, and more.
For example, our Subscription Overview dashboard shows key subscription analytics including subscription churn, subscriber loss, MRR churn rate, active customers, and more.
Use our Subscription Overview dashboard, Revenue dashboard, data export reporting and data API features, and more to better understand:
- How each product contributes to your bottom line.
- When customers are most likely to drop off.
- What coupons or promotions are working.
- How individual trials are performing.
- Which subscription models generate the most revenue.
- Where your customers are located.
- What currencies and payment methods customers prefer.
- Chargeback rates by customer segment.
- Chargeback rates by product line.
- The status of your active webhooks.
- And much more.
All-in-One Pricing Without the Need for Additional Software
Chargebee separates its Billing features into three pricing plans, so you may eventually need the most expensive plan to get the features you need. For example, chargeback automation is not offered in Chargebee’s Starter plan.
Plus, you’ll still have to pay for additional software solutions like payment gateways (sometimes interchangeably referred to as “payment processors,” although they are technically different) or tax software for a complete payment management system. Even with seamless integrations, it’s a hassle, an additional cost, and may even require additional headcount to manage it all.
FastSpring, on the other hand, offers one flat-rate price that includes the entire platform — every feature and all services. Our team works with you to find an affordable price based on the volume of transactions you move through FastSpring (you’ll only be charged when successful transactions take place).
If you think FastSpring could be the right payment solution for your subscription-based business, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.
2. Stripe
Stripe’s main service is payment processing; however, they do offer a few other services, such as:
- Checkout.
- Fraud and risk management.
- Automated invoicing.
- In-person payments.
- Subscription management.
- Virtual and physical card issuing.
- Business spend management.
Stripe billing has fewer options than Chargebee for recurring billing, but you can easily integrate the two software solutions if you want to use (and pay for) both. Stripe works with companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.
3. Maxio
Maxio (formerly Chargify and SaasOptics) is another cloud-based financial operations platform for B2B SaaS. They offer solutions to automate financial systems on the back end, and features to help improve the order-to-revenue process. Their main services include:
- Subscription management.
- Usage-based and global billing.
- Revenue recognition and revenue management tools.
- Billing system dashboard and metrics.
- Built-in integrations with various other software (e.g., accounting software such as QuickBooks and Xero).
- International payment gateways.
Maxio advertises their ability to accommodate any go-to-market strategy (such as product-led or sales-led approaches).
4. Zoho Billing
Zoho offers a large suite of software to run your business, from a CRM and ERPs to a video meeting platform. Zoho Billing (formerly Zoho Subscriptions) is their payment processing and recurring billing solution. Some of their key features include:
- Invoicing and invoice templates.
- Multi-currency support.
- 50+ pre-built analytic reports.
- Automatic online payment retries.
- Out-of-the-box integrations with other billing platforms (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, etc.).
Zoho Billing offers more pre-made solutions than other options on this list, which some companies may find limiting. However, Zoho Billing may be a good choice if you’re already embedded in the Zoho ecosystem.
5. Stax Bill
Stax Bill (formerly Fusebill) provides subscription management software and a payment gateway in one platform. Other than offering a payment gateway with each plan, Fusebill offers many of the same features as Chargebee, including:
- Dunning management.
- Flexible recurring billing options.
- Recurring revenue recognition features.
- Billing analytics.
Fusebill also offers flexible catalog pricing and inventory tracking tools.
6. Zuora
Zuora is a monetization platform for B2C and B2B companies. Zuora’s key functionalities include:
- Customer subscription management.
- Revenue reconciliation tools.
- Revenue analytics.
- Built-in integrations with lots of business software.
- Low-code SDKs and APIs to build your own integrations.
- Quoting software.
Zuora provides a lot of flexibility for building out your own solution on top of their platform; however, non-developers may find it difficult to manage.
7. Sticky.io
Sticky.io (formerly Limelight) is a subscription management platform that integrates with popular ecommerce platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, and Shopify. They advertise the ability to:
- Support nearly any subscription or pricing model.
- Create coupons, discounts, and special promotions.
- Offer add-ons, upsells, etc.
- Fight fraud and chargebacks.
- Manage automated dunning.
Like Chargebee, Sticky.io doesn’t provide a payment gateway; however, they do offer pre-built integrations with several payment gateways.
8. PayPal Enterprise Payments
PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree by PayPal) is a payment gateway provider that also provides merchant accounts. Other features include:
- Subscription billing management.
- Optimized checkout flow.
- Flexible risk mitigation options.
- Reporting and analytics.
- Third-party integrations for recurring billing, accounting, and more.
PayPal Enterprise Payments supports payment from PayPal, Venmo (in the U.S.), Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
9. Recurly
Recurly is a subscription management software and recurring billing platform. Recurly offers features such as:
- Multiple pricing models.
- Item catalog.
- Recurring billing.
- Payments orchestration.
- Subscriber management.
- Churn management.
- Reporting dashboards and analytics.
Like Chargebee, Recurly doesn’t include a native payment gateway, but the platform does offer pre-built integrations with popular gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more. Recurly also allows you to connect multiple gateways.
10. Paddle
Paddle is another Chargebee alternative that’s an MoR with a subscription billing platform, appropriate for use by SaaS and software companies. Paddle has features including:
- Multiple payment gateways.
- Secure checkout.
- Recurring billing management.
- A robust payments toolkit.
- Fraud protection.
- Transaction and subscription reporting.
- Invoicing.
- And more.
Learn more about Paddle alternatives.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chargebee Alternatives
What’s the Difference Between Chargebee and FastSpring?
In short: Chargebee is a subscription management platform for SaaS companies, while FastSpring is an all-in-one payments and digital commerce platform (and merchant of record) built for digital-first businesses.
Who Are the Top Competitors to Chargebee in 2025?
Top Chargebee competitors include:
- FastSpring.
- Stripe.
- Maxio.
- Zoho Billing.
- Stax Bill.
- Zuora.
- Sticky.io.
- PayPal Enterprise Payments.
- Recurly.
- Paddle.
What Should I Consider When Choosing a Subscription Management Platform to Replace Chargebee?
The most important considerations include:
- Your business size, industry, and transaction volume.
- Support for localization and preferred payment methods in the jurisdictions where your customers live.
- Integrations with other tools in your payments and tech stack.
- Security and compliance.
- Budget, costs, and scalability.
- Customer support.
How Difficult Is It to Migrate From Chargebee to Another Platform?
In short, the complexity of migrating from Chargebee to another platform depends heavily on factors including:
- Your current Chargebee setup.
- The complexity of your subscription model.
- The platform you’re migrating to.
If you’re looking to migrate from Chargebee to FastSpring, FastSpring can import your subscriptions with payment details or without payment details. Either way, our team is always available to help — regardless of how big or small your operation is.
Need a Chargebee Alternative for Your SaaS, Software, Video Games, or Other Digital Products Business?
FastSpring can help!
Instead of managing a large software stack for just the subscription lifecycle, let FastSpring handle all of payment lifecycle management for you. FastSpring is more than a subscription management platform — we’re the merchant of record for global SaaS companies and many other digital businesses.
Sign up for a free account or request a demo today.
This post was originally published in December 2022 and has been updated.
