Key Takeaways About Xsolla Competitors:
- Xsolla is a merchant of record (MoR) that serves video game companies.
- FastSpring is an alternative MoR with deep video game and mobile game experience and key features such as global payments, gaming-specific fraud prevention, and gamer support.
- Other Xsolla competitors include Stripe, Coda Payments, Appcharge, Tebex, Aghanim, and Paddle.
Xsolla is a leading merchant of record (MoR) payment provider that serves the video game industry. The platform includes a broad feature set that provides video and mobile gaming companies with the infrastructure needed to sell online and accept payments globally.
You can read more about Xsolla’s features and benefits on their website, but if you’re considering additional choices for the best payment provider for you, we hope you find this article helpful.
In this guide, we share seven Xsolla competitors, starting with an in-depth look at our solution, FastSpring.
Are you shopping for competitors of Xsolla that can help you expand your video game monetization strategy? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, mobile apps, and other digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and player payments support. Learn more about FastSpring for video games at fastspring.gg.
7 Xsolla Alternatives
FastSpring
FastSpring is an MoR and D2C payment system for video games and in-game purchases that’s similar to Xsolla.
Our solution enables game publishers to collect direct-to-consumer (D2C) payments for your video games and in-game purchases, embed payments in your game or on your web store, and enjoy many of the benefits of selling on a game marketplace for a fraction of the cost.
Video game publishers who work with FastSpring can instantly accept localized D2C payments from across the globe, with gaming-specific fraud protection and support for the top payment methods across jurisdictions and in 20+ languages.
Our solution not only gives you global reach on payments, but also includes key features to streamline and automate VAT and other sales tax compliance for you, including calculating, collecting, and remitting taxes.
Beyond global payment processing, FastSpring also helps you create a seamless checkout flow with customizable, localized checkout experiences in game and on your website, ensuring player experience is consistent and easy across multiple touchpoints.
Why You Should Monetize Your Video Game With FastSpring
The biggest advantage to working with FastSpring is our experience. To compare, we’ve been an MoR for more than two decades, and we have a long history of working with video game companies. We’re also committed to working in partnership with game developers to help you grow.
For example, we worked hand-in-hand with Out of the Park Developments to localize checkout for their benchmark game in South Korea — a change that helped them grow sales in the region by 4x.
“We have been delighted with everything about FastSpring — from the robust platform to the helpful customer service that supports our company growth goals.”
– Richard Grisham, CMO + COO,
Out of the Park Developments (makers of OOTP Baseball)
More Than 20 Years’ Experience
FastSpring is trusted by video game companies from around the world, from smaller publishers like DITOGAMES to major brands like Rovio.
FastSpring was founded in 2005 to enable D2C payments for downloadable software, PC games, premium mods, and other digital products.
Today, our platform delivers:
- Extensive payments infrastructure with the most popular local payment options around the world.
- A highly-optimized video game risk model.
- Easily embeddable components for your web store.
- Specialized data signals to help your whales transact seamlessly.
- Developer-first APIs/webhooks to support your live service systems and in-game entitlements.
Our extensive video game experience and capabilities combined help make FastSpring an MoR that gets gaming.
High Approval Rates and Advanced Gaming-Specific Fraud Protection
FastSpring’s platform boasts higher-than-average approval rates for payment providers, likely higher than you can achieve on your own.
This is thanks to the trust FastSpring has established with global payment processors and smart payment routing that routes FastSpring’s transactions between multiple payment processors based on the best approval rates, types of transactions, and jurisdictions in which transactions are processed.
FastSpring’s multi-homed payment processing approach helps you achieve better processor uptime and approval rates globally than using a single payment processor such as Stripe alone.
Our advanced, gaming-specific fraud prevention and risk engine is built specifically for video games and the types of transaction fraud that game developers are likely to encounter.
Any patterns in risky behavior, for example, are learned and applied across all our video game customers, and specific fraud rules can be applied just for your games. So if a nefarious transaction or buyer gets flagged by one customer, the flag applies to every video game customer of FastSpring, helping to proactively prevent chargebacks and loss of revenue.
Additionally, we give you the ability to dynamically flag players as safe (e.g., whales) or not trusted (e.g., new players), which we can use to optimize our fraud rules specifically for you, making them more or less strict as needed.
Our fraud model accommodates revenue spikes in line with key offers and events, and we’ll work with you to ensure it’s prepared to anticipate the behavior you expect.
If you expect players to purchase many times in quick succession because of a unique sale, for example, we’ll work with you ahead of time to ensure that we understand your player segments and make sure your VIP players have uninterrupted purchase flows through player whitelisting and targeted fraud rules.
Our multi-homed processor workflow combined with advanced video game-specific fraud protection helps make your player experience great and helps you deliver a great big GAME OVER to your payment cheaters.
Amazing Support — for You and Your Players
If you need assistance, our award-winning customer support team is always happy to provide hands-on help — whether that’s for setting up initial integrations, ongoing maintenance, extra support for your whales, or localizing your checkout for a new region — and we’re always working to improve the customer experience.
Our AI-assisted documentation, for example, makes it easier than ever to get the help you need when you need it, or you can work with a real human at any time to help you troubleshoot and find a resolution to more complex questions.
Additionally, FastSpring provides friendly and direct support for your players who have payment issues related to their purchase experience. This means your team doesn’t have to provide that support, saving you time and helping your players get the right help faster.
A Global Presence You Can Trust
Originally founded in Santa Barbara, California, FastSpring has continued to expand globally, including two offices in the U.S. and additional offices in Canada, the EU, the UK, the Netherlands, and Singapore.
Our global presence means we’re always here when you need us, and our knowledge of — and strict adherence to — compliance regulations and sanctions means you can rest easy knowing that such a critical part of your business is in safe hands.
FastSpring is a profitable company with plenty of proceeds available to support our business, and we’re backed by top-performing and highly reputable investment firm Accel-KKR. FastSpring has the resources to help you scale and the excellent corporate, privacy, and security governance to give you peace of mind.
Visit our Trust Center for more information about privacy, security, and more.
Are you shopping for competitors of Xsolla that can help you expand your video game monetization strategy? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, mobile apps, and other digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and player payments support. Learn more about FastSpring for video games.
Paddle
Paddle is an MoR and subscription billing platform. It offers similar features to the other apps on this list, including:
- Global payments.
- Multiple payment gateways.
- Secure checkout.
- Fraud protection.
With that said, Paddle is primarily built for SaaS and other subscription businesses — the feature-set leans more toward subscription-based billing. So, while an MoR, Paddle may not be as well-optimized for video games or D2C monetization of mobile apps and games.
Learn more about Paddle alternatives.
Aghanim
Launched in 2024, Aghanim is the newest of newcomers in this space, but the founders aren’t — the whole founding team came from Xsolla. Unlike many of the other alternatives on this list, Aghanim is hyper-focused on D2C monetization for mobile games exclusively.
Aghanim offers similar features to Xsolla and its alternatives:
- Conversion-optimized checkout.
- Fraud protection.
- Merchant of record services.
But the platform also includes a feature-set specific to mobile game developers, including:
- A customizable, no-code web builder.
- Automated marketing and player segmentation.
- A player journey, outreach, and events builder for liveops.
Tebex
Tebex is a merchant of record that was originally built specifically to monetize game servers, later expanding to also monetize in-game creator content. The company has been around since 2011 and was acquired by Overwolf in 2022, at which time it appears Overwolf pivoted Tebex to become a more traditional merchant of record for games.
The platform currently offers many of the same features as Xsolla, including:
- Global payments.
- In-game shop and webstore sales.
- Checkout.
- Sales tax and compliance.
- Chargebacks and fraud prevention.
Tebex also has risk mitigation and fraud prevention, offering an insurance policy against any chargeback-related losses.
Appcharge
Appcharge is a merchant of record that has features similar to those of other merchants of record like Xsolla or FastSpring.
The relatively young Appcharge was launched in 2022. As a gaming-focused merchant of record, this is one to keep an eye on; it may be worth a try if you’d like the influence of being one of their earlier customers, and if you’re okay with some possible growing pains as Appcharge ramps up as a payment provider.
Coda Payments
Coda Payments is a Singapore-headquartered competitor to Xsolla that enables video game companies to accept payments globally. Depending on the package customers choose, Coda Payments may or may not act as the MoR.
The company’s Codapay product competes most directly with Xsolla, offering payment experiences embedded in a publisher’s web storefront or in-game experience, or the use of Coda’s web store.
Stripe
Stripe is a well-known DIY payment processor (sometimes referred to as a payment gateway, though they’re not the same) that enables businesses to accept credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments.
The most important thing to note here is that Stripe’s base product is not an MoR.
Stripe’s base pricing tends to be lower than the managed services a merchant of record provides — because those prices don’t include any of the tax compliance vendors, fraud management, and development time needed for you to build and manage integrations with Stripe and stay compliant internationally.
There are now three options when choosing Stripe:
- Source and pay for all of the separate vendors you’ll need for payments, compliance, taxes, and more — and dedicate some of your own valuable time to managing them.
- Navigate Stripe’s many complicated packages and add-ons to piece together a workable solution for global commerce.
- Try Stripe’s untested Managed Payments MoR product, something they’ve been building after purchasing Lemon Squeezy in 2024 but which is just launching in early 2026.
The most common mistake is comparing Stripe’s base pricing — at face value — against any alternatives that include merchant of record services. In addition to the management time and complexity this adds, Stripe often has a higher total cost of ownership than a merchant of record like Xsolla or FastSpring.
That’s not even to mention the time wasted while your game development-centric engineering organization is distracted with back office financial systems and compliance — time they could be using to make your games better.
As we mentioned above, Stripe purchased Lemon Squeezy in 2024 and has built an MoR product that is just now being released, but as it is new, little is known about how it performs or whether early adopters will be satisfied with the offering.
Frequently Asked Questions About Xsolla Alternatives
Yes, Xsolla is primarily geared toward gaming and video game companies.
Payment service providers (PSPs) such as Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net, etc. act as a bridge, connecting sellers with the back-end networks required for processing payments, such as payment gateways, payment processors, and merchant accounts. They do not manage taxes, regulatory rules, risk, and much more.
To compare, a merchant of record handles all of those extra concerns because the merchant of record becomes the entity selling the product. Therefore, the MoR becomes the one to worry about differing rules across credit and debit card brands, regulations in each jurisdiction, VAT and sales taxes, and risk.
Your MoR then takes the lead on risk management, chargebacks, and global VAT, GST, and sales taxes for every transaction.
Stripe offers a number of packages and add-ons that cover some of the features provided by an MoR, but it gets a little complicated (and expensive). They launched an MoR product in Feb. 2026 with Lemon Squeezy, but opinions on performance remain to be seen.
There’s no one-size-fits-all best alternative to Xsolla, but when it comes to video game monetization, FastSpring is a compelling option.
As an experienced merchant of record, FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, mobile apps, and other digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and player payments support.
Learn more about FastSpring for video games.
The Choice to Power Your D2C Game Is Yours
We’d love the chance for FastSpring to earn your business, but we know the choice is yours. As you continue your research for Xsolla alternatives, we hope you find these suggestions helpful, and we wish you all the best in making the right choice for you.
If you’d like more information about FastSpring, you can schedule a demo with one of our video game monetization specialists to explore pricing, answer questions, and get more details on the many great benefits of FastSpring.
Are you shopping for competitors of Xsolla that can help you expand your video game monetization strategy? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, mobile apps, and other digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and player payments support. Learn more about FastSpring for video games.
Related Reading
- Wondering how to monetize a web store? Learn more about Using a Gaming Payment Gateway to Monetize Your Game’s Web Shop and how merchant of record FastSpring makes monetization easy.
- Trying to market to more gamers? Check out highlights and listen to our Growth Stage podcast episode, Marketing Your Video Game Outside of Game Marketplaces & App Stores.
- Get a gaming industry news roundup and learn more about the direct-to-consumer situation around the world in our post on How a Lack of Direct-to-Consumer Options Hurts Players.
- As the landscape around video games ecommerce solutions is ever changing, Epic Games has played an active role in driving some of those changes. Hear from FastSpring’s CEO in Is What Epic Wants for App Stores What Other Game Developers Actually Want?
- Easily keep an eye on revenue and cash flow metrics, customer churn and LTV, trends across regions and products, and other important ecommerce data points with FastSpring’s Revenue Overview and Subscription Overview Dashboards.
- Learn more about merchant of record functionality plus other payment solutions and commerce platforms in Top 10 International Payment Gateways: An In-Depth Guide.
- Considering a subscription monetization model? Learn about recurring billing and subscription management platforms in Billing and Subscription Management: A Detailed Comparison of 5 Options.
