Is customer churn hurting your revenue?
Manual billing errors and failed payments are frustrating. They also push your hard-won customers away, causing revenue leaks and high churn rates.
It gets worse when your billing system can’t adapt to customer needs, making you seem inflexible and sending them straight to your competitors.
The risk is real. According to Recurly, 40% of subscribed customers reduce usage of other services. This shows how quickly they might leave without a smooth experience.
The right software can completely fix this by automating your entire revenue cycle. It streamlines billing and keeps your valuable customers happy.
In this article, I’m going to guide you through the best recurring billing software available today. I’ll help you find the perfect fit for your business needs.
You’ll learn how to simplify complex billing, reduce failed payments, and ultimately lower your churn rate for good.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chargebee → | SaaS founders & finance leads | |
| 2 | Recurly → | SaaS & e-commerce managers | |
| 3 | Stripe → | SaaS & e-commerce finance leads | |
| 4 | Zuora → | Founders & finance teams | |
| 5 | Maxio → | Fast-growth B2B SaaS companies |
1. Chargebee
Struggling with complex subscription billing?
Chargebee automates invoicing, provisioning, and reporting to simplify your revenue operations. This means you can launch new pricing in hours, not months.
This solution helps you reduce manual errors and manage diverse pricing models. It’s about empowering your business to grow efficiently.
Here’s how Chargebee helps.
It streamlines your entire revenue workflow, from customer acquisition to retention. You can manage complex deals, automate payment retries, and reduce unpaid invoices by 80%, as Deliverr experienced.
Chargebee provides no-code provisioning and packaging, allowing you to test new plans without engineering delays. It also offers multi-brand cancellation experiences, helping you transform potential churn into retention opportunities by presenting targeted offers to keep customers. This holistic approach ensures you can continuously adapt to market changes.
Plus, you can gain instant strategic insights from automated financial reporting.
If your operations also involve specific compliance needs, my article on best Eway Bill software can help eliminate manual errors and speed compliance.
Key features:
- Billing Automation: Automates invoicing, product catalog management, and supports usage-based pricing, simplifying complex billing scenarios and scaling with your business.
- Customer Retention: Predicts churn, deflects cancellations with AI-powered offers, and provides real-time retention metrics to boost customer lifetime value.
- Revenue Recognition & Reporting: Ensures GAAP-compliant revenue recognition and offers 80+ predefined financial reports, eliminating manual calculations and syncing with accounting systems.
Learn more about Chargebee features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Chargebee excels as the best recurring billing software for SaaS founders and finance leads due to its extensive automation features, including invoicing, retention tools, and robust financial reporting that ensures compliance and reduces unpaid invoices by up to 80%, as seen with Deliverr.
2. Recurly
Are complex subscription models holding you back?
Recurly offers a comprehensive platform to simplify your revenue operations, allowing you to focus on growth. This means you can easily manage diverse pricing models, plans, and promotions.
With features like automated invoicing and tax compliance, you can eliminate manual errors and streamline your billing processes.
Ready to automate your billing?
Recurly tackles key pain points by offering robust subscriber management and payments orchestration, which helps reduce failed payments and improve overall financial health. It provides tools for trial management, gift subscriptions, and managing multiple payment gateways and alternative methods.
Additionally, the platform includes sophisticated churn management features like intelligent retries and dunning campaigns. This helps you recover lost revenue from expired cards and failed payments, boosting your retention rates significantly. Plus, Recurly Engage and Recurly Commerce specifically help you convert one-time shoppers into loyal subscribers and boost your Shopify recurring revenue.
It’s truly a comprehensive solution.
While securing your revenue is crucial, don’t forget about safeguarding your online services. My article on DDoS mitigation tools might offer helpful insights.
Key features:
- Plans, Pricing & Promotions: Manages various pricing models, plans, add-ons, coupons, and discounts to support diverse subscription offerings.
- Churn Management: Employs intelligent retries, account updater, and dunning campaigns to proactively reduce subscriber churn and recover lost revenue.
- Reporting & Analytics: Offers dashboards, reports, and built-in benchmarks for insights into performance, aiding strategic decision-making.
Learn more about Recurly features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Recurly addresses common pain points like manual billing errors and high churn rates, making it an excellent choice for SaaS founders and e-commerce managers. Its integrated suite of features, from subscriber management to intelligent churn prevention, helps you efficiently scale your business. Recurly is truly the best recurring billing software if you want to optimize revenue and customer retention.
3. Stripe
Struggling with complex subscription models and manual billing errors?
Stripe’s Billing feature is designed to automate subscriptions and usage-based revenue, directly addressing your needs. This means you can manage diverse pricing models, from flat rate to usage-based and hybrid, reducing those painful manual errors.
Here’s how it helps: Stripe helps minimize churn and automate your finance operations for optimal efficiency.
The result: simplified revenue and reduced churn.
Stripe’s comprehensive suite captures recurring revenue by managing various pricing models, streamlining your billing process. This includes robust Invoicing for creating, collecting, and tracking online invoices efficiently, which is crucial for maintaining clear financial oversight. Additionally, for businesses with consumption-based services, its usage-based billing provides metering, billing, and consumption insights. Plus, with Sigma, you gain custom revenue reports without needing SQL, offering valuable insights into your financial health and accelerating your accounting automation. This unified platform ensures you can focus on core business innovation.
Key features:
- Billing and Invoicing: Manage subscriptions, flat-rate, and usage-based pricing, while automating invoice creation, collection, and tracking.
- Revenue Recognition and Tax: Automate accounting and sales tax/VAT, ensuring compliance and accurate financial reporting.
- Sigma for Custom Reports: Generate custom revenue reports quickly and easily, providing vital insights without SQL knowledge.
Learn more about Stripe features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Stripe offers a powerful, integrated solution for SaaS founders, e-commerce managers, and finance leads. Its robust Billing, Invoicing, and Revenue Recognition features automate complex processes, minimize churn, and provide deep insights, making it an excellent choice for the best recurring billing software.
4. Zuora
Struggling with complex subscription billing and revenue recognition?
Zuora offers a powerful monetization platform to manage every model, from subscriptions to usage-based.
This means you can easily handle diverse pricing strategies, ensuring accurate billing and invoicing for complex calculations and amendments, reducing manual errors that lead to lost revenue.
You need an automated solution.
Here’s how Zuora solves these problems, supporting your recurring revenue growth across pricing, billing, and customer acquisition. Their flexible billing software supports any mix of recurring, usage-based, or one-time pricing models with a comprehensive product catalog, streamlining your revenue collection and improving transparency. Additionally, it automates revenue recognition, allowing you to close your books faster, simplify audits, and drive GAAP reporting. Plus, you can launch dynamic paywalls and track usage data to bill customers accurately based on real-time consumption, ensuring an optimal customer experience.
The result is scalable, efficient revenue management.
Key features:
- Flexible Billing Software: Supports any mix of recurring, usage-based, or one-time pricing models, accurately billing complex charges and amendments.
- Automated Revenue Recognition: Fully automates complex revenue recognition, helping you close books faster, simplify audits, and drive GAAP reporting.
- Dynamic Paywalls & Usage Tracking: Create personalized paywalls based on customer behavior and collect/meter usage data for precise, real-time billing.
Learn more about Zuora features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Zuora is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Recurring Billing, making it an excellent choice for founders, managers, and finance leads seeking the best recurring billing software. Its automation of billing and revenue recognition can save your team over 100 IT billing and engineering hours monthly.
5. Maxio
Struggling with complex subscription billing?
Maxio lets you define products, create components, and enable coupons, making any billing scenario possible.
This means you can diversify revenue with add-ons and usage-based options, empowering your team to test different pricing models easily.
Here’s how to simplify your operations.
Maxio helps you consolidate variable pricing and currency calculations, supporting sales-led growth with custom pricing for specific customers. This allows you to manage sales-negotiated contracts alongside self-service signups without complicating your catalog.
You can also scale faster with usage-based pricing, automating billing for models like metered, tiered, and stair step. This automation significantly reduces the time and stress for your collections team. Additionally, Maxio offers customer billing portals for self-service, allowing subscribers to update cards or change plans, and providing public signup pages that are PCI compliant and highly customizable.
The result? Reduced manual errors and improved customer satisfaction.
While we’re discussing improved customer satisfaction, understanding churn prevention software is equally important for long-term growth.
Key features:
- Flexible pricing and product definition: Customize product catalogs, define base plans, and add components like add-ons and usage-based pricing with ease.
- Automated invoicing and dunning: Generate thousands of invoices accurately and on time, while automated dunning capabilities help recover past-due payments.
- Integrated customer management: Empower customers with self-service billing portals and customizable signup pages, supporting both sales-led and self-service growth.
Learn more about Maxio features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Maxio provides a robust platform for managing diverse pricing models, automating billing, and streamlining revenue collection. Its ability to handle global multi-currency transactions and provide comprehensive revenue recognition makes it the best recurring billing software for fast-growth B2B SaaS companies aiming for efficient, scalable operations.
6. Paddle
Is complex billing holding back your growth?
Paddle offers a complete merchant of record solution, purpose-built for SaaS, apps, and games, handling payments, taxes, and subscriptions. This means you can simplify revenue collection and reduce manual errors.
Your team can focus on innovation rather than dealing with the complexities of global payments and compliance. This is truly transformative.
You can finally unify your revenue data.
Paddle streamlines your operations by managing all billing-related support queries and providing flexible, multi-product subscriptions. This solves your pain points around inefficient billing cycles.
Additionally, Paddle includes Retain, which automatically recovers failed card payments, radically reducing churn. Plus, you get ProfitWell Metrics for free, offering real-time subscription analytics for accurate revenue reporting. The result is improved transparency and enhanced customer retention, empowering you to scale your commercial operations with ease.
If you’re also looking for other specialized billing solutions, my article on best supermarket billing software covers comprehensive options.
Key features:
- Merchant of Record Solution: Paddle acts as your merchant of record, taking on liability for sales taxes, fraud, and payment provider relationships globally.
- Automated Billing & Recovery: It provides recurring, automated B2B invoicing, handles all billing support, and automatically recovers failed payments to reduce churn.
- Global Tax & Fraud Compliance: Eliminate sales tax headaches with full, automatic global tax compliance and reduce risk with built-in fraud prevention.
Learn more about Paddle features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Paddle stands out as the best recurring billing software, especially for SaaS, app, and game businesses, by taking on the entire payment stack. With solutions like ProfitWell Metrics and Retain, and a track record of recovering $100,000+ in 72 days for HubX, it directly addresses critical pain points like churn and compliance, letting your business grow efficiently.
7. FastSpring
Struggling with complex recurring billing?
FastSpring offers flexible recurring billing tools and subscription management to simplify your revenue streams.
This means you can streamline payment processes, reduce manual errors, and keep your focus on core business innovation. It truly simplifies your revenue operations.
How can you grow efficiently?
FastSpring solves this by serving as your all-in-one payment and subscription platform. You get global online payments, fraud prevention, and tax compliance all handled for you.
This means you can confidently expand into over 200 regions, support 21+ languages, and manage 23+ currencies, eliminating the stress of global sales tax and VAT. Additionally, FastSpring provides interactive quotes to shorten sales cycles, digital invoicing for B2B deals, and robust reporting and analytics to unlock valuable business insights, ensuring you understand everything about your subscriptions and revenue.
Your business can thrive anywhere.
Key features:
- Global online payments: Easily transact across borders with higher credit card approval rates, accepting diverse payment methods and currencies in over 200 regions.
- Subscription management + billing: Manage recurring subscriptions, upsells, cross-sells, and upgrades with flexible tools designed to boost your recurring revenue.
- Tax compliance + Merchant of Record: Eliminate sales tax and VAT worries as FastSpring handles all taxes and the complexities of selling globally on your behalf.
Learn more about FastSpring features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: FastSpring excels as the best recurring billing software, offering an all-in-one platform for SaaS, software, and digital product companies. With global payment support, tax compliance, and robust subscription management, it frees your team from operational complexities, enabling efficient growth and streamlined revenue collection.
Conclusion
Ready to automate your revenue?
Choosing the right tool is tough. You need a platform that scales with your startup without adding more operational headaches or revenue leaks.
The right software does more than bill. Recurly reports that add-on options increased revenue by $2.2 billion in 2023. This highlights the massive upside of optimizing subscription offers for your customers.
Here is what I recommend.
From my complete review, Chargebee truly stands out. It simplifies complex billing and gives you powerful, automated tools to reduce churn effectively.
I was especially impressed by how Deliverr used it to reduce unpaid invoices by 80%. The best recurring billing software delivers clear, measurable results like this.
I suggest you start a free trial of Chargebee to see firsthand how it automates your entire revenue workflow from start to finish.
Your business growth will accelerate.
