The best Chargebee alternatives of 2026

If your payments already run through Stripe, Stripe Billing is the shortest move away from Chargebee. Your customers' saved cards are already in your Stripe account, so you are moving plans and subscription schedules, and nobody has to re-enter a card.

The pay-as-you-go price is 0.7% of billing volume, with no monthly fee. That covers recurring charges processed on Stripe and off it; one-time invoices are billed separately under Stripe Invoicing. At $10,000 a month you pay $70 in billing fees, against $80 on Chargebee's Flow plan. Card processing is charged on top, as it is with Chargebee and your gateway. Stripe also sells yearly contracts with lower rates for higher volumes.

You get a hosted customer portal where subscribers update cards and change plans (a custom domain for it costs $10 a month), automatic reminders, and Smart Retries for failed payments. Stripe says Smart Retries recover 38% of failed payments on average. Usage billing is built in through meters, which handle up to 100 million events a month, and Stripe sells heavier usage billing through Metronome, which Stripe lists as one of its own products.

The catch is that Stripe Billing only bills through Stripe. If you need two gateways, or you sell in a country Stripe doesn't serve, look at Recurly or Chargebee itself. Stripe sells tax calculation and revenue recognition as separate products, so budget for those if you need them.

Zoho Billing, which Zoho sold as Zoho Subscriptions until its rename, charges a flat fee instead of a share of your revenue. Standard costs $50 a month, or $39 a month billed yearly, and covers three users. Premium costs $100 a month, or $79 billed yearly, with ten users. Extra users are $9 a month each.

That makes the arithmetic easy. Chargebee's 0.8% passes $50 at about $6,250 a month in billing, so from there Zoho costs less, and the gap widens as you grow. Both plans allow up to 100,000 invoices a year and up to $1 million in yearly revenue. Past that, Zoho moves you to its Enterprise edition, which has no public price.

The feature list covers what most small subscription businesses use: free trials, upgrades and downgrades, metered billing for usage, dunning for failed payments, quotes, a customer portal, and revenue recognition reports. It connects to Stripe, PayPal and other gateways, so you keep your own processor.

Zoho Billing reads like accounting software, with invoices and reports up front. That suits a founder who handles finance; a growth team that wants checkout experiments and cancel-save offers will find less here than in Chargebee or Recurly. Phone support runs Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 9 PM Eastern.

Paddle works differently from Chargebee. It is a merchant of record, which means Paddle sells your product to the customer, collects the payment, and then pays you. Because Paddle is the seller, it calculates, collects and files sales tax and VAT in more than 100 jurisdictions, and it deals with fraud, chargebacks and buyer support questions.

The price reflects that. Paddle charges 5% plus 50 cents per checkout transaction, with no monthly fee, and that figure already includes card processing. On a $50 monthly plan you pay $3 per renewal. On a $10 plan you pay $1, which is a 10% cut, so Paddle is easier to justify on higher-priced plans. High-volume businesses can ask for custom pricing.

For subscriptions, you get a built-in customer portal, proration when people change plans mid-cycle, pausing, upgrades and downgrades, and automatic dunning, which Paddle includes rather than selling as an add-on. It bills in more than 20 currencies.

Skip Paddle if you want to stay the legal seller, for example because enterprise buyers expect to sign and pay you directly. Moving off Paddle later also takes more work than leaving a billing tool that sits on your own Stripe account, because the payment relationship belongs to Paddle.

Recurly has focused on subscription billing for over 15 years, and its pricing tells you who it wants: subscription businesses where expired and declined cards quietly cost money every month.

The Starter plan costs $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of billings each month included at no charge. You can try it for 90 days, the longest trial in this guide. Under $40,000 a month you pay a flat $249. At $100,000 a month you pay $789, against $749 on Chargebee's Flow plan, so the two run close.

Starter includes one dunning campaign, more than 20 payment gateways and more than 10 payment methods. The reason most people pick Recurly sits on All-Access: multiple dunning campaigns, routing payments across several gateways, cancel-save flows, multicurrency and single sign-on. All-Access needs at least $1 million in billing volume and is priced below 1% of volume, billed yearly. Recurly also sells versions for Shopify stores, plus two add-ons billed yearly: Engage, for retention offers and messages (from $1,600 a month), and revenue recognition (from $850 a month).

Recurly makes less sense for a young SaaS business billing a few thousand dollars a month. Paying $249 to bill $5,000 is about 5%, and Stripe Billing or Zoho Billing would cost far less for the same basic job.

Maxio is where Chargify went. In 2021 Battery Ventures combined Chargify and SaaSOptics, and the merged company launched as Maxio in April 2022. If an older comparison sends you to Chargify, this is the current product.

Maxio is aimed at business-to-business software companies whose finance team cares about contracts, receivables and revenue reports as much as about card payments. Every plan includes usage-based billing, subscription management, recurring billing, collections and dunning, and more than 20 payment gateways. Optional modules add advanced revenue management, accounts receivable, multi-entity support, expense amortization and EU hosting.

The Grow plan costs $599 a month and covers up to $100,000 in monthly billings. Scale, for anything above that, is priced on request. Maxio doesn't charge per seat, which matters when finance, sales and support all need logins. Agreements are yearly by default; monthly or quarterly payment is a premium option.

At $100,000 a month, Maxio's $599 compares well with $749 on Chargebee and $700 on Stripe Billing, and you get finance reporting that those plans don't include. Below about $75,000 a month, the flat $599 costs more than the percentage plans, and a yearly contract is a big commitment for a company still finding its pricing.

Pabbly Subscription Billing, called Pabbly Subscriptions until recently, is the cheapest way off Chargebee for a small seller. It takes 0% of your sales on every plan, including the free one, so your only percentage cost is your payment gateway's fee.

The free plan handles up to 50 customers, with revenue capped at a level Pabbly doesn't state. Standard costs $19 a month and covers up to 1,000 customers with unlimited revenue and team members. Unlimited costs $79 a month, removes the customer cap and adds a multi-tier affiliate program. Pabbly advertises $14 and $59, but those are the monthly rates when you prepay three years. Every paid plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

What you get is aimed at people selling courses, coaching and memberships: unlimited checkout pages in hosted, pop-up and embedded layouts, coupons, upsells, a customer portal, and dunning emails with automatic payment retries. It connects to more than 35 gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Square and Authorize.net.

For a SaaS company with finance needs, Pabbly falls short. It has no revenue recognition and doesn't file tax for you, and its reporting is simpler than Chargebee's.

If you charge for tokens, API calls, compute minutes or credits, Orb is built for that model first and subscriptions second. It takes in usage events as they happen, prices them, and sends alerts when a customer nears a limit. You can sell prepaid credits, bill when a customer crosses a spending threshold, or mix a seat price with usage.

Orb's Business plan is pay as you go at $6 per credit, and Orb says one credit works out to about 0.60% of billing volume, plus charges for event ingestion and other metered items. New accounts get 100 free credits. Business includes Orb's own invoicing, payments through Adyen or Stripe, scheduled price changes, and finance and tax integrations.

Enterprise adds customer hierarchies, collections automation, NetSuite and Salesforce integrations, custom roles, audit logs and a 99.9% uptime commitment, at a price you negotiate.

Orb is a poor fit for a simple monthly subscription with a few plans. You would be paying for a metering system you don't need, and the credit-based price is harder to predict than a flat fee. Chargebee now handles usage billing too, so compare both if usage is only part of your pricing.

Lago is billing software you can run on your own servers. The code is open source under the AGPLv3 license, and you can deploy it in your own cloud account, a private network or on your own hardware. For a company that can't send customer billing data to another vendor, or that wants to avoid a revenue share, that is the main draw.

Lago started as a metering and usage billing system. It turns usage events into billable metrics and supports graduated, package and volume pricing, minimum commitments, prepaid credits and subscriptions with overage charges. It creates invoices and credit notes and collects payments through your processor.

Lago also sells a managed cloud version and a Premium tier for both cloud and self-hosted use. Neither has a public price; you book a demo. Several things a billing team expects come as Premium add-ons, including automatic dunning, tax integrations, custom invoice branding and CRM or accounting integrations.

Choose Lago if you have engineers who will run and update it. If you don't, the hosting, upgrades and on-call duty land on your team, and a hosted product like Stripe Billing or Chargebee will cost less in staff time.