Chargebee vs Recurly (2026)

Pick Chargebee if you bill for usage, seats or credits, take payments through more than one gateway, or invoice less than about $31,000 a month: its Flow plan has no base fee and takes 0.8% of what you invoice, and it includes 100 million usage events a month. Pick Recurly if you sell consumer or Shopify Plus subscriptions and failed card payments are your biggest leak: Starter costs $249 a month with the first $40,000 of billings included, comes with a 90-day free trial, and works out cheaper than Chargebee between roughly $31,000 and $84,000 a month by our arithmetic. Recurly's machine-learning retries, multiple dunning campaigns and gateway failover sit on All-Access, which needs $1 million in billing volume and a yearly contract. Prices checked November 4, 2026.

Pricing compared

The two companies charge in different shapes, so the cheaper one depends on how much you bill. All prices below come from each vendor's pricing page, checked November 4, 2026, and exclude your payment gateway's own processing fees.

Chargebee sells Billing on one self-serve plan, Flow, with two ways to pay. You can pay 0.8% of monthly invoicing volume with no base fee, or $99 a month plus 0.65%. The two cost the same at about $66,000 a month, and the $99 option is cheaper above that. Enterprise, which adds multi-entity management, account hierarchies and contract terms, is priced by quote.

Recurly Starter costs $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of billings each month included at no percentage fee. All-Access is "as low as" under 1% of billing volume, billed annually, with a $1 million billing volume minimum, and Recurly gives the exact rate only through sales.

By our arithmetic, the published self-serve prices work out like this:

Monthly billings	Chargebee Flow	Recurly Starter
$10,000	$80	$249
$30,000	$240	$249
$50,000	$400	$339
$84,000	$645	$645
$150,000	$1,074	$1,239

Chargebee is cheaper until about $31,000 a month, Recurly is cheaper from there to about $84,000, and Chargebee's $99 option pulls ahead again above that. Past roughly $83,000 a month you reach $1 million a year in billings and can ask Recurly for All-Access, whose rate may beat both.

The add-ons follow the same pattern. Chargebee's Growth Starter (pricing tables, hosted checkout, a self-serve portal and no-code cancel pages) is free for Billing customers, and CPQ Lite is free for the first 50 quotes; full CPQ, RevRec and Growth Enterprise are quoted. Recurly publishes floor prices for its add-ons: Engage from $1,600 a month and RevRec from $850 a month, both billed annually.

Failed payments and dunning head to head

Recovering failed renewals is where Recurly puts most of its effort, and it shows on the higher plan. Every Recurly plan runs static retries based on gateway decline codes, stopping after 7 declines, 20 attempts or 60 days, plus one default dunning campaign. All-Access adds Intelligent Retries, which use machine learning to pick the retry time, up to 50 dunning campaigns for different customer groups, and failover to a backup gateway when your main one goes down. Account Updater, which picks up new card numbers from the card networks, is not in Starter and Recurly's docs say it costs extra. Recurly also lets you compare your churn and dunning recovery with built-in benchmarks drawn from more than 58 million subscribers and 2,200 brands.

Chargebee includes basic and smart dunning on both plans. Smart Dunning is rules-based: it reads gateway error codes and allows up to 12 retries, or you can set a fixed schedule of up to 5 retries on days you choose. Its machine-learning option, Revive, evaluates more than 200 signals on each failed transaction, but it currently works only with Stripe and Braintree, and Chargebee does not publish its price. Lifecycle email templates with segmentation and several reminders come with Flow.

On Starter against Flow the two are close, with rules-based retries on both. Recurly wins once you qualify for All-Access and want machine-learning retries across any gateway, separate dunning campaigns and failover.

Usage billing, pricing models and AI

Chargebee is the stronger pick if your pricing involves meters. Flow takes raw or pre-aggregated usage events through the API, CSV uploads or Amazon S3, lets you define meters with filters and custom SQL, and includes 100 million usage events a month, with Enterprise able to buy up to 500 million. You can set included usage per plan, usage limits and alerts, and overage charges, and mix usage with recurring and one-time fees. Price models cover flat fee, tiered, stairstep, volume, usage and per-seat, with multi-decimal price points. Chargebee also runs an MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex or Notion AI query subscriptions, invoices and usage in plain language; Chargebee says write actions are launching shortly, so for now it answers questions rather than making changes.

Recurly handles usage on every plan too. You can bill at the end of each cycle for what a customer used, combine that with a fixed fee, and mix recurring, per-seat, usage and one-time charges on one invoice. It also supports free trials, bulk coupon codes, gift subscriptions and pausing a subscription for a set number of cycles. Recurly does not publish an event allowance or metering tools on the scale Chargebee does, so a product that sells tokens, credits or API calls will find more built in at Chargebee.

For retention offers, Chargebee's free Growth Starter gives you cancel pages with cancellation reasons, loss aversion cards and pause or downgrade options. Recurly's equivalent sits in Engage, which starts at $1,600 a month and adds a churn-propensity model, personalized offers and A/B tests.

Gateways, checkout and integrations

Both bill through a gateway you connect, and neither acts as merchant of record, so you stay the seller and file your own sales tax and VAT. If you want a company to take that on, look at Paddle.

Chargebee Flow connects to 40+ gateways, including Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, GoCardless, PayPal Commerce, Checkout.com and Mollie, and supports direct debit from ACH to SEPA and BACS through supported gateways. Recurly Starter lists 20+ gateways and 10+ payment methods; ACH, multicurrency and payment orchestration across gateways come with All-Access.

On integrations, Chargebee's pricing page is the more explicit. Xero, QuickBooks, Anrok, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Klaviyo, Zendesk, Intercom, Slack and Zapier are included on Flow, while Salesforce, NetSuite, Sage Intacct and Avalara AvaTax are paid add-ons on Enterprise only. Recurly's help center documents QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite and Salesforce integrations but does not say which plan each needs. Recurly's tax tool, powered by Avalara, calculates sales tax, VAT and GST on every plan, and Chargebee calculates US sales tax, EU VAT and other taxes on both of its plans.

For app makers, Recurly's App Management pulls App Store and Google Play subscriptions into the same reports, at a fee Recurly does not publish. Chargebee lists in-app purchase management on Flow.

Ease of use and setup

Both connect to your product through an API, a JavaScript library (Chargebee.js or Recurly.js) and hosted pages, so plan on developer time for the first integration. After that, finance and product staff can change plans, coupons and prices from the dashboard in either tool.

The bigger difference is how you get in. Recurly's 90-day Starter trial is long enough to run two or three real renewal cycles before you pay, though the retries you test on Starter are the static ones. Chargebee lets you sign up for a free trial and sandbox, choosing a US, EU or Australian data center, but does not state the trial length, so ask before you move real customer data. Chargebee lists engineering consultation and migration support on both plans; Recurly sells onboarding, data migration and professional services through its support team.

Support compared

Chargebee publishes the same support on Flow and Enterprise: email around the clock, and live chat, phone and call-back requests 24 hours a day, five days a week, plus a knowledge base, docs and community.

Recurly says its in-house support team works seven days a week by chat, email and phone, and its help center lists chat, tickets and email. A dedicated customer success manager needs a minimum contract value or a paid package, and premium 24/7 support with a technical account manager is sold separately. Recurly does not say which of these channels Starter customers get. If you want support terms in writing before you buy, Chargebee's pricing page gives you more to go on.

Who each one suits

Chargebee suits SaaS and AI companies with usage, seat or credit pricing, teams that use or plan to use more than one gateway, and anyone billing under about $31,000 a month who wants to pay only a percentage. Funded startups in a partner accelerator or VC network can start free. Larger companies needing Salesforce, NetSuite or multi-entity billing will end up on a quoted Enterprise plan.

Recurly suits direct-to-consumer subscription brands and Shopify Plus sellers, and businesses billing about $31,000 to $84,000 a month, where Starter's included volume makes it the cheaper of the two. Its case gets stronger at $1 million a year and up, when All-Access brings machine-learning retries, multiple dunning campaigns and failover. If you bill a few thousand dollars a month and take every payment through Stripe, Stripe Billing or Zoho Billing may cost less than either.