The 8 Best Options For Recurring Payment Systems & Subscription Billing Platforms

Best for small businesses seeking an all-in-one payments platform with an online store.

Like Stripe, Square is a full-stack payment services provider, combining payment processing with billing, invoicing, an mPOS app, employee management, and even an online store builder (something Stripe does not offer). Included in Square's payments ecosystem is support for subscription billing. Square's Subscriptions API allows you to review the invoices generated by subscriptions in your dashboard. You can also offer subscriptions via Square Online Checkout, a service that allows you to accept customers' payments by simply sharing a link.

As with Stripe, Square's flat-rate pricing is ideal for new businesses and lower-volume merchants. Larger businesses will find the pricing model to be disadvantageous as sales volume increases. However, if you're offering subscriptions through the Square Online Store and you purchase the Premium subscription plan, your rate will go from 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction to just 2.6% + $0.30/transaction. This plan costs $72/month, but large merchants who sell at scale should still come out ahead compared to the standard rate.

Additionally, with Square, you may find that you need to integrate with third-party subscription management software for more advanced functions.

Best for businesses seeking an accounting app with recurring billing support.

FreshBooks is one of the biggest names in accounting and invoicing software. While FreshBooks Payments doesn't offer up a multitude of subscription-specific features like other specialized subscription billing solutions, it does offer support for recurring payments for a fraction of the cost of a software package like Chargebee.

Through FreshBooks's recurring payments system, you can automatically charge a customer's credit card, bank account, or PayPal account on a recurring basis. You can use FreshBooks Payments (a rebranded version of WePay) to process payments from your customers, but if you'd rather use Stripe or PayPal as your payment processor, you can do so. Whichever processor you use, you'll be charged 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

FreshBooks offers four different subscription tiers, with pricing starting at $4.50/month. The highest-tier plan, Select, offers custom pricing, so you'll have to contact the company to see what it offers.

Best for businesses already using Zoho business software.

Zoho Subscriptions offers recurring billing, subscription management, and invoicing crafted for the entire billing life cycle. The software is compatible with numerous payment gateways and can handle currencies from countries around the globe, making Zoho Subscriptions a good subscription billing solution for international eCommerce.

You can begin using Zoho Subscriptions to test the features and functions (and even sell a few subscriptions) for free. Once you've sold more than 20 subscriptions, you'll need to choose one of the paid plans on offer. Pricing starts at $39/organization/month.

One great feature you'll get with Zoho Subscriptions is a free integration with Zoho Books, Zoho's online accounting software. Any business already using Zoho Books to balance its books should definitely consider using Zoho Subscriptions as a subscription management solution. You'll be able to integrate with other Zoho software packages (such as Zoho CRM) as well.

Best for small businesses seeking an all-in-one payments platform.

Best known for its accessible online payment processing services, Stripe also offers a billing system in the form of Stripe Billing. For startups and small businesses using Stripe as their payment processor, Stripe Billing supports both one-time and recurring payments. You can create billing plans based on usage, the number of users, flat fees, or any other business model that suits your operations. You'll also get support for coupons, free trials, automated failed payment emails, automatically-generated reports, and more.

If you're looking for free online recurring billing software, look no further (when it comes to monthly fees, at least). Stripe's "full-stack" payment services package comes with no monthly charges or extra fees. Instead, similarly to other payment aggregators, Stripe charges a flat rate of 2.9% + $0.30 from each successful card charge.

Stripe's simple pricing scheme is beneficial to startups and smaller businesses, as it allows them to keep down expenses. However, for larger businesses, Stripe's pricing model becomes increasingly expensive as transaction volume increases.

Best for startups and growing businesses.

Chargebee specializes in automating recurring billing tasks for SaaS businesses, providing subscription management, recurring billing and invoicing, accounting, tax support, and reporting. Chargebee is designed to scale with your company as you expand, offering subscription packages for each stage of a growing business. In fact, a startup can use Chargebee's recurring billing software for free until $50,000 has been invoiced, after which you'll be charged a monthly fee.

Chargebee provides a lot of value for larger businesses with its capacity to handle multiple payment methods and tax profiles, large quantities of subscriptions, and the ability to tailor subscription packages to fit the needs of different kinds of businesses. Smaller businesses will find a lot to like as well, with support for unlimited payment gateways, SaaS metrics, and integration with Xero and QuickBooks included with Chargebee's lower-tier subscription plan,

Chargebee doesn't include a payment gateway or merchant account in its services. Thankfully, Chargebee integrates with a wide array of payment gateways, including Stripe. What's more, based on user reviews, customers seem to appreciate the quality of Chargebee's user support and analytics.

Best for enterprise-level businesses.

Recurly's recurring billing software is designed to accommodate the complex billing needs of larger businesses. With its wide array of integrations, compatibility with 16 payment gateways, support for several different billing models, and international business support (140+ currencies are supported), Recurly has a lot to offer enterprise-level businesses.

Smaller businesses will find much to like about Recurly as well, including the fact that you can sign up for Recurly and test out its features for free. You'll need a paid account — and a connection to a payment gateway and merchant account — before you can begin taking payments from customers, however.

With the broad range of billing models available, Recurly is adaptable to a wide range of businesses, as customers can be charged in a number of different ways, depending on your chosen model. The system lets you test different pricing types, so you get a sense of what best matches your customers' needs.

Included among the software Recurly integrates with is Zapier, which allows you to connect with another 2,000+ apps, further extending Recurly's functionality.

Best for large companies with sophisticated billing needs.

Zuora is a subscription management platform that bills itself as a complete order-to-revenue service, letting you manage quotes, orders, and billing for the whole customer lifecycle.

The software isn't offered as a single package but as a collection of features that businesses can pick and choose from to create a tailored package that fits their particular needs. As such, Zuora is a solution primarily for very large businesses with complex subscription management needs, and no pricing information is given on the website. You can sign up for a free trial of the recurring billing software, however.

A business using Zuora is likely to be offering products to large companies that require varied, customizable service packages. An ordinary subscription management service won't be able to offer such flexible solutions. You'll still have to connect Zuora to a payment gateway and merchant account, however.

Best for B2B businesses.

Chargify is a recurring billing and subscription management software platform that, like most of the options listed in this article, requires connections to a payment gateway and/or merchant account. Chargify specializes in serving B2B SaaS businesses — the software lets you offer a wide variety of recurring billing models, along with events-based billing and offer management.

Chargify is not cheap. You can try Chargify for free, but once it comes time to accept payments, you'll need a paid subscription. The lowest-tier Chargify subscription goes for $299/month — though this only covers your first $50K/month in revenue. For all revenue above this threshold, Chargify will charge you 1% of the overage.

Chargify is set up specifically to take advantage of Stripe's features, should you use Stripe for payment processing. However, you also have the option of using any one of a host of other processing providers.