Chargebee vs Paddle

Chargebee is a subscription billing and revenue management platform founded in 2011 in Chennai, India. It sits between your product and one or more payment gateways (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, PayPal, GoCardless and others) and manages everything that happens after a customer chooses a plan: trials, upgrades, proration, invoicing, collections and reporting.

Core billing handles flat, per-seat, tiered and usage-based pricing, coupons, add-ons and multiple currencies, with hosted checkout pages and a self-serve customer portal. Around it Chargebee adds dunning and smart payment retries, tax calculation through integrations, revenue recognition for ASC 606 and IFRS 15 reporting, subscription analytics such as MRR and churn, and Chargebee Retention (built on its Brightback acquisition) for cancel flows and save offers. Billing runs on a Flow plan priced as a share of monthly invoicing volume (0.80% with no base fee, or $99 a month plus 0.65%), and Enterprise deals with multi-entity features are custom.

Chargebee is a strong fit for B2B SaaS and subscription commerce companies whose pricing has outgrown simple monthly plans, or who need gateway independence for different regions. For a startup with a handful of plans already on Stripe, Stripe Billing is cheaper and faster to implement. Recurly is the closest alternative for consumer subscriptions, Maxio (formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics) targets B2B finance teams, and Paddle or Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record, taking on global sales tax liability that Chargebee leaves with you.

Paddle is a London-based payments company founded in 2012 that acts as a merchant of record for software, SaaS, apps and digital products. As the merchant of record, Paddle legally sells your product to the customer on your behalf, which means it calculates, collects and remits sales tax and VAT across more than 200 markets, handles fraud and chargebacks, and issues compliant invoices and receipts.

Paddle Billing, the current platform, combines overlay and inline checkout with localised prices and currencies, cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and local payment methods, subscriptions with trials, upgrades, proration and dunning, plus APIs and webhooks for developers. Paddle acquired ProfitWell in 2022, which brought Retain for recovering failed payments and free subscription metrics. Standard pricing is a single fee of 5 percent plus 50 cents per transaction, with custom pricing for larger volumes.

Paddle fits SaaS and software companies selling internationally that would rather not register for tax in dozens of countries, including founders in countries where Stripe is not available, such as Turkey. The fee is higher than a payment processor alone, customisation is narrower than building on Stripe, onboarding includes a review, and payouts are slower. Stripe with Stripe Tax gives more control if you can handle compliance yourself, Lemon Squeezy (now owned by Stripe) and Polar serve smaller indie sellers with a similar model, and FastSpring is a long-standing merchant of record competitor.