Recurly vs Stripe: Price, Features & What’s Best in 2023

Recurly is a powerful subscription management software that works with multiple payment processors. Stripe, meanwhile, is a powerful payment processor that works with subscriptions. Stripe integrates with hundreds of third-party apps—including Recurly.

Both offer strong tools for invoicing, billing, and preventing the loss of subscribers because of expired cards and other involuntary reasons. Stripe does more with one-time product sales and social selling, while Recurly concentrates on building and keeping your subscriber base. However, it requires a third-party merchant account (such as Stripe). In short:

• Stripe: Best for tech-savvy startups and growing ecommerce businesses, B2B, and international sales
• Recurly: Best for SaaS, streaming, mobile app, and other businesses that are primarily subscription-based

As an alternative, consider Square for in-person plus subscription sales: Recurly lacks an in-person POS, and Stripe Terminal is very basic. Thus, we recommend Square if you run a brick-and-mortar business with subscriptions. One of our top picks for payment processing, POS systems, and more, it’s priced great, has a free and complete POS system, handles subscriptions, and offers banking and other features that let it grow with your business. Read our Square POS review for more details.

Recurly vs Stripe At a Glance

*Reviews are averaged over multiple user review sites

When to Use Recurly vs Stripe

The question of Recurly vs Stripe is not a truly fair one, as you can have Recurly and Stripe. Recurly is a Stripe Partner, which means they work well together. Recurly offers more depth to subscription management, while Stripe is an excellent and versatile payment processor. If you like Recurly but want Stripe as a merchant account, simply add Stripe as a payment processor—it doesn’t even have to be the only payment processor you use with Recurly. Scroll on to learn more about the use cases for each.

When to Choose Recurly

Recurly is best for medium, large, or growing businesses with primarily subscription-based products. This can include SaaS, mobile apps, consumer goods (like subscription boxes), digital or streaming media, services, e-learning, or any product or service needing recurring billing. Recurly says its customers have increased their subscriber numbers a hundredfold while preventing involuntary churn.

It is also better if you don’t want to be limited to a specific payment provider (namely, Stripe). With Recurly, you can even use more than one payment provider if you wish, giving your customers more choices.

When to Choose Stripe

If you have heavy online and social selling needs and your inventory consists of more than subscriptions, then Stripe is your best bet. It ranks among the best payment gateways, especially for online sales, and the leading B2B payment solutions because of its excellent invoicing and billing tools. It gives you a merchant account and processes domestic and international payments. (Recurly requires a separate merchant account.) It has hundreds of ready-made integrations. While highly versatile, its more advanced features sometimes require coding.

Neither Stripe nor Recurly has their own mobile app. However, several excellent mobile payment apps are made especially for Stripe. Learn more in our Stripe review.

Best for Affordability: Stripe

*Custom quotes for Professional and Elite Plans; Core plan free for one year with 0.9% charge for revenue over $40,000 per month; after the year, price rises to $249 per month.
**Both Recurly and Stripe rely on third-party POS software.

 

Stripe is the least expensive simply because, with Recurly, you pay a monthly fee for the software and still need to pay for a payment processor. It’s possible you may find a less expensive payment processor than Stripe, but it does rank among the cheapest payment processors in addition to offering discounts for nonprofits and high-volume sellers.

When to Use Recurly

Recurly has a monthly fee that covers subscriptions to a certain amount—up to $40,000 in revenue with the Core plan, for example. After that, you pay 0.9% of the additional revenue. However, Recurly says its clients see an average return on investment of 12.3x, so if subscriptions are your main source of income, it may well pay for itself and then some.

In 2023, Recurly changed its pricing to make the Core plan free for a year up to $40,000 per month. After that, the pricing rises to $249 per month. The other plans require custom pricing.

Best for Recurring Payments: Recurly

Recurly offers a multitude of ways to set up billing: prepaid, usage-based, fixed, volume-based, tiered, stairstep, usage-based, and hybrids thereof. By integrating multiple providers, you also give your customers greater choice in how they pay. These things make it superior to Stripe for recurring billing.

However, we were more impressed with the dunning management tools. Like Stripe, it has an account updater so that when a credit card expires or is changed (like after a theft), Recurly gets the updated information with no interruption to the subscription. Even better, it proactively manages expired cards ahead of renewals to prevent declines. Plus, its intelligent retry analyzes reasons for declines and adapts to the transaction. Finally, subscribers can give you more than one payment method so that you have an automatic fallback if one fails. Recurly says its customers report reducing involuntary churn to 1%.

When to Use Stripe

Stripe also uses 3D Secure authentication and smart retries to reduce involuntary churn. Its professed record is less than Recurly’s—38% recovery on average, with an additional 11% if using smart retries. It, too, has prebuilt email reminders you can send for overdue payments. While Recurly does more, Stripe is sufficient for businesses that only do small subscription sales.

Best for Managing Subscriptions: Recurly

Recurly is the more powerful software for subscriptions; plus, it’s easier to use. With only a few clicks, you can set up a variety of subscription plans, trials, gift subscriptions, and more. You can set prices and start dates or individualize them for customers through the admin channel. Recurly stands out in that it lets you manage add-ons as part of the subscription—for example, a free skillet with a meal box subscription—while Stripe makes these separate purchases. Recurly also lets you pause subscriptions to reactivate at a later date, which may help retention.

When to Use Stripe

If you are collecting subscriptions through third-party software, then Stripe may be a better option. Its billing API makes it easy to integrate with websites, mobile apps, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, plus it integrates with hundreds of software applications. It, too, has trial management, custom start dates, and flexible billing schedules. You can also create coupons for discounts or gift subscriptions.

Best for Billing & Invoicing: Stripe

Stripe takes the lead for invoices. Like Recurly, it offers customizable invoices for one-time or recurring billing, where recurring billing can follow scenarios from per-seat pricing to metered billing. It allows payment by credit card or ACH. (With Recurly, it depends on the merchant account you choose.) Invoices can be paid in installments, and you can create quote-to-cash automations. You can apply tax rates to the entire invoice or individually by line item, allow coupons, and more. For these reasons, it’s also an ideal B2B payment solution.

When to Use Recurly

Recurly may not have some of the tools Stripe offers, but we were impressed with its flexibility when it comes to invoicing for recurring billing or subscriptions. You, of course, can give customers more choices for payment, including paying by PayPal. It also has automated workflows to honor subscriber preferences for billing. We also like the refunds-via-credit feature, as it encourages return customers. Recurly invoices are customizable and work for one-time purchases and recurring bills.

Best for Ecommerce Checkout: Stripe

Stripe blows Recurly away in this category, with nearly 240 ecommerce integrations for everything from online stores to CRM tools like Salesforce. It integrates with multichannel sellers like eBay and lets you create links and buttons for posting on social networks. Stripe has several options for buy now, pay later (BNPL) payments. This is not as important for subscriptions but does give it an edge for large one-time payments. Overall, it’s simply more versatile than Recurly.

When to Use Recurly

Recurly is no slouch for ecommerce. You can create custom checkout, hosted payment pages, and more. While it does not have social selling or buy buttons on its own, you may find those tools with your payment provider. One advantage it has over Stripe is the one-click checkout, which you can get by integrating with PayPal or Amazon Pay. This makes it a great choice for whim buys or for consumers who want the convenience of a quick checkout experience.

Best for International Subscriptions: Recurly

*International card transactions are increasing to 1.5% in June 2023
**Stripe’s help guides continue to show that you cannot change a currency once set.

Recurly accepts payments in 195 countries (with the right merchant account), has hosted payment pages available in 14 different languages (30+ languages overall), and automatically defaults to the customer’s local currency. It also has advanced VAT management, including the ability to automatically refund VAT for qualifying customers. Additionally, it offers integrations with tax management programs to help you stay on top of international tax mandates.

When to Use Stripe

Stripe is nonetheless an excellent choice for international sales, ranking as the best overall international merchant account. It works in 34 languages and over 135 currencies. One drawback is that once you set a currency, you cannot change it; however, it’s working on an API that lets you set multiple currencies so a customer can change it to the best for them.

Best for Chargeback Prevention & Fraud Monitoring: Stripe

Like Recurly, Stripe uses Dynamic 3D Secure, and it screens medium as well as high-risk buyers. In addition, it has Stripe Radar, which uses machine learning and Stripe’s extensive database of information to spot and block fraud. You can even set custom rules and block lists. Further, it provides chargeback protection by reimbursing you the disputed amount and waiving the dispute fees. Radar is available free on all purchases charged the standard 2.9% + 30 cents, and you can purchase it for other transactions for an additional 5 cents per transaction.

When to Use Recurly

Recurly uses Dynamic 3D Secure and does a simple fraud velocity check before passing a transaction to your payment gateway. Therefore, your fraud protection depends on the payment provider processing the payment. However, Pro and Elite Plan holders also get the benefit of Kount’s fraud protection. Kount is a leading fraud protection program that is our No. 1 choice for chargeback protection services.

Best for Reporting & Analytics: Recurly

Recurly offers a multitude of reports to help you analyze your sales, subscriber growth, trial performance, and standard revenue reports. As such, it’s best for reports and analysis, especially if you want to apply the data to key performance indicators and strategies for the future. Some reports are only available in the higher plans, however.

When to Use Stripe

Stripe primarily offers a balance report and a payout reconciliation report, which it says can answer most of your questions. Stripe Radar has reports for declined transactions and chargebacks. Otherwise, you can download the data and create your own reports or integrate it with third-party reporting apps.

Best for Ease of Use: Tied

*Reviews are averaged over multiple user review sites

The differences between the two are minimal when it comes to ease of use. Recurly has excellent user experience, taking only minutes to set up even complex subscriptions. Meanwhile, Stripe needs coding for some modifications, but it also has plug-and-play tools that are easy for the layman to use. In addition, it has an impressive library of how-to videos done by live human beings.

Recurly makes it simple to set things up, with setup widgets for everything, but on the payment provider side, you may have varying results for ease of use and account stability. It’s been adding human-narrated how-to videos; previous ones were computer-generated. Both are highly rated by real-world users, although Stripe had the higher score.

Recurly vs Stripe Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do you add Stripe to Recurly?

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What payment gateways does Recurly work with?

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What software does Recurly integrate with?

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What recurring billing and subscription software work with Stripe?

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Bottom Line

Recurly is certainly the heavyweight in the question of which is best for subscription management, but Stripe does have some good low-cost subscription tools and works for many other kinds of sales, too. Regardless, it’s not necessary to choose one or the other. You can get Recurly as your subscription software and add Stripe as a payment processor.