9 Best Subscription Billing Software of 2026

Chargebee is a billing platform that covers recurring invoices, usage pricing and the finance work around them. The Flow plan has two price options: $0 plus 0.80% of invoicing volume, or $99 per month plus 0.65%, and the pricing page puts the breakeven at $66K of monthly invoicing. Flow includes the price book and invoicing, usage ingestion with MCP, up to 100M usage events a month, real-time usage limits and alerts, usage and revenue analytics, pricing tables with one growth experiment, and CRM and ERP integrations. Failed payments go through payment retries that Chargebee describes as machine-learning dunning, across 40+ gateways and 100+ currencies. Enterprise adds multi-entity management, account hierarchies, contract terms and up to 500M usage events. RevRec for ASC 606 style revenue schedules and the full CPQ are separate modules sold by quote, so finance teams should price those together with billing before they sign.

Stripe Billing adds recurring billing and invoicing on top of Stripe Payments. On pay as you go it costs 0.7% of billing volume with no recurring fee, and Stripe says that covers billing transactions processed on and off Stripe but excludes one-off invoices. Subscriptions can be set up in the Dashboard, sold through Payment Links or Checkout, or built with the API. Dunning comes from Smart Retries, which retry failed payments at a time chosen by machine learning, plus automatic reminder emails and up to three recovery and retention automations with custom retry policies. Basic usage billing runs on the Meters API with up to 100M events a month included, while multidimensional rates and negotiated contracts go through Metronome, a Stripe product sold separately. The hosted customer portal is included, with a US$10 monthly charge for a custom domain. Card processing fees sit on top of the billing fee, so model both.

Zoho Billing is the lowest flat-fee option on this list. Standard costs $39 per organization per month billed annually but covers one-time billing, so subscription businesses need Premium at $79 billed annually or $100 billed monthly. Premium adds subscription billing with proration, hosted payment pages, usage-based billing, dunning management, in-app purchase handling, abandoned cart reminders, custom modules and functions, and scheduled reports, with up to 10 users. Standard features such as quotes, multi-currency transactions, automated payment reminders and a self-service customer portal carry over. Zoho's FAQ says Standard and Premium allow up to 100,000 invoices a year with total billed revenue up to $1M, and larger companies need the Enterprise edition, which adds advanced usage controls and flexible revenue recognition configurations. Extra users cost $7.50 per user per month billed annually. It fits smaller subscription companies, especially those already using other Zoho apps.

Paddle works differently from the other tools here. It acts as the merchant of record, so it sells to your customers, collects payment and takes on sales tax, VAT and payment regulations. Pay-as-you-go pricing is 5% + 50¢ per checkout transaction with no monthly, migration or hidden fees, and custom pricing is available for high-volume or low-value transactions. The package includes an embeddable branded checkout, subscription management, multiple currencies and payment options, fraud protection and chargeback handling, financial reporting, and billing support that answers your customers' questions about payments, subscriptions and cancellations. A migration service moves subscribers over from another system. Invoicing, advisory services and implementation support are listed as additional services. For a small software company selling into many countries, the fee replaces several costs at once; for a high-volume B2B company with sales-led contracts, a billing-only tool plus its own tax setup usually costs less.

Recurly is a subscription billing platform built around retention. Starter costs $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, the first $40K of billings each month carries no charge, and there is a 90-day free trial. Starter includes automated global subscription billing, flexible plans and pricing, static churn-prevention tools, one dunning campaign, 10+ payment methods and 20+ gateways. All-Access, which needs at least $1M in billing volume, adds AI agents and analytics, intelligent churn prevention, multiple dunning campaigns, multicurrency, payment orchestration across gateways, custom reporting and single sign-on. A Shopify edition brings the same tools into Shopify stores. Revenue recognition is a separate RevRec product starting at $850 per month billed annually, and the Engage upsell and retention module starts at $1,600. Recurly lists 67M active subscribers and 140+ currencies on the platform. Its pricing suits companies with steady volume more than very early teams.

Lago is a billing platform built around usage metering, and its core is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license on GitHub. You can run it on Lago Cloud or self-host it in your own cloud or on premises. It meters tokens, compute, API calls or any product event through billable metrics, then turns usage into plans, prepaid credits, entitlements and invoices. The Premium feature list adds real-time usage and wallet alerts, plan overrides for a client, a customer portal, multiple billing entities, grace periods, an invoice preview endpoint, a built-in analytics dashboard, an AI billing assistant and an MCP server. Some items, including progressive billing, tax integrations and automatic dunning, are listed as add-ons available on demand. Lago lists Mistral AI, Groq and PayPal among its users. Premium and Cloud prices are not published, so you need a demo for a quote, and teams that self-host take on running the service themselves.

Maxio targets B2B SaaS finance teams that need more than invoices. Grow costs $599 per month for companies billing up to $100K a month, and Scale is quoted for larger companies. Both plans include automated invoicing and billing, subscription management, payment processing, financial reports, A/R management and revenue recognition, with advanced versions of reports, A/R and revenue recognition reserved for Scale along with advanced revenue management, expense amortization, metering and rating, and multi-entity support. Billing supports fixed, usage-based and milestone-based models, proforma and consolidated invoices, e-invoicing, discounts and customer hierarchies. On the finance side the documented reports include an advanced revenue summary, A/R aging, contract details with a deferred revenue waterfall, roll forwards, deferred revenue by transaction and an open balance diagnostic. Collections and dunning run across 20+ payment gateways. The price is steep for a seed-stage company, but it can replace spreadsheets for deferred revenue and save hours at month end.

Orb is a billing engine for companies whose pricing depends on usage. The Business plan is pay as you go at $6.00 per credit, with lower rates at volume, and includes real-time event ingestion, real-time alerting, hybrid and usage-based billing, Orb Invoicing with A/R aging, Adyen and Stripe payments integrations, automated price changes, and finance and tax integrations. Usage arrives through an idempotent API or as files dropped into S3 or GCS, and billable metrics are written in SQL over raw events with parameters for reuse. A pricebook holds every price, plan and add-on, plan versions let you migrate customers on your own schedule, and simulations show how a pricing change would land on real customer data before launch. Enterprise adds customer hierarchies, collections automation, NetSuite and Salesforce integrations, a 99.9% availability SLA, data exports and audit logs. The credit model is flexible, but it makes costs harder to forecast than a flat fee.

Zuora is the enterprise option on this list. Its pricing catalog supports flat fee, per unit, tiered and volume pricing, usage models such as overage, tiered plus overage, high-water mark and overage smoothing, prepaid commitments with drawdown, minimum commitments with true-up, and multi-attribute or formula-based pricing, plus pre-rated usage you calculate yourself. Billing runs monthly, annually or on custom schedules tied to anniversaries, a day of the month or contract events, and invoices can be triggered on activation, shipment or usage thresholds, in advance or in arrears, with proration for mid-cycle changes. Revenue recognition and accounting rules are embedded in the catalog, global price lists cover multi-currency pricing, and the same catalog feeds CPQ quotes, self-service commerce and partner APIs. Zuora does not publish prices, so expect a sales process and an implementation project. For a large company with many products and channels, the breadth is the point; for a small team it is more than needed.