5 Best Paddle Alternatives in 2024

Estimated read time: 6 minutes, 36 seconds

When considering Paddle alternatives, it’s important to note that Paddle is a merchant of record (MoR). The company handles transactions for sellers of digital products, providing the infrastructure for global online payments while taking responsibility for tax collection and remittance, fraud prevention, and other aspects of the checkout process.

It’s a capable solution, but by no means is Paddle a universal, one-size-fits-all option. Depending on your needs, sellers may run into a number of potential limitations with the Paddle platform:

Paddle doesn’t accept as many alternative payment methods as other MoR partners.
The subscription management system doesn’t support multi-product transactions.
Other MoRs boast higher conversion and approval rates.
Paddle is less experienced than other MoR partners.

In this guide, we discuss five service providers that function in whole or in part as alternatives to Paddle that may help you avoid some of these limits, starting with a look at our solution, FastSpring.

Paddle competitors in this list:

Are you looking for a Paddle alternative that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

FastSpring

Unlike many Paddle competitors, FastSpring is a merchant of record (MoR) and the most direct alternative to Paddle. As an MoR, our platform handles a lot more than just standalone payment gateways or subscription management software solutions.

FastSpring includes global payment processing and recurring revenue management, of course, but the platform also takes care of the end-to-end checkout process, including optimization of your checkout flow, collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT, localization, fraud prevention, global compliance, and more.

FastSpring’s Advantages Over Paddle

The main benefit to partnering with a merchant of record is the infrastructure. MoRs are complete payment solutions that enable you to outsource the entire checkout process, as well as liability for sales tax and VAT remittance, fraud prevention, and tax compliance.

That means that once you implement FastSpring, you’re ready to start selling — in more than 200 regions, with support for 21+ languages and 23+ currencies — almost instantly.

FastSpring offers a more robust, fully-featured platform that can support more use cases.

Paddle is also an MoR, but its functionality isn’t as robust, nor is the platform as effective as FastSpring. Our ecommerce solution is built to cover all your bases, so you can focus on building a great product. That’s why FastSpring includes a deeper, more robust set of features than Paddle.

FastSpring supports 20+ payment methods, including additional alternative methods Paddle doesn’t accept such as checks, Pix, and wire transfers for transactions under US$100.
With our JavaScript Store Builder Library (SBL), you can completely customize, brand, and streamline your checkout flow, building trust with buyers and eliminating friction. The SBL includes tracking and testing tools to help monitor and improve your conversion rate, too.
FastSpring also powers multi-product transactions, allowing you to offer customers product bundles, upsells, and multi-product coupons.

FastSpring delivers industry-leading approval and conversion rates.

FastSpring’s platform processes transactions locally, includes best-in-class intelligent payment routing, and has quick, automatic failover processing to minimize involuntary churn. Plus, with our JavaScript library and three different checkout experiences, you can quickly and easily build the best-converting checkout flow for your business.

FastSpring is a more experienced, knowledgeable partner for your SaaS business.

We’ve been working in this space since 2005, and we’ve seen the growth of the subscription business firsthand. Our team intimately understands the complexities of subscription billing and selling — and we’re deeply committed to helping our customers grow.

Whether that means providing customer support to help you migrate from another payment processor or recurring billing solution, optimizing your checkout process to boost revenue, or working with you to expand into new regions, we’re your partner in growth.

4 Additional Paddle Alternatives

Stripe

Stripe is best known as an online payment processor that enables you to accept credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. Stripe is not an MoR, but the company does offer add-on products that include additional features such as:

Checkout.
Digital invoices.
Subscription and recurring payment collection.
In-person payments.
Revenue metrics and analytics.
Fraud and risk management.

The most crucial difference to note is that, since Stripe isn’t a MoR, its pricing looks a lot lower to begin with — but with all the add-ons needed to make it function like an MoR, that price will go up quickly.

It can also be used to sell physical products, both online and in person, with Stripe Terminal serving as a Point of Sale (PoS) solution, too.

2Checkout (now Verifone)

A preview of Paddle alternative 2Checkout by Verifone's homepage, a green webpage with an image of someone touching a touch screen.

Verifone (formerly 2Checkout) offers a number of different products and services:

The core 2Sell product is a payment gateway that enables sellers to accept online and mobile payments.
2Subscribe is a subscription management system that offers features such as recurring billing and churn prevention.
2Monetize is the most similar product to Paddle. With this package, Verifone acts as the MoR, and sellers gain features for conversion rate optimization (CRO), sales tax and VAT collection and remittance, and fraud prevention.

Braintree by PayPal

Braintree from PayPal is a payment processor that enables customers to accept online payments via credit, debit, Venmo (in the U.S.), digital wallets (Apple Pay and Google Pay), and — of course — PayPal. Braintree also offers merchant accounts, as well as:

Recurring billing.
Optimized checkout flow.
Risk mitigation.
Reporting and pricing analytics.
Third-party integrations for recurring billing software, accounting, and more.

Maxio (Formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics)

A preview of Paddle alternative Maxio's homepage, a black web page with images of laptop screens and a large block of white text.

Maxio is neither an MoR nor a payment gateway. Instead, the company bills itself as billing and financial operations for B2B SaaS, and the featureset is much more focused on back-end operations.

The core Maxio product enables users to automate recurring billing. Other features include:

A/R management.
Advanced revenue management.
Expense amortization.
Third-party integrations for payment processing, CRM, accounting, and more.

An important note: With Maxio, you’ll still need to implement another, separate solution to manage taxes and compliance.

Find out Why TestDome Considers FastSpring a Real Partner for Selling Software Online.
Learn more about the merchant of record business model, including how an MoR like FastSpring can handle all of the tedious billing tasks such as keeping track of the ever-changing VAT, sales tax, and compliance laws — empowering you to reduce your payment, sales tax, and subscription management stack down to one while retaining control over your customer data and relationships and taking your business global instantly.
Discover more about FastSpring’s developer tools, including:
- Our powerful and customizable JavaScript Store Builder Library (SBL) to seamlessly embed FastSpring experiences into your website or app without custom API configurations.
- Reliable and fast REST APIs to connect FastSpring, your site, and back office systems (including Salesforce).
- Extensive JSON-based webhooks to reduce API calls and reliably listen to events on FastSpring to trigger actions in your app, website, or business systems.
2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Comparing Payments, Taxes, and Platform Features (+ Pricing)
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Katie Stephan

Katie Stephan is the Senior Content Strategist at FastSpring. Besides her extensive marketing experience, she has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing and has served her local communities as a college writing instructor.

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5 Best Paddle Alternatives in 2024