GoCardless vs Mollie
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedGoCardless compared with Mollie
Soon to be the same company: Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless for around 1.05 billion euros in December 2025, with closing expected by mid 2026 and a phased product integration. Today they are complementary rather than competing. Mollie is a card and local-method processor with iDEAL, Bancontact, and a subscriptions API at roughly 2.3 percent on a European consumer card. GoCardless is a bank debit specialist at roughly 1.5 percent with a per-transaction cap. If you need both cards and direct debit in Europe, you are increasingly buying from one vendor either way.
Mollie compared with GoCardless
Soon the same company: Mollie agreed in December 2025 to acquire GoCardless for around 1.05 billion euros, with closing expected by mid 2026. Today Mollie is the card and local-method acquirer at roughly 2.34 percent on a European consumer card, and GoCardless is the bank debit specialist at roughly 1.5 percent with a per-transaction cap that makes large invoices nearly free to collect. If you need both, you are increasingly buying from one vendor. If you only need bank debit and your tickets are large, GoCardless is still the sharper instrument.
Choose GoCardless if
Subscription businesses in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and increasingly North America with predictable recurring charges and average tickets high enough that a card's percentage genuinely hurts, particularly business-to-business SaaS, membership organisations, gyms, professional services, utilities, and anyone whose involuntary churn is dominated by expired and reissued cards.
Choose Mollie if
European businesses, especially Dutch, Belgian, German, and Polish ones, where local payment methods drive conversion and a card-only processor leaves money on the table; ecommerce and SaaS companies that want transparent per-method pricing with no monthly fee; and teams that already have their own billing logic or a billing platform and need a European acquirer underneath it rather than a subscription engine.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | GoCardless | Mollie |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Billing | Billing |
| Starting price | 1 percent plus 20 pence per transaction, capped at 4 pounds (free plan available) | €0.32 per iDEAL transaction, or 1.80 percent plus €0.25 on European Economic Area consumer cards (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-transaction percentage plus a small fixed fee, capped per transaction, across three self-serve tiers with no monthly platform fee. Custom pricing is negotiable above roughly 1 million pounds of annual revenue. | Per-transaction pricing published individually for each payment method, with no monthly fee and no minimum volume on online payments. In-person payments have an optional monthly plan. |
| Free plan | No free plan, but no monthly fee either. The Standard plan costs nothing until a payment is collected, which functions as a zero-cost entry point. | No plan fee at all on online payments. You pay per successful transaction and nothing otherwise, which functions as a permanent zero-cost baseline. |
| Free trial | No trial; there is no subscription fee to trial | No trial; test mode is free and available before verification completes |
| Best for | Subscription businesses in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and increasingly North America with predictable recurring charges and average tickets high enough that a card's percentage genuinely hurts, particularly business-to-business SaaS, membership organisations, gyms, professional services, utilities, and anyone whose involuntary churn is dominated by expired and reissued cards. | European businesses, especially Dutch, Belgian, German, and Polish ones, where local payment methods drive conversion and a card-only processor leaves money on the table; ecommerce and SaaS companies that want transparent per-method pricing with no monthly fee; and teams that already have their own billing logic or a billing platform and need a European acquirer underneath it rather than a subscription engine. |
| Setup time | A day for a no-code setup using hosted payment pages or an accounting integration. A week or two for a custom API integration, most of which is designing how your system reacts to failures that arrive days after submission rather than instantly. | A day for a plugin-based ecommerce setup. Two to five days for a custom API integration covering payments, mandates, and subscriptions. Business verification runs in parallel and test mode is available immediately, so development is never blocked on approval. |
| Learning curve | Moderate, and the difficulty is conceptual rather than technical. Teams used to cards have to internalise that a payment is a request that resolves over days, that a failure can arrive after delivery, and that scheme rules impose advance notice obligations. The API itself is clean and well documented. | Low for developers. The API is small, well shaped, and thoroughly documented, and the mandate model is easy to grasp. The real learning is method-specific behaviour: which methods produce mandates, how SEPA notice periods work, and what each failure reason means. |
| Platforms | Web dashboard, REST API, Client libraries for Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, and Node, Hosted and embedded payment pages, Partner integrations in accounting and billing software | Web dashboard, REST API, Official libraries for PHP, Python, Node, Ruby, .NET, and Java, Plugins for WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware, PrestaShop, and Shopify, Payment terminals for in-person |
| Compliance | PCI DSS, FCA authorised as a payment institution in the United Kingdom, Regulated entities in the European Union, GDPR, SOC 2, Bacs, SEPA, ACH, PAD, and BECS scheme accreditations | Licensed payment institution regulated by De Nederlandsche Bank, PCI DSS Level 1, PSD2 and Strong Customer Authentication, GDPR, SEPA scheme participation |
| Founded | 2011 | 2004 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Ownership | Venture-backed; being acquired by Mollie under an agreement signed in December 2025 | Private, venture and growth-equity backed |
Strengths and limitations
GoCardless
Strengths
- Effective cost around 1.5 percent on a typical ticket and dramatically lower on large invoices because of the per-transaction fee cap, which is a fraction of any card-based alternative.
- Mandates do not expire, so the single largest source of involuntary subscription churn simply does not exist on this rail.
- One API and one dashboard across Bacs, SEPA, ACH, PAD, BECS, Autogiro, and Betalingsservice, which is a genuinely hard integration problem solved for you.
- Self-serve signup with published pricing on all three standard tiers and no monthly fee, so testing it costs nothing but the transactions you route through it.
Limitations
- Not a merchant of record and not remotely a tax product: VAT, sales tax, invoicing, and the customer contract are entirely yours, which puts it in a different category from Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, or Gumroad.
- Not a billing platform either. There is no plan catalogue worth the name, no proration engine, no entitlements, no quotes, and no revenue recognition, so you need a billing layer in front of it.
- Settlement is slow. Collections take business days to confirm, and a failure can arrive after you have already delivered the service, which is a materially different risk shape from a card authorisation.
- Mandate setup is heavier than entering a card and will reduce conversion in any self-serve consumer funnel.
Mollie
Strengths
- The deepest European local payment method coverage of any self-serve provider, with iDEAL, Bancontact, SEPA Direct Debit, Przelewy24, EPS, Klarna, and Wero as first-class methods rather than redirects.
- Genuinely transparent per-method pricing published on the website, which is rare in European acquiring and makes cost modelling possible.
- Flat-fee methods change the economics of recurring billing: SEPA Direct Debit at 35 cents per collection is a fraction of any percentage-based rate on a typical subscription.
- No monthly fee, no minimum volume, and self-serve signup, so the cost of trying it alongside an existing provider is limited to the transactions you route through it.
Limitations
- The Subscriptions API is a scheduler, not a billing platform. No plan catalogue, no proration, no coupons, no usage metering, no quotes, no invoicing worth the name, and no revenue recognition.
- Dunning is a fixed policy: five daily retries and then the subscription is cancelled. You cannot shape the schedule, there is no intelligent retry model, and there is no card account updater story comparable to Stripe or Paddle.
- Not a merchant of record, so European VAT registration and one-stop-shop filing stay entirely with you, and nothing in the product helps with tax at all.
- Non-European card rates at 3.25 percent plus 25 cents make it a poor choice for a business selling mainly to the United States.
Pricing compared
GoCardless
Per-transaction percentage plus a small fixed fee, capped per transaction, across three self-serve tiers with no monthly platform fee. Custom pricing is negotiable above roughly 1 million pounds of annual revenue.
- Standard1% + 20p
- Advanced1.25% + 20p
- Pro1.4% + 20p
- CustomNegotiated
Work it at a $50 average ticket, roughly 40 pounds. On Standard you pay 1 percent, about 40 pence, plus 20 pence, so 60 pence per transaction, or about 76 cents. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is roughly $152, an effective rate of 1.52 percent. At $100,000 a month across 2,000 transactions it is roughly $1,520, again 1.52 percent, because the cap does not bite at this ticket size. Set that against Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent, Paddle at 6 percent, and Gumroad at 11 percent on the identical ticket. GoCardless is between three and seven times cheaper than everything else in this category, and on large invoices the fee cap makes the gap absurd: a 4,000 pound annual contract costs 4 pounds to collect against roughly 120 pounds on a card. The reason everyone has not moved is that direct debit is slower, harder to sign up for, geographically constrained, and does not touch tax compliance at all. You are not buying a billing platform. You are buying a much cheaper rail for the payments that suit it, and the right answer for most businesses is to run it alongside cards rather than instead of them.
Mollie
Per-transaction pricing published individually for each payment method, with no monthly fee and no minimum volume on online payments. In-person payments have an optional monthly plan.
- Online payments (pay per transaction)From €0.25
- Klarna and buy now pay later2.99% + €0.35 to 4.99% + €0.40
- In-person pay as you go€0
- In-person Pro€20
- Volume pricingNegotiated
Work it at a $50 average ticket, roughly 46 euros. On a European Economic Area consumer card that is 1.80 percent, about 90 cents, plus 25 cents, so roughly $1.17 per transaction, an effective rate of 2.34 percent. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is about $234; at $100,000 across 2,000 transactions about $2,340, the same 2.34 percent. Now change the method. Route those same subscriptions to SEPA Direct Debit at a flat 35 cents and the effective rate collapses to 0.7 percent, which is $70 a month at $10,000 and $700 at $100,000. That spread is the whole argument for Mollie: not the card rate, which is unremarkable, but the ability to move recurring charges onto a flat-fee rail your customers will actually accept. Set against Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent and Paddle at 6 percent on the same ticket, a European business collecting by SEPA is paying a sixth of what a merchant of record charges. It is also getting none of the tax service, none of the billing engine, and a five-retry dunning policy it cannot change.
Editorial verdict on each
GoCardless
GoCardless is the cheapest rail in this category by a wide margin and the one most businesses under-use. At roughly 1.5 percent on a typical ticket, with a per-transaction cap that makes large annual invoices cost almost nothing to collect, and mandates that never expire the way cards do, the economics against any card-based option are not close. The honest framing is that it is not a billing platform and not a merchant of record, so it does not compete with Paddle or Chargebee, it sits underneath them. The right move for most United Kingdom and European subscription businesses is not to replace their card processor but to route the customers who will accept direct debit, particularly business customers on annual contracts, onto GoCardless and watch the blended take rate fall by two or three points. Weigh the multi-day settlement, the heavier mandate signup, and the roadmap uncertainty from the pending Mollie acquisition, then do it anyway.
Read the full GoCardless profileMollie
Mollie is the right European acquirer and the wrong European billing platform, and confusing the two is the only way to be disappointed by it. The local method coverage is genuinely best in class, the per-method pricing is published and honest, and the ability to move recurring charges onto SEPA Direct Debit at a flat 35 cents drops the effective take rate to around 0.7 percent, a sixth of what a merchant of record charges on the same ticket. What you do not get is a plan catalogue, proration, coupons, usage metering, revenue recognition, or any control over dunning beyond five daily retries and cancellation, and you keep every ounce of the European VAT obligation. Buy Mollie as the rail under a billing system you already have or intend to buy. If you are a European business currently paying a merchant of record double-digit percentages for convenience, work out the SEPA arithmetic before your next renewal, and factor in that the GoCardless integration through 2026 will make this a bigger and less predictable vendor than the one you signed with.
Read the full Mollie profileGoCardless profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Mollie last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.