GoCardless vs Recurly
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
Editorial assessmentGoCardless compared with Recurly
Same relationship as Chargebee. Recurly owns the subscription lifecycle and its recovery engine; GoCardless is a gateway option underneath it for SEPA and Bacs collection. Choosing between them is a category error. The real decision is whether your billing engine supports direct debit properly, and Recurly does.
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 Recurly if
Subscription businesses with meaningful card volume, particularly consumer and media subscriptions, where involuntary churn recovery and multi-gateway payments orchestration are worth more than pricing flexibility, and which have the finance capability to own their own tax registrations and filings.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | GoCardless | Recurly |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Billing | Billing |
| Starting price | 1 percent plus 20 pence per transaction, capped at 4 pounds (free plan available) | $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included (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. | Monthly platform fee plus a percentage of billing volume above an included threshold, with separately priced products for churn engagement and revenue recognition, and higher tiers gated by volume and a sales conversation. |
| 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 free plan. The 90-day trial is the evaluation path, and after it the $249 monthly floor applies regardless of revenue, which is the single most important constraint for a small business. |
| Free trial | No trial; there is no subscription fee to trial | 90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve |
| 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. | Subscription businesses with meaningful card volume, particularly consumer and media subscriptions, where involuntary churn recovery and multi-gateway payments orchestration are worth more than pricing flexibility, and which have the finance capability to own their own tax registrations and filings. |
| 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. | Weeks for a real deployment. Hosted pages and mobile SDKs shorten the front end considerably, but connecting multiple gateways, configuring dunning campaigns, and modelling plans and promotions properly is a project rather than an afternoon, which is part of what the 90-day trial is for. |
| 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. | Moderate. The subscription concepts are conventional and the documentation is mature after fifteen years, but the value of the platform is concentrated in the recovery and orchestration configuration, and that is where the learning actually is. A team that connects one gateway and accepts default retry settings has bought an expensive invoice generator. |
| 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 application, Hosted checkout and account management pages, Hosted subscriber portal, REST API, Mobile SDKs, Webhooks, Shopify app via Recurly Commerce |
| 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 | SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support through the RevRec module |
| Founded | 2011 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom | San Francisco, California |
| Ownership | Venture-backed; being acquired by Mollie under an agreement signed in December 2025 | Private equity owned, majority stake held by Accel-KKR since August 2020 |
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.
Recurly
Strengths
- The most developed churn recovery machinery in this batch: machine-learning retry logic, an account updater, configurable dunning campaigns, cancel-save flows, and pause-before-cancel, built over fifteen years for businesses where recovery is the whole game.
- Payments orchestration across more than 20 gateways with cascading retries recovers transactions a single-processor integration would lose outright.
- Support for 140-plus currencies and 10-plus payment methods, with genuinely global subscription billing rather than a US product with international bolted on.
- A 90-day free trial with self-serve signup, which is long enough to migrate a real subscriber base and measure lift before committing, and nothing else in the category offers it.
Limitations
- The $249 monthly floor is disqualifying below roughly $30,000 of revenue, where it produces an effective rate no better than a merchant of record while providing none of the tax relief.
- Not a merchant of record. Tax is localized and calculated, but registration, filing, and remittance remain your company's legal responsibility.
- Almost everything differentiating sits on All-Access, which requires $1M in billing volume and a sales conversation, so the self-serve product is deliberately the thin version.
- Revenue recognition and the Engage churn product are separate annual purchases from $850 and $1,600 a month, so a complete configuration is an order of magnitude more expensive than the headline.
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.
Recurly
Monthly platform fee plus a percentage of billing volume above an included threshold, with separately priced products for churn engagement and revenue recognition, and higher tiers gated by volume and a sales conversation.
- Starter$249 + 0.9%
- All-AccessLess than 1% of billing volume
- All-Access for ShopifyLess than 1% of billing volume
Recurly is priced for a business it fits, which is not a small one. The $249 floor plus your processor produces an effective 6.0 percent at $10,000 a month, no cheaper than a merchant of record and without the tax relief, so a bootstrapped company should not be here. At $100,000 a month the same structure lands near 4.3 percent and saves roughly $1,700 a month against a merchant of record, and at that scale the churn recovery engine and multi-gateway orchestration start paying for themselves independently of the fee comparison. The frustration is that the features that justify Recurly, multiple dunning campaigns, intelligent churn prevention, payments orchestration, and multicurrency, are on All-Access behind a $1M volume gate. Starter is the on-ramp, not the product. Judged honestly, Recurly is excellent value for a high-volume subscription business with a finance team and poor value for anyone else, and the 90-day trial is the right way to find out which you are.
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 profileRecurly
Recurly is a specialist, and the specialty is getting money out of cards that did not work the first time. Fifteen years of machine-learning retry logic, an account updater, configurable dunning campaigns, cancel-save flows, and cascading retries across more than 20 gateways add up to a recovery engine nothing else in this batch matches, and for a consumer subscription business with real card volume that is worth more than any amount of pricing flexibility. The economics follow the same logic. At $10,000 a month the $249 floor produces an effective 6.0 percent, identical to a merchant of record but with none of the tax relief, which makes Recurly simply the wrong product at that size. At $100,000 a month the same structure lands near 4.3 percent, saves roughly $1,700 monthly against a merchant of record, and the recovery lift arrives on top. The frustration is how much sits behind the $1M All-Access gate, including multiple dunning campaigns, orchestration, multicurrency, and SSO, which means Starter is an on-ramp rather than the product. Use the 90-day trial, which is genuinely the best evaluation term available anywhere in this category, and let your own recovery numbers decide.
Read the full Recurly profileGoCardless profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Recurly last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.