Paddle vs. WooCommerce Subscriptions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Paddle
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
London-based Paddle offers an ecommerce and subscription management solution for software companies seeking a streamlined demonstration of their services and centralized management of their different service levels and cloud-based offerings.N/A
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a premium extension for WooCommerce which supports recurring payments and subscription-based services and products.N/A
Pricing
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Editions & Modules
Custom
custom pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Considered Both Products
Paddle
Chose Paddle
So far, we haven't used other solutions, but we are thinking of trying Stripe for a global perspective and MercadoPago here in Chile and other countries where they have a presence.
Chose Paddle
Paddle has better customer experience than other offerings in its class. Provides a low overhead and quick setup solution when compared to direct Stripe integration. It is competitive on rates with other offerings and when features like frontline support, abandoned cart …
Chose Paddle
We tried using Stripe before Paddle, but it was a pain integrating it and it lacked the licensing. Paddle allows us just to add a payment button and don’t ever think about payment methods, we don’t have to make a separate button for card payments and another one for PayPal. …
Chose Paddle
Paddle supports easy credit/debit card payments. It supports companies across the world. It has the best user experience for our users.
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe is a simple setup but doesn't offer customer subscription management. We use WooCommerce Subscriptions because we need that feature
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a good alternative in this case because it's built into our system which is already using Wordpress and WooCommerce Subscriptions for other products. The other systems I mention here are also useful and have their place, but do not integrate into …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe subscriptions, PayPal subscriptions, LearnDash. I like that WooCommerce works with multiple payment processors and it makes it easy to remove people from a group or membership if they haven't paid that month.
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
We liked that WooCommerce Subscriptions was easier to implement, use, and (slightly) modify over Shopify's subscription model. We can implement and grow Wordpress and WooCommerce (with subscriptions) on our micro-sites fairly quickly and without much long term hassle. The UI is …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
It's just much better than simply using Stripe or other WordPress payment plugins that only rely on Stripe. We can incorporate non-Stripe supported payment gateways such as PayPal and Amazon Payments which support recurring payments. More options for the user means less …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
I have not used other subscription platforms so it is difficult to say how WooCommerce Subscriptions stacks up against them. We selected WooCommerce Subscriptions because we moved our site over to the Word Press platform. It has been a great plugin and does exactly what we need …
Best Alternatives
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Small Businesses
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
2Checkout from Verifone
2Checkout from Verifone
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
7.1
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PaddleWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
I wouldn't recommend them to anybody because their support is getting worse and worse and their business processes require you to contact support whether you want to or not. You will be forced to contact support and then wait for days to get any meaningful response that's not a copy/pasted sentence from FAQ.
Read full review
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a solid option for WordPress based eCommerce sites, particularly if you are already using WooCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It works for simple subscriptions, allows for customization in terms of email notifications, pricing, coupons, etc. It obviously would not be a good fit for non-WordPress websites, and it may be too much if all you need are very simple subscription plans.
Read full review
Pros
  • Taking care of the relation with government entities and compliance in each country.
  • They take care of the VAT for us.
  • It gives the tools to scale to other countries being able to charge your users in different parts of the world.
Read full review
  • Ease of ability for customers to purchase a product and choose their re-occurring timelines.
  • Well laid out admin UI to manage orders
  • Fair amount of customizable options within the plugin to suit varying needs
  • Updating the plugin is quick and painless
Read full review
Cons
  • Analytics could support more flexible analysis of reported data and better custom events.
  • More customization of the drop in purchase UI on the web without the need for a full custom site integration.
  • Sometimes communication from their front line support staff has gone to the wrong address.
Read full review
  • Better syncing to ActiveCampaign for renewal reminders
  • Make it easier for clients to update their credit cards and have it automatically apply to all subscriptions
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We are very likely to renew our Woo Commerce subscriptions add on. We are dedicated to WordPress and plan to grow our business significantly. Woo Commerce subscriptions enables us to manage and extend our subscription revenue easily. We did not have this a few years ago and we have seen the uplift in revenue from using it!
Read full review
Usability
No answers on this topic
I like almost everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions EXCEPT one of the main reasons we started using it has never worked out. When we started this subscription box company, I discovered that it was difficult to track how many of each unique product we needed to order to fulfill subscriptions. In my naivete, I thought it was a simple task . 4 years later, I have recently developed my own custom solution (after learning 5 different programming languages) and I now use the WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions API to get the data I need from the store en masse. Basically, I offer multiple selections that customers can make as part of their subscriptions. WooCommerce does not offer totals or reports for anything up that is not tracked using a 'variation ID' which you have to manually generate. My products have 80 or so variations per product sometimes and the WooCommerce system was actually a little buggy when I tried setting them all up at once so I gave up. Now I know that without that info, the selections in orders are treated as metadata and handled almost as if they are not relevant to the order
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
The ticketing system of WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions is not state of the art. I wish it were an intercom type of support, But I honestly very rarely need support so it's partially a non-issue. Documentation is also very good so it preemptively addresses things that you might typically need support on. One thing I hate about WooCommerce plugins' support MO is that you're always asked to reset to the standard WP theme and deactivate all plugins, which is near impossible to do in a production environment. So their preliminary steps for offering support are highly onerous.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
It was a smooth and easy implementation for us. Downloaded the add-on and made a few integrations to salesforce and shipstation and we were up and running within a day
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Paddle has better customer experience than other offerings in its class. Provides a low overhead and quick setup solution when compared to direct Stripe integration. It is competitive on rates with other offerings and when features like frontline support, abandoned cart recovery, and user suggestions are factored into their offering, their rates are more than competitive.
Read full review
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high fees that Cratejoy charges per transaction in their marketplace and you would be setting yourself up for growth in the future as you continue to develop your own store.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Paddle takes only 5% of sales, in comparison to 30% as Apple does.
  • We added browser extension in-app purchases thanks to Paddle, which now generate our revenue.
Read full review
  • We were able to create a low-price recurring revenue offer
  • Additional recurring revenue totalled 5 figures a year from a fairly simple membership subscription in our case
  • Our admin team already know how to use WooCommerce Subscriptions so adding this in didn't require any extra resources
Read full review
ScreenShots

Paddle Screenshots

Screenshot of Padddle Payment Gateway