It might be true that nothing happens until a sale is made, but once that sale is made, everything happens—and that includes collecting payment for the sale you just made. Whether you’ve got an e-commerce business or run a subscription model, you need to find the right payment processor for your organization. 

When it comes to subscription sales specifically, two solutions rise to the top: Chargebee and Stripe. These two have similarities and differences, and which one you choose for your organization depends greatly on your business’ specific needs. 

Chargebee and Stripe Side by Side

First, let’s do a quick comparison of the two: 

Digging Deeper on the Differences

Stripe is best for online sales that accept a variety of payment methods, including subscriptions. This payment processor includes a number of tools for selling products, services, and subscriptions online, and integrates with hundreds of sales, e-commerce, and business software.

Because of its developer-friendly tools and documentation, Stripe remains popular with startups, e-commerce enterprises, and tech giants. A key strength too is its range of APIs and developer tools, allowing it to integrate quickly and easily with websites and applications and providing a seamless user experience for customer checkout. 

Stripe’s main features:

• Local and global card payments
• Physical card terminals
• Online and digital payment methods
• Invoicing and recurring billing solutions
• Payment links
• Low- and no-code solutions, as well as complex, tailored options
• Support with tax, user identification, business management, and more

On the other hand, Chargebee is better for handling recurring subscriptions for goods, services, and SaaS products. However, it manages mostly subscription services and is not itself a payment processor—for that, you’ll need to integrate it with a payment processor. Which could even be Stripe. 

Target organizations for Chargebee include software as a service (SaaS) and utilities companies, and any other business that charges customers on a regular and recurring basis. It is a payment platform, but not a payment processor. 

Main features of Chargebee:

• Billing: Manage subscriptions and invoicing at scale
• RevRec – Automated and compliant revenue recognition
• Receivables: Tools help create a proactive collection strategy
• Customer Retention Tools
• Analytics: Insight-driven and interactive dashboards
• Integration with accounting and other business tools

So Which One Is Better?

Asking which is better between Stripe and Chargebee is actually the wrong question to be asking, especially when you consider that you can use Stripe to process payments collected using Chargebee. In reality, you can’t compare the two apples to apples. Chargebee is software that has a greater depth of functionality to manage subscriptions. Stripe is a payment processor with broad features and capabilities for processing payments. 

So if your business runs on recurring billing—like SaaS—then Chargebee will be your better bet for flexibility and variety of tools for managing subscriptions. It will be the intermediary between your website and payment processor, handling subscription management, invoicing, dunning, and more. 

If you’re just looking for a payment processor—or you need a good payment processor for your Chargebee platform—then Stripe is for you. It can handle individual sales or subscription services and is extremely versatile with the ability to customize extensively. It’s a great solution for online sales and social selling, but also great for B2B payments, too. 

In the end, it comes down to whether or not you need a more heavy-duty subscription service management. If you do, Stripe won’t be enough and you’ll need Chargebee. But you don’t even have to choose one at the exclusion of the other, as integrating the two solutions can net you the best of both worlds. 

Reporting with Chargebee and Stripe

No matter which platform you choose, you’ll also need to report on your subscription and billing data. And if you’re using both together, your reporting process could be quite manual to assemble data from the two systems into one report. 

We’ve got something that can help. Meet ExtendInsights, the Excel integration solution that connects to popular business data sources like Chargebee, Stripe, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Netsuite (with more on the way!) to let you combine and analyze data automatically, all in the familiarity of a spreadsheet. Export, merge, blend, analyze, and enrich your data from multiple sources and get the easiest and most accurate reporting you’ve experienced. Try it free now for no obligation.