Recurly is a great billing system, however, sometimes we need to have more control and freedom over the software we use. Maybe we need to self-host the software, or we need to modify the software to fit our needs. In this article, we'll discuss some open-source alternatives to Recurly.

BillaBear

BillaBear (that's us!) is a great alternative to Recurly. It's a new product which is developing fast. It's a subscription management and billing system that is built with the user in mind. It's easy to use, easy to install, and easy to customize. BillaBear is built with modern technologies and is constantly being updated and improved.

BillaBear aims to remove a lot of the generic tasks that end up clogging up your development pipeline. From tasks like changing text in emails to rerunning a failed processes, BillaBear aims to allow the people who care to solve their own problems.

BillaBear allows for extending via an extra namespace which is never overwritten and by use of the Symfony Events and interfaces. This allows you to add your unique billing needs.

Functionality

BillaBear provides lots of functionality out of the box that replaces functionality for Recurly, including:

• Tax Management
• Subscription Management
• Flexible pricing, including usage-based pricing, package, and tiered pricing.
• Invoice Generation
• Email and PDF templates
• Reports
• Vouchers, discounts, credits, etc.
• Integration with email service providers such as Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, etc
• Integration with accounting systems such as EasyBill, Xero, etc
• Integration with newsletter systems such as Mailchimp, EmailOctopus, etc
• Integrations with customer support help desk systems such as FreshDesk, Zendesk, etc
• Integration with payment gateways such as Stripe.
• Extendable

To delve further into the feature set of BillaBear you can check out the documentation.

Technical Information

• Language: PHP And Symfony
• Database: TimescaleDB
• License: FCL - Fair Core License - Some consider it Fair Source or Source Available
• Release Cycle: A feature release every 6 months.
• Hosted Option: Yes, BillaBear Cloud
• GitHub: https://github.com/billabear

KillBill

KillBill is the longest living open source billing product which makes it a good open source alternative to Recurly. It's been battle-tested in many scenarios and has stood the test.

KillBill is designed to be used by development teams to build a billing system that fits their needs. It's a bit more complex than BillaBear, but it's also more powerful. This, however, means that any changes require a developer to implement and results in your development team being a bottleneck.

Features

• Subscription Plans
• Admin UI
• Email Notifications
• Internationalization
• Invoice Templates
• In arrears usage billing
• Payment Gateway Integration
• Plugin System

Technical Information

• Language: Java
• Database: PostgreSQL
• License: Apache
• Release Cycle: Minor releases whenever they change something.
• Hosted Option: No.
• GitHub: https://github.com/killbill

Lago

Lago is another new open source billing system. It's built with Ruby on Rails and is open source under AGPL, however, many of the features require a paid subscription plan on their hosted service. This makes it good as a barebones billing system to get you off the ground.

Lago is backed by YCombinator and has a lot of potential to grow into a great billing system.

Features

• Usage Billing
• Usage collectors from Segment and other services.
• Vouchers
• Credit Wallets
• Integration with payment gateways such as Stripe, Adyen, etc.

To delve further into the feature set of BillaBear you can check out the their website.

Technical Information

• Language: Ruby and Rails
• Database: Postgres
• License: AGPL
• Release Cycle:: Small feature releases frequently.
• Hosted Option: Yes. https://getlago.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/getlago

Conclusion

So this has been a quick guide through the multi open source alternatives for Recurly. We're very basis in the fact we think BillaBear is the best option. It's the most feature complete, it's standalone and doesn't require developers to manage it, and it doesn't have all the useful functionality locked behind a paid subscription on a hosted service.

However, all the options have their own strengths and weaknesses. KillBill is powerful, but requires a developer to manage it. Lago is the best when it comes to usage based billing.