Getting paid should be the easiest part of running a business, yet payment friction quietly kills revenue everywhere: invoices that take 45 days, international transfers that eat 4% in hidden spread, failed subscription renewals nobody retries. These seven tools fix the whole money-in pipeline — from accepting the first card to billing thousands of subscribers.
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The tools split into three jobs. Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Square, Braintree) move money from customer cards to your account. Subscription billing platforms (Chargebee, Recurly) sit on top of a processor and manage the recurring layer — plans, trials, upgrades, dunning, and revenue recognition. And Wise solves a different problem entirely: moving money across borders without the banking markup. Most businesses need one processor; SaaS businesses eventually add a billing layer; anyone international should look hard at Wise.
The default payment infrastructure for internet businesses, and the most complete billing toolkit here. Beyond card processing, Stripe's own products cover most of what this page is about: Stripe Invoicing for one-off bills, Stripe Billing for subscriptions with smart dunning, Stripe Tax for automatic sales tax, and Radar for fraud. For many businesses, Stripe alone replaces a processor plus a billing platform — you only graduate to Chargebee or Recurly when your pricing complexity outgrows it.
Deep dive: read our full Stripe review.
The trust badge that doubles as a payment system. For invoicing freelancers and small businesses, PayPal's simplicity is real: send an invoice by email, client clicks, money arrives — no integration work at all. As a checkout option it recovers customers who won't type card numbers into unfamiliar sites. Fees run higher than Stripe's (roughly 3.49% for standard checkout) and its account-freeze reputation is earned, so treat it as a complement for trust and reach rather than your only rail.
The small-business Swiss Army knife. Square started with the card reader and grew into a full commerce system: point-of-sale, free invoicing with card-on-file, recurring payments, appointment booking, payroll, and even banking. For a local service business — salon, contractor, café — Square handles getting paid in person, online, and by invoice from one dashboard with no monthly fee. Online-only businesses get better tooling from Stripe; anyone who ever swipes a card in person should start here.
The international money tool banks hope you never discover. Wise converts currency at the real mid-market rate plus a transparent fee (typically 0.3–1%), where banks and PayPal hide 3–4% in the exchange rate. A Wise Business account gives you local account details in 8+ currencies — so US clients pay you like a US business, EU clients like an EU business — plus batch payments for paying overseas contractors. If money crosses borders in your business monthly, Wise usually saves four figures a year.
The subscription billing layer for growing SaaS. Chargebee sits on top of Stripe/Braintree/PayPal and owns everything recurring: plan catalogs, trials, coupons, proration on upgrades, usage-based pricing, dunning campaigns that recover failed payments, and the revenue-recognition reports your accountant will eventually demand. Its free tier (up to $250k lifetime billing) means startups can adopt it before it costs anything. The moment your pricing has more than a couple of plans and currencies, this beats hand-rolling billing logic.
Chargebee's head-to-head rival, with a particular edge in churn recovery. Recurly's machine-learning retry logic is the best-documented in the industry — it times failed-payment retries to when they're most likely to succeed and claims to recover a meaningful chunk of involuntary churn, which at subscription scale is real money. It skews slightly more mid-market/enterprise than Chargebee (think media and consumer subscriptions as well as SaaS), with pricing to match. Evaluate both; the better fit depends on your pricing model.
PayPal's developer-grade gateway, and the single-integration answer when your customers want to pay with everything. One Braintree integration accepts cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay — no separate PayPal button work — at rates that match Stripe's. Marketplace and split-payment tooling remains a strength. The developer experience and documentation lag Stripe's noticeably, which is why it's the alternative rather than the default; but if PayPal/Venmo volume matters to your audience, it's the cleaner architecture.
| Tool | Job | Cost | Standout Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Processing + billing | 2.9% + 30¢ | Complete ecosystem |
| PayPal | Processing + invoicing | ~3.49% | Trust and simplicity |
| Square | In-person + online + invoices | 2.6–3.3% | Local business suite |
| Wise Business | International transfers | ~0.3–1% | Mid-market FX rates |
| Chargebee | Subscription billing | Free → $599/mo | Startup-friendly billing depth |
| Recurly | Subscription billing | From $249/mo | Churn recovery |
| Braintree | Processing | 2.89% + 29¢ | All payment methods, one API |
For most businesses, the stack is short: Stripe for processing and billing, plus Wise the moment money crosses a border. Stripe's own invoicing and subscription tools cover you far longer than most founders expect, and Wise's FX savings are the closest thing to free money on this page.
The exceptions: in-person sales → Square. Freelancer who just needs clients to pay an emailed invoice → PayPal or Square invoicing. SaaS with complex pricing → add Chargebee (free tier) early, or Recurly if failed-renewal churn is your bleeding wound. Heavy PayPal/Venmo audience → Braintree.
Related reading: our full Stripe review, plus guides to e-commerce payment gateways, accounting software, and alternative business lenders — or browse everything on the My Seven Stars homepage.