Compare Alternatives
Kill Bill offers much more than SaaS billing solutionsAs an open-source billing and payment solution, Kill Bill is in a class of its own. Yet it more than stacks up against the available alternatives. On the left, we’ve listed Kill Bill’s strengths and compared it to what the competition offers.
Architecture and Design
Full control and ownership
Enterprise support
Own your data
Remove vendor lock-in
Basic Subscription/Invoicing
Customizable catalog
In-arrear/in-advance billing
Pro-ration logic
Trial / Discount support
Simple usage-based billing
Advanced Subscription/Invoicing
Invoice grouping
Complex usage models & tiers
Support for 3rd-party catalog
Billing alignments
Payment/Dunning
Payment routing (mulitple gateways)
Support any payment flow (CC, ACH, crypto-c, etc.)
Configurable dunning strategies
Payment retries
Event Based
Able to register for push notifications
Event sourcing design
Support for complex retry strategies
Customization
Custom billing & payment behavior through plugins
Support any 3rd-party integrations (tax, payment, CRM, etc.)
Able to integrate with rest of the platform
Audit Trails
Any state change is audited (who, when)
State revision history (what)
Internationalization
All currencies supported
Localized catalog templates
Localized invoice templates
Multi-tenancy
Ability to use mutliple tenants
Security
Granular roles and permissions
Testing
Customizable / On-Demand test environments
Extensive test suites available
Admin UI
Powerful Admin UI
Deployment
On Premises
Public Cloud
Kubernetes (K8s)
Scalability
Support millions of subscriptions & invoices
Pricing Model
Free tier
Independent of revenue
Kill Bill
Aria
Chargebee
Fusebill
Recurly
Zuora
Open-Source Versus Proprietary Software
One of the biggest differences between Kill Bill and other recurring billing software alternatives is that Kill Bill is open source subscription software (licensed under Apache Version 2.0), while the others are strictly proprietary software.
- Open-source software is freely available for you to download, study, change, run, and share.
- Proprietary software is privately-owned, and you are usually not allowed to look at the source code.
Own Your Billing Data
Another difference often doesn’t occur to SaaS users until it’s too late. SaaS software doesn’t allow you complete control over your own billing data.
What Happens When the SaaS Server Crashes?
Your billing data is housed on the SaaS provider’s server. Guess what happens if the SaaS provider’s website or servers crash? Answer: you can’t get to your data!
Switching to Another Billing Solution Is a Pain
Another problem occurs if you have been using a SaaS billing provider and you want to switch to another billing system. It’s completely up to the SaaS billing provider to decide if and when they will hand over your billing data. Even if you receive the data promptly, there’s no guarantee that it will be complete and in the format you need.
Difficulties with Reports and Analysis
Yet one more problem with not having complete access to your billing data affects reports and analysis. Your billing data on the SaaS servers may not be available in real-time. This delay in receiving the information you need could result in inaccurate, incomplete information leading to bad decisions.Reports and analysis can also be impeded by control over how you access your data. If the SaaS billing provider has a limited API that doesn’t allow you to query the data in the way that you need, you have no other options. Or, you may be restricted to a certain number of data queries within a 24-hour period.
When you use Kill Bill open-source software as a recurring billing software alternative, you own your own data. You can access it anytime you want, however you want, and as often as you want.