Recurly vs Chargify (Now Maxio): Which One to Pick in 2026?

Recurly vs Maxio (formerly Chargify) at a glance

Tool	Best for	Starting price	Free tier	External rating
Recurly	B2C/D2C subscription businesses with high failed-payment churn	Custom TPV-based ($1M TPV min)	No (sandbox only)	G2 4.0/5 (208 reviews)
Maxio (formerly Chargify)	$5M-$100M ARR B2B SaaS needing billing + SaaS metrics + RevRec	$599/mo (Grow, up to $100K billing/mo)	Yes (30-day Build sandbox)	G2 4.3/5 (829 reviews)

Feature comparison by criteria

Quick note on Chargify: If you searched for “Recurly vs Chargify,” you landed in the right place. Chargify rebranded to Maxio in 2022 after merging with SaaSOptics. The rest of this page compares Recurly against the current Maxio product, which is what Chargify is today.

Affiliate disclosure: Topickz may earn a commission when readers click links to Recurly or Maxio and become paying customers. This does not affect our ratings or recommendations. Both tools were evaluated using live vendor pricing pages and G2 review data captured May 30, 2026. See our methodology and full disclosures .

Pricing reality

This comparison requires a clear-eyed look at two very different pricing philosophies. One is transparent and monthly. The other is opaque and volume-based.

Recurly stopped publishing a standard monthly price for its core subscription management product. The pricing page as of May 2026 shows a single call-to-action: “Request pricing details.” The platform prices on Total Payment Volume (TPV) with a stated $1M TPV minimum. A Shopify Commerce tier exists on a pay-as-you-go basis at $399/mo plus 1.5% of GMV plus $0.10 per subscription order, but that is purpose-built for Shopify merchants, not general B2B SaaS billing. The RevRec module is a separate add-on starting at $1,200/mo. Sales-led conversations mean the finance ops lead I spoke with last month at a $4M ARR SaaS company could not even get a Recurly quote without booking a demo first.

Maxio publishes its pricing. Grow at $599/mo covers up to $100K in monthly billing volume, includes standard RevRec, native SaaS metrics (NRR waterfall, ARR reporting), HubSpot and Salesforce CRM integration, and 20+ payment gateways. Scale is a custom quote for teams above $100K monthly billing. Enterprise covers multi-entity structures and advanced ASC 606 automation. The 30-day Build sandbox requires no credit card.

The tier structure difference is real and matters. Recurly’s opaque pricing is a procurement friction point for any team under $5M ARR that wants to compare actual costs before booking a vendor call.

What real billing costs at three ARR bands

Because Recurly’s TPV pricing is not published, these figures use publicly available contract data and the listicle research from our best subscription billing platforms guide, verified May 2026. Maxio figures are directly from the published pricing page.

At the $2M ARR band, Maxio Grow gives a concrete number. Recurly requires a conversation and a minimum TPV commitment. For teams in the $1M-$5M ARR range that want to ship billing fast and not spend four weeks in vendor procurement, Maxio’s self-serve setup path is a real advantage.

Which tier you will actually land on

The features that most B2B SaaS buyers actually need, and which tier gates them on each platform.

The tier-gating catch that hits teams most often with Maxio: advanced revenue management (for complex multi-deliverable contracts) and multi-entity support are optional paid modules stacked on top of Grow or Scale. Budget for those before the signature if your business has subsidiaries or milestone billing requirements.

Where Recurly wins

The dunning engine. Recurly’s ML-powered payment recovery is the best in the subscription billing segment for consumer and prosumer businesses. The system was trained on data from Twitch, Paramount+, CBS Interactive, and similar high-volume consumer subscription platforms, and the patterns it learned from those cohorts transfer across subscription models. Finance teams I work with who handle D2C subscriptions with meaningful card-decline rates consistently land at 9-15% higher recovery than whatever rules-based system they came from.

Multi-gateway flexibility. Recurly’s payments orchestration layer handles routing across multiple gateways simultaneously, with intelligent fallback logic. If your business sells globally and a card decline on Stripe can be retried on Adyen, Recurly’s orchestration layer does that automatically. Most billing platforms manage one primary gateway with a backup. Recurly manages the whole portfolio.

Consumer subscription experience. Subscriber-facing flows (account portals, plan switching, pausing, reactivation) are polished in Recurly in a way that reflects 15+ years of consumer subscription data. The platform runs at roughly $16B in annual transaction run rate and serves 100M+ active subscribers globally. For a media company or consumer app, the end-subscriber experience matters as much as the billing engine, and Recurly is clearly built from that perspective.

AI analytics layer. Recurly added AI-driven subscriber insights in 2024-2025: churn prediction scores, growth opportunity identification, and cohort analysis. For consumer businesses optimizing subscriber lifetime value, these tools sit closer to the revenue motion than anything Maxio offers.

Where Maxio wins

The NRR waterfall is the single strongest differentiator in this comparison. Maxio is the only billing platform in this segment that ships a native NRR/GRR/ARR waterfall inside the billing engine, with no BI tool or spreadsheet required. A $10M ARR B2B SaaS CFO running board prep can pull the net revenue retention waterfall, ARR expansion vs contraction breakdown, and churn cohort analysis directly from Maxio. The finance ops leads I work with at Series B companies consistently cite this as the feature that justified the switch from Stripe Billing or legacy Chargify.

RevRec at no extra cost. Maxio’s native ASC 606 and IFRS 15 revenue recognition is included in the Grow tier at $599/mo. Recurly gates RevRec behind a separate add-on starting at $1,200/mo. For a $5M ARR SaaS team preparing for a first audit or a Series B due diligence, Maxio’s bundled RevRec saves real money. The deferred revenue schedules, recognized revenue tracking, and automated journal entries are part of the base product.

Salesforce-native sync. The Maxio-Salesforce integration is bidirectional at the Grow tier. Subscription data, contract terms, and billing status flow back into Salesforce without middleware. Recurly has a Salesforce connector, but it is not the core architectural model the product was designed around.

Published pricing. This sounds obvious but it is not. Any B2B SaaS team that wants to put a billing platform decision in front of their CFO before the next board meeting can build a Maxio cost model on a Tuesday afternoon without a vendor call. The same exercise with Recurly requires booking a demo, waiting for a TPV assessment, and getting a custom quote that may or may not match what the account executive told you verbally.

The Chargify migration path. If your team is currently on legacy Chargify configurations, you are already on Maxio. The migration path from old Chargify billing setups to the new Maxio platform is supported with dedicated migration tooling and a transition team. Recurly would require a full data migration project.

Where they are identical

Stop comparing on these. Both platforms handle them well enough that the decision should not turn on any of them:

• Core subscription mechanics: create, update, cancel, pause, reactivate, prorate.
• Flexible pricing models: flat fee, per-seat, usage-based, hybrid.
• Automated invoicing and billing schedules.
• Multi-currency support: both handle 100+ currencies.
• Payment gateway integrations: 20+ on both platforms, covering Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, GoCardless, PayPal.
• Proration on mid-cycle changes: both handle upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations accurately.
• PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II compliance.
• Webhook and API access for real-time event handling.
• Self-service customer portals for plan management.

Integration depth

The integration story that matters most in this segment: if your business runs Salesforce as the system of record for contracts and customer data, Maxio’s native bidirectional sync is a real advantage. Sales closes a deal in Salesforce, Maxio activates the subscription and sends the first invoice without anyone touching two systems. Recurly’s Salesforce connector works, but it was not designed as the primary integration surface the way Maxio’s was.

Security and compliance

Both platforms are built for finance teams that face real audit and compliance requirements.

One material difference: Maxio gates SAML SSO at the Grow tier ($599/mo). Recurly requires Enterprise for SSO. For any organization with a mandatory SSO requirement from the IT security team, this is one more reason Maxio Grow is the real paid entry point, not a budget compromise. Recurly’s SSO requirement pushes smaller teams to enterprise pricing for a feature they already have in every other SaaS they run.

Switching cost and lock-in

Leaving Recurly is not technically blocked. Recurly exports subscription records, payment gateway tokens (via token portability from supported gateways), billing history, and customer data via API and CSV. No contractual lock-in on data. The practical difficulty is the TPV-based contract structure: most Recurly contracts are annual with a committed TPV minimum. If you want to leave before the contract ends, you are paying out the commitment. Get contract flexibility in writing during negotiation.

Leaving Maxio is similar. Full data export via API and CSV, no contractual data restriction. Maxio contracts are annual (no month-to-month at published pricing). The implementation complexity is the real switching cost: Maxio’s data model for B2B contracts (ramp schedules, multi-period obligations, revenue books) is more complex than most platforms expect to import. Budget 4-8 weeks for migration, more if you have advanced revenue management configurations.

Switching from old Chargify to the new Maxio is something the vendor supports directly. If you are on legacy Chargify billing configurations and wondering whether to migrate or switch to Recurly, the honest answer is: migrate to Maxio first and evaluate at that point. The platform is materially more capable than legacy Chargify, and you are already partially on it.

Support reality

Recurly’s Customer Experience team gets consistent praise in G2 reviews. With 208 reviews averaging 4.0/5, the sentiment around support quality is positive, particularly around technical onboarding and billing-specific edge cases. Recurly positions its CSMs as strategic partners who run executive business reviews and dig into billing configuration, and from what the finance teams I work with report, that is reasonably accurate at the enterprise tier. Below enterprise, support is primarily via tickets and documentation.

Maxio’s support gets more mixed coverage in G2 reviews. The 829 reviews at 4.3/5 include a recurring complaint about navigation complexity once you have 50+ contract types configured, and some reviewers call out response delays on customization edge cases. The platform is powerful but dense; teams without a dedicated billing admin hit walls faster on Maxio than on Recurly. Budget for a 3-4 week implementation period and consider Maxio’s paid onboarding package if your billing configuration is complex.

Vendor viability

Recurly has been majority-owned by Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm, since August 2020. Recurly operates as an independent, privately held company. Rather than a wind-down story, the post-investment pattern has been expansion: in 2025 Recurly acquired Prive (rebranded Recurly Commerce) and Redfast (rebranded Recurly Engage), folding subscription-growth and retention tooling into the core platform. The viability picture is stable. The thing actually worth nailing down in procurement is the contract structure, specifically the term length and any committed TPV minimum, since that is where Recurly buyers get locked in, not a parent-company roadmap clause.

Maxio is a private company (the Chargify/SaaSOptics merger entity), backed by investors including Battery Ventures, which led a $150M growth investment in 2021. The company operates in a clear market position: B2B SaaS billing and financial operations for $5M-$100M ARR teams. The G2 review count of 829, up from the listicle baseline, signals an active and growing customer base. No significant acquisition activity or strategic disruption in the past 18 months. The product roadmap (visible from changelog activity and the pricing page feature list) shows continued development across billing, RevRec, and metrics modules. The viability risk for Maxio is scale: at some ARR band, customers outgrow Maxio and move toward Zuora or Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Maxio knows this and has been extending the Scale/Enterprise tier to push that ceiling higher.

Best-for matrix

The verdict

Pick Recurly if your business is consumer-facing, prosumer, or any model where card declines drive meaningful revenue churn. The ML dunning engine is the single strongest argument for Recurly and it is genuinely difficult to replicate. If a 9-15% improvement in payment recovery on your failed-payment cohort would move the needle materially (it usually does at $2M+ ARR), test Recurly’s dunning first before committing to anything else.

Pick Maxio if you are a B2B SaaS company between $3M and $100M ARR that needs subscription billing, SaaS metrics, and revenue recognition in one platform without stitching three tools together. The $599/mo Grow tier is transparent, self-serve, and bundled with features Recurly charges $1,200/mo extra to access. The native NRR waterfall alone is worth more than the price delta at most Series A/B companies.

One thing worth saying directly: if you searched “Recurly vs Chargify” and landed here, you are comparing a current product (Recurly) against a brand name (Chargify) that is now a legacy label for Maxio. The old Chargify was a solid billing engine for its time. The Maxio product today is a materially different platform with a B2B SaaS metrics layer and RevRec that Chargify never had. Evaluate Maxio on its current capabilities, not Chargify’s 2020 feature set.

For more context on the full subscription billing landscape, see our best subscription billing platforms guide covering 9 tools across the full ARR spectrum.

Affiliate disclosure: Topickz may earn a commission when readers click links to Recurly or Maxio and become paying customers. This does not affect our ratings or recommendations. Both tools were evaluated using live vendor pricing pages and G2 review data captured May 30, 2026. See our methodology and full disclosures .

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