BillaBear vs Paymenter

BillaBear is a subscription management and billing system with Stripe integration, a REST API, and web, API, and self-hosted deployment options. It manages subscriptions, custom plans, add-ons, invoices, quotes, hosted checkouts, paylinks, vouchers, credit notes, dunning, and reports. Pricing models include fixed, usage-based, volume and graduated tiers, fixed-plus-unit, and per-seat charges. The system supports multiple brands and currencies, tax management, country and state rules, configurable thresholds, EU reverse charge, one-stop-shop, and VAT Sense integration. Workflows can retry failed tasks, including API requests. Invoice, quote, PDF, and email templates use Twig or email-service-provider templates. Integrations listed include Stripe, Slack, Freshbooks, Xero, Mailchimp, EmailOctopus, SendGrid, MailGun, and Postmark; Zendesk and Freshdesk integrations help agents find customer profiles. SDKs are listed for PHP, Java, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. The Starter plan is $1 a month, with $50,000 of revenue free. Managed cloud hosting is currently unavailable.

Paymenter is an open-source billing platform tailored to hosting companies. It supports automated billing and service deployment, with custom themes and extensions available through its marketplace. A REST API lets users control the platform and automate workflows. Built-in payment gateway extensions include Mollie, PayPal and Stripe; server extensions include cPanel, Convoy, DirectAdmin, Enhance, Plesk, Pterodactyl, VirtFusion and Virtualizor. Proxmox is available only as a paid extension. The platform includes customer support tickets and can receive ticket replies through email piping. Its WHMCS importer can transfer currencies, users, admins, categories, products, tickets, orders, services, cancellations, invoices and payments. Paymenter is released under the MIT License and is available as a self-hosted product or hosted PaaS. Self-hosted installation lists Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04, CentOS 9 and 8, and Debian 13, 12 and 11 as supported; Windows is unsupported. The Paymenter plan costs nothing. PaaS costs €5 a month, with free daily backups and Cloudflare DDoS protection described for hosted instances. The installation guide warns that losing the APP_KEY makes encrypted data irrecoverable.