FOSSBilling vs GoCardless
FOSSBilling and GoCardless are both billing and subscriptions software. FOSSBilling is open source under Apache-2.0, with 1.7k GitHub stars. GoCardless is a commercial product from GoCardless.
Which to pick
- Pick FOSSBilling when
- A small web host or reseller wants a free alternative to WHMCS and accepts beta software.
- Pick GoCardless when
- You collect regular invoices or subscriptions and want lower fees and fewer failures than cards.
Side by side
Billing and client management for hosting providers and other online services, with automated invoices, payment gateways, client area and provisioning extensions.
Collects recurring and one-off payments by bank debit and open-banking pay-by-bank across the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America.
The project itself says it is beta with rough edges and limited support.
Bank debit settles slowly and customers must authorise a mandate, which adds signup friction.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server
Cloud service
PHP, Twig, TypeScript and MySQL
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by GoCardless
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
1.7k GitHub stars
406 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release 0.8.9.
Not known
Other comparisons
More billing and subscription management systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.