GoCardless vs Paymenter
GoCardless and Paymenter are both billing and subscriptions software. GoCardless is a commercial product from GoCardless. Paymenter is open source under MIT, with 2.8k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick GoCardless when
- You collect regular invoices or subscriptions and want lower fees and fewer failures than cards.
- Pick Paymenter when
- You run a small game or web hosting business and want a free alternative to WHMCS.
Side by side
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.
A self-hosted billing and storefront for hosting companies, handling products, invoices, Stripe and PayPal payments and provisioning through Pterodactyl and other panels.
Bank debit settles slowly and customers must authorise a mandate, which adds signup friction.
Smaller ecosystem of provisioning extensions than WHMCS.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service
Self-hosted server
Not published
PHP and Laravel
Closed source, sold by GoCardless
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
406 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
2.8k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v1.5.9.
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.