GoCardless vs Polar
GoCardless and Polar are both billing and subscriptions software. GoCardless is a commercial product from GoCardless. Polar is open source under Apache-2.0, with 10k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick GoCardless when
- You collect regular invoices or subscriptions and want lower fees and fewer failures than cards.
- Pick Polar when
- You sell software or digital products internationally and want tax handling and billing done for you.
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 merchant-of-record billing platform for selling subscriptions, digital products and usage-based plans, handling payments and sales tax.
Bank debit settles slowly and customers must authorise a mandate, which adds signup friction.
Merchant-of-record means a percentage fee on each sale, and the hosted service is the real product even though the code is open.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service (both)
Not published
Python, FastAPI, TypeScript and Next.js
Closed source, sold by GoCardless
Open source, Apache-2.0 (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
10k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release @polar-sh/better-auth@2.1.3.
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.