FastSpring vs. WooCommerce Subscriptions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
FastSpring
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
FastSpring is an ecommerce solution with features such as subscription billing and customer relationship management.N/A
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a premium extension for WooCommerce which supports recurring payments and subscription-based services and products.N/A
Pricing
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Considered Both Products
FastSpring
Chose FastSpring
We are getting the best possible support from the FastSpring team, even within a few hours. But with Stripe, and others, we had to wait for days to resolve the simple issue.
Chose FastSpring
FastSpring provides an easier solution, and definitely a much better fit for our configuration, which doesn't require a lot of power, just an easy workflow with a single product to purchase, to provide the most straightforward experience to the user.
With FastSpring we have been …
Chose FastSpring
Compared to Paddle – FastSpring has much more experience in the e-commerce solution market. They already patched many things that Paddle might still go through.

And Avangate is just very user-unfriendly (In my personal opinion). Their dashboard and checkout are just outdated. …
Chose FastSpring
I have previously used PayPal - but customers complained because they thought they had to set up a PayPal account. Other customers didn't think that PayPal was as professional looking overall as FastSpring. PayPal is fine for accepting ebay auction payments, but businesses who …
Chose FastSpring
I have been using FastSpring consistently for the past nine years, and I cannot now recall what other products I considered when I selected FastSpring. I am not currently aware of any other company that would handle my type of business any better than FastSpring.
Chose FastSpring
With this new "Risk Assessment Fee," FastSpring is just the same as your average e-Commerce platform.
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe is a simple setup but doesn't offer customer subscription management. We use WooCommerce Subscriptions because we need that feature
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a good alternative in this case because it's built into our system which is already using Wordpress and WooCommerce Subscriptions for other products. The other systems I mention here are also useful and have their place, but do not integrate into …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe subscriptions, PayPal subscriptions, LearnDash. I like that WooCommerce works with multiple payment processors and it makes it easy to remove people from a group or membership if they haven't paid that month.
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
We liked that WooCommerce Subscriptions was easier to implement, use, and (slightly) modify over Shopify's subscription model. We can implement and grow Wordpress and WooCommerce (with subscriptions) on our micro-sites fairly quickly and without much long term hassle. The UI is …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
It's just much better than simply using Stripe or other WordPress payment plugins that only rely on Stripe. We can incorporate non-Stripe supported payment gateways such as PayPal and Amazon Payments which support recurring payments. More options for the user means less …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
I have not used other subscription platforms so it is difficult to say how WooCommerce Subscriptions stacks up against them. We selected WooCommerce Subscriptions because we moved our site over to the Word Press platform. It has been a great plugin and does exactly what we need …
Best Alternatives
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Small Businesses
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 8.7 out of 10
2Checkout from Verifone
2Checkout from Verifone
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Agentforce Revenue Management
Agentforce Revenue Management
Score 8.6 out of 10
Agentforce Revenue Management
Agentforce Revenue Management
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FastSpringWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
FastSpring is better option for small business and enterprises as well. But if you're a single person managing a person, or don't have a developer on your team, you may need to hire one to integrate the platform on your site, otherwise, it works great on all the parts. Have integrations with Apple, Google and Amazon Pay and accept most of the cards. And handles and tax automatically, which is a plus.
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WooCommerce Subscriptions is a solid option for WordPress based eCommerce sites, particularly if you are already using WooCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It works for simple subscriptions, allows for customization in terms of email notifications, pricing, coupons, etc. It obviously would not be a good fit for non-WordPress websites, and it may be too much if all you need are very simple subscription plans.
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Pros
  • FastSpring makes the process of selling ebooks from my website quite painless and virtually invisible for me. I let FastSpring handle all details of the transactions, and I rarely have to get involved directly with the customers who purchase the books.
  • FastSpring is very responsive with respect to technical and customer support. I have had a few occasions when a customer was having difficulty completing a purchase transaction, and FastSpring has always been responsive and helpful in resolving such problems quickly and efficiently.
  • FastSpring offers a flexible set of options for customizing ordering pages that can be included in my website. There are many options, such as promotional coupons, discounts, multiple file downloads, and others.
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  • Ease of ability for customers to purchase a product and choose their re-occurring timelines.
  • Well laid out admin UI to manage orders
  • Fair amount of customizable options within the plugin to suit varying needs
  • Updating the plugin is quick and painless
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Cons
  • FastSpring uses 2 separate GUIs for store owners. Some features work with one GUI implementation and not the other one.
  • Some other providers do provide lower credit card processing fees, compared with FastSpring. But I have been very happy dealing with FastSpring overall in terms of support and overall usability - so I am happy to continue using FastSpring. If I was selling 10x or 100x my current sales volume, I might consider a change, but I have no plans to change at the present time.
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  • Better syncing to ActiveCampaign for renewal reminders
  • Make it easier for clients to update their credit cards and have it automatically apply to all subscriptions
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We are very likely to renew our Woo Commerce subscriptions add on. We are dedicated to WordPress and plan to grow our business significantly. Woo Commerce subscriptions enables us to manage and extend our subscription revenue easily. We did not have this a few years ago and we have seen the uplift in revenue from using it!
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Usability
No answers on this topic
I like almost everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions EXCEPT one of the main reasons we started using it has never worked out. When we started this subscription box company, I discovered that it was difficult to track how many of each unique product we needed to order to fulfill subscriptions. In my naivete, I thought it was a simple task . 4 years later, I have recently developed my own custom solution (after learning 5 different programming languages) and I now use the WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions API to get the data I need from the store en masse. Basically, I offer multiple selections that customers can make as part of their subscriptions. WooCommerce does not offer totals or reports for anything up that is not tracked using a 'variation ID' which you have to manually generate. My products have 80 or so variations per product sometimes and the WooCommerce system was actually a little buggy when I tried setting them all up at once so I gave up. Now I know that without that info, the selections in orders are treated as metadata and handled almost as if they are not relevant to the order
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
The ticketing system of WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions is not state of the art. I wish it were an intercom type of support, But I honestly very rarely need support so it's partially a non-issue. Documentation is also very good so it preemptively addresses things that you might typically need support on. One thing I hate about WooCommerce plugins' support MO is that you're always asked to reset to the standard WP theme and deactivate all plugins, which is near impossible to do in a production environment. So their preliminary steps for offering support are highly onerous.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
It was a smooth and easy implementation for us. Downloaded the add-on and made a few integrations to salesforce and shipstation and we were up and running within a day
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Alternatives Considered
Compared to Paddle – FastSpring has much more experience in the e-commerce solution market. They already patched many things that Paddle might still go through. And Avangate is just very user-unfriendly (In my personal opinion). Their dashboard and checkout are just outdated. As a software company that builds and sells software via online in 2018 – we need to implement a fresh and simple experience for our potential customers. FastSpring offered this and Avangate didn't.
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WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high fees that Cratejoy charges per transaction in their marketplace and you would be setting yourself up for growth in the future as you continue to develop your own store.
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Return on Investment
  • Great impact on the cost efficiency of the payments.
  • Good impact on the "abandoned cart" users: we could reach out to such users and in several cases re-add them as paying users.
  • Good impact on customer support: FastSpring support is extremely helpful and available, in very rapid times.
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  • We were able to create a low-price recurring revenue offer
  • Additional recurring revenue totalled 5 figures a year from a fairly simple membership subscription in our case
  • Our admin team already know how to use WooCommerce Subscriptions so adding this in didn't require any extra resources
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ScreenShots