Us vs Them
The honest tradeoffs between Flowglad and other tools in the stack - so you can choose the right foundation for your business.
Stripe
Stripe creates a problem where you have multiple sources of truth. If your payment processor disagrees with your application database, you now have to reconcile your app's data with what happened in your payment processor. Before you can even do that reconciliation, you have to make sense of events in their system and map them back to events in your system. You essentially have two different lifecycles that you must map together.
For example, what does "setup intent succeeded" with a Stripe customer ID mean inside your system? What's the difference between "charge succeeded" and "payment intent succeeded"? What do you do when you receive webhooks that arrive out of order? You have to develop an entire system of record from the ground up for your application database. This is a boring and undifferentiated technical design problem that we handle for you. Stripe only gives you a write layer, then notifies you of events that you must reconcile yourself.
Polar
Polar is deliberately designed to support more rudimentary models and isn't designed to be a system of record as much as it is a more pleasant payment processor. When you use Polar, you get a simplified or pared-down version of the Stripe offering with a few helpful adapters.
What's different about Polar's approach from ours is that we're building a full-stack SDK that allows you to read billing data wherever you need it - not just on the backend, but also on the frontend. This enables you to do more complex things related to adapting, extending, remixing, and iterating on your pricing much more easily because we actually manage the versioning of your different pricing models as catalogs.
Whereas Polar just has one global list of products, we isolate them into catalogs that allow you to try out different pricing models and business models as you figure out what works best for your customers - all without polluting your global state. If you anticipate needing to adapt and iterate on your pricing (which almost all businesses do) and you don't want to figure out how to make those iterations happen without creating technical debt, we're by far the best choice. However, if you know you have a simple business and won't really iterate on pricing, then it's a closer call between Polar and Flowglad.
Autumn
Autumn is built on top of Stripe Billing, which itself sits on top of Stripe Payments - three layers deep from the core payments layer. Flowglad, by contrast, is a full payment processor and system of record built from the ground up. That architectural difference matters. With Autumn, you’re dealing with more abstraction, which means higher costs (since Stripe Payments, Stripe Billing, and Autumn each need to make money) and more constraints (since their product is limited by what Stripe Billing can support).
Flowglad gives you fewer moving parts and more control. Our billing engine isn’t shaped by Stripe’s legacy model - it’s designed from first principles to support modern usage-based billing. Over time, that lets us do things like local acquiring in regions like India and Europe to improve acceptance rates and reduce fees, which wouldn’t be possible in Autumn’s model unless Stripe enables it first. We’re solving similar problems, but our path gives you more leverage, more flexibility, and a clearer long-term advantage.