PayPal alternatives
The best alternatives to PayPal — ranked by price, regional coverage, and how much vendor lock-in they ask you to accept. INR + USD pricing for every option. PayPal starts at $30/mo.
Cheaper than PayPal
Same category, lower entry price. Always check that the feature delta is acceptable before switching — pricing isn't the only axis.
Lemon Squeezy
Merchant-of-record payments + subscriptions for digital products. Handles VAT/sales tax globally so you do not have to.
Paddle
Merchant-of-record SaaS billing infra — handles tax, fraud, dunning. Higher fees than Stripe but no compliance overhead.
Stripe
Best-in-class developer-first payment infrastructure for global businesses.
Square
POS + online payments for SMBs and restaurants in the US.
Razorpay
India's leading payment gateway with the broadest payment-method coverage.
PayU
Established Indian payment gateway with EMI and pay-later support.
Cashfree
India payment gateway with payouts, recurring, and cross-border collections.
Compare PayPal head-to-head
Quick side-by-side reads with each top alternative.
FAQ
›Why look for an alternative to PayPal?
Common reasons: pricing scaled past your budget, missing regional support (UPI, INR billing for Indian businesses), enterprise features locked behind a high-tier plan, vendor lock-in concerns, or a feature you depend on got deprecated. We surface alternatives that solve each of those.
›Are open-source alternatives to PayPal viable in production?
Yes, with caveats. Open-source payments tools (where they exist) are production-ready, but you trade vendor support for engineering operational load. Most teams move to OSS only after they've outgrown the vendor's pricing — not before. Self-host only if you have an SRE function or are <5 engineers paying >$500/mo for the SaaS version.
›What's the cheapest alternative to PayPal?
Lemon Squeezy is the cheapest ranked alternative we cover, with a usable free tier. Read the full review on its page to confirm the feature delta is acceptable for your use case.
›Can I migrate my data from PayPal?
Most modern SaaS supports CSV/JSON export of the core data model. The migration cost is integration work — every webhook, every API token, every Zapier flow has to be re-wired. Budget 2-4 weeks of engineering time for a non-trivial production migration. Don't attempt it during a launch quarter.