If you sell digital products or software, then you’re probably going to need subscription management software built specifically for your offering. Digital River subscription software may have come up in your quest to find the right platform, with it being one of the longest serving merchant of record platforms around.

Digital River and Paddle both offer billing solutions that take care of your subscriptions-based product, but how do you know which one is right for you?

We’ve taken a closer look into Paddle and Digital River’s subscription software capabilities so you can decide on what the right fit is for you. To find out more about how Paddle compares against Digital River more broadly, check out our Paddle vs Digital River page.

How is Paddle's subscription software different?

• Paddle only services companies that are SaaS, subscription or sell digital products. So we have a deeper understanding of what matters to them, from SaaS metrics reporting, to advanced churn management.
• We work with both SMBs and larger scale companies alike, and can cater to each need when it comes to the right solution for their subscription software or digital products. 
• We offer custom pricing on either end of the scale. Sell a product for $10 or less? Larger enterprise company? We'll create something that's right for you.

SaaS metrics reporting that actually understands your business

Forget a generic reporting suite – Paddle provides reporting on metrics that are actually relevant to your SaaS or subscription product, such as customer lifetime value, churn rate and more. Not only does this help with understanding the health of your subscription business, but it allows you to forecast so you can forward plan, make decisions on your pricing and ultimately, improve your product to win more customers.

While Digital River offers detail on common SaaS metrics like monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue and revenue by subscription plan, it is at a very general level which prevents businesses from getting better quality insights. If you do want to go further, you might need to purchase add-ons from them or pay for an additional analytics platform, which can be hard to keep up with (as well as potentially ending up more expensive in the long run.)

Profitwell Metrics shows your churn over time, and calculates your churn rate over any given period. Get it for free.

Combat churn, get paid

On top of growing your business and constantly improving your products, ensuring customers are getting the best experience from your platform and preventing them from canceling their subscription is time-consuming.

Paddle helps you stay proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to managing churn – specifically, voluntary churn.

• Set up automated retention workflows e.g. send special offers to stop customers from churning - you can set this to automatically run whenever a cancellation is triggered, saving you time
• Get detailed insights - find out why a customer has decided to cancel, which will help steer product improvements
• Get churn probability - with ProfitWell Metrics you can see which customers are at risk of churn based on their activity levels, so you can take action. It’s completely free, too!
• Win back lost customers - Paddle Retain identifies churned customers most likely to return, and sends them the right offer at the right time to increase your chances of winning them back.

Digital River software on the other hand doesn’t have any churn management capabilities. They do offer tools to manage dunning, e.g. failed payment retries, but that’s as far as they go.

Automated proration as standard

Paddle automatically adjusts payments when a customer decides to change their subscription, whether that’s an upgrade or downgrade. 

With Digital River, proration logic setup is possible, but getting it up and running can be complex. Digital River was designed for more complex proration rules that are found in enterprise companies, which could be why a streamlined, automated approach isn’t possible. This means that their subscription management software may not be the right fit for your business.

Get free insights on subscription benchmarking

Want to know where you stand in the SaaS and subscription space? By choosing Paddle as your subscription billing software, you’ll get free access to benchmark data on 30,000+ SaaS and subscription companies are performing. Why? Because we want to empower companies and give them the tools they need to make better decisions to win more customers.

With Digital River as your subscription and billing software you’ll likely have to purchase access to a third party tool, and there aren’t many out there that provide analysis on SaaS and subscription companies specifically.

Get deeper insights of your product performance with cohort analysis

Wouldn’t it be great if you could slice and dice your data, and get insights from customers over time? Paddle makes this entirely possible without having to perform any custom exports to business intelligence tools yourself (or buying a separate tool to do that in the first place.) It’s all included so you can make smarter decisions, and elevate your product’s growth.

Digital River software does not provide an out-of-the-box cohort analysis feature. You can segment customer data by geography and sign up date, but you wouldn’t be able to track things like churn and retention over time.