The Best Dunning Software in 2024

In the dynamic landscape of SaaS businesses, the looming specter of churn is always a concern. In fact, projections indicate a staggering $121 billion loss in 2024. SaaS businesses tend to manage churn in one of two ways — either they resign themselves to it as an inevitable occurrence, or they resort to patchwork solutions like ad-hoc software projects or integrating multiple legacy systems in a bid to "resolve" churn and mitigate cancellations. And things get especially hairy when we step into the world of dunning management. 

Most SaaS founders don’t want to think about failed payments, much less find the time to deal with them. And there are an overwhelming number of software platforms out there claiming to handle all of your dunning management for you. That’s why we’ve put together a comprehensive guide breaking down the best dunning software in 2024. 

TL;DR: Want to find the best dunning software to help you manage failed payments? Keep reading for a comprehensive breakdown of all your best options.

Top Dunning Software Picks

How to choose the right dunning software 

Dunning management is absolutely essential for SaaS companies. After all, if you're not getting paid on time, you're going to have a hard time keeping your business running. And when you work with high-quality dunning software, you can (ideally) automate all of your dunning management, taking it entirely off your plate. When you’re trying to choose the right dunning software, here are some factors to keep in mind:

• Evaluate Customization Options: Look for dunning software that allows you to tailor the communication and recovery processes to align with your SaaS business model and brand voice
• Integration Capabilities: Prioritize dunning solutions that seamlessly integrate with your existing SaaS platforms, payment gateways, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
• Automation and Scalability: Opt for dunning software that automates the subscription recovery process, ensuring efficiency and scalability as your SaaS business grows.
• Comprehensive Analytics: Choose a solution that provides detailed analytics and reporting, offering insights into customer behavior, payment trends, and churn patterns.
• Customer Communication Channels: Ensure the dunning software supports various communication channels, such as email, SMS, and in-app notifications, to reach customers through their preferred medium.
• Flexible Retry Logic: Look for software with adaptive retry logic, allowing you to customize the frequency and timing of payment retries based on customer behavior and preferences.

Best dunning software compared

1. Churnkey

Reasons to buy:

• This modern payment recovery platform leverages machine learning and churn expertise to keep your customer accounts in good standing.
• Also takes care of voluntary churn and reactivations for your business.
• Automates feedback analysis: Churnkey's Insights AI collects, sorts, and ranks raw feedback so your teams can improve your product, messaging, and understand your customers more holistically.
• Easy to set up and get data flowing to every team who has a hand in serving your customers — product, marketing, data science, customer success, and customer support teams.

Churnkey is best for subscription companies (like VEED) who want to supercharge all aspects of customer retention (including dunning management), optimize growth, and inform customer-driven product development. Our platform is designed to be design-forward, user-friendly, and easily installed, with a focus on integrating our data into your team's everyday workflows. 

Improve dunning management before it’s too late

With Churnkey, you can recover up to 89% of failed payments without having to become a payment recovery expert. And these dunning campaigns are personalized for you. Every one of your customers is unique: they speak different languages, live in different time zones, subscribe to different plans, and use different payment methods. Churnkey optimizes messaging on your behalf to boost recovery rates alongside your revenue.

Better yet, our white-labeled system will always look and feel like it's from and built by your team. Every interaction comes from your email address, lives on your domain, and reflects your branding. But behind the scenes, Churnkey's modern messaging and payment stack utilizes cutting-edge technology to ensure maximum deliverability and recovery rates.

Sometimes, customers will let their cards expire quietly, or are too busy to update their payment information. It doesn't have to be that way. You can use current and/or future offers to incentivize your customers to update their payment methods. It's one of the most novel dunning features on the market.

Other notable features:

• A/B testing engine to optimize your cancel flow offers, copywriting, and audiences
• Best-in-class Stripe App that was Stripe's App of the Month
• Watch every cancel flow session as if you were sitting with them so you can experience what each customer is thinking
• Pause Wall prevents paused customers from using your product for free
• Failed Payment Wall blocks product access for past-due accounts
• Deep integrations with payment providers, Slack, a robust webhooks infrastructure, and access to custom data APIs

Pros:

• Recover up to 89% of failed payments with dunning software optimized by ML models
• See immediate ROI on day one
• Ready to go in minutes
• Always fixed fees
• Industry-leading personalization 
• Precise payment retries
• White-labeled experiences
• Utilize exclusion lists
• Receive clear metrics

Free trial: 14 days

Pricing: $$

It's simple to improve retention with Churnkey

• Sign up for an account here and get started immediately, or
• Get a demo to see what Churnkey can do for your business

2. Stripe

Stripe is a billing platform that powers online and in-person payment processing. Stripe helps companies accept payments, send payouts, automate financial processes, and ultimately grow revenue. They also offer dunning management for failed payments.

Features:

• Custom dunning flows for annual subscribers
• Automated emails regarding failed payments
• Customer portals
• Integration with third-party dunning services

Best for: SaaS businesses and organizations that use Stripe as their payment gateway.

Pros: 

• Seamless integration with Stripe’s payment gateway
• Customization options
• Real-time updates and tracking

Cons:

• Limited to Stripe users
• Limited customization options for checkout pages
• Some user reports of difficulty with customer support

Pricing: $$$

3. Chargebee

Chargebee’s unique Revenue Growth Management platform helps SaaS businesses acquire, grow, retain, and manage customers in 227 countries and territories globally. They offer billing services alongside dunning management.

Features:

• Preemptive payment failure mitigation
• Automated customer follow-up cadence
• Dunning management for online payments, offline payments, direct debit payments, and one-time payments
• Smart retries

Best for: SaaS businesses and organizations that use Chargebee as their payment gateway.

Pros: 

• Seamless integration with Chargebee’s other products
• Automation and efficiency
• Advanced retry logic

Cons:

• Pricing structure can be prohibitively expensive for small businesses or startups
• Limited reporting capabilities 
• Limited scalability 

Pricing: $$$

4. Paddle

Paddle is a billing operations platform that was purpose-built for SaaS businesses. Paddle offers products that track metrics, reduce churn, and handle all aspects of billing, including dunning management. 

Features:

• Automatically recover failed card payments
• Deploy personalized messaging
• Proactive in-app reminders
• Leverages a recovery algorithm to rerun failed card payments

Best for: Businesses looking for an all-in-one solution covering payment processing, tax compliance, subscription management, and fraud protection

Pros: 

• Tactical card retries
• Quick setup
• Offers native integrations with payment providers

Cons:

• Limited usage-based billing
• Interface is not very user-friendly
• Higher transaction fees than Stripe

Pricing: $$$$

5. Braintree

Braintree is an online payment solution platform that primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies. Braintree can help companies reach more buyers and drive higher conversion. 

Features:

• Customizable dunning management
• Fraud tools
• Buy now, pay later options
• Seamless checkout experience

Best for: Small businesses looking for highly customizable software at a reasonable price.

Pros: 

• Has global coverage
• Clean and intuitive interface
• Flexible payment intervals

Cons:

• Limited reporting features
• Reports of difficulty configuring charge details in bank statement
• Much less emphasis on dunning management than some other billing platforms

Pricing: $$$

6. Churn Buster

Churn Buster is a churn reduction software that can help you improve ecommerce retention by reducing failed payments. Churn Buster focuses on dunning management and cancel flows for e-commerce box businesses.

Features:

• Automatic card retries
• Custom-tailored email campaigns
• SMS nudges
• Data insights into SKU performance, decline codes, and more

Best for: E-commerce businesses.

Pros:

• Strong track record in e-commerce industry
• Pricing is easy to understand
• Quality user interface and email templates

Cons:

• Focused on e-commerce, so your needs might differ
• Pricing might get out of reach for medium to large customer bases
• Focused mostly on involuntary churn

Pricing: $$

7. Stunning

A clever combination of “Stripe” and “dunning”, Stunning is dunning software that helps recover failed Stripe payments. This software offers failed payment prevention and recovery, alongside features like recovery breakdowns, customer lifecycle emails, and customer subscription management.

Features:

• Customizable dunning campaigns
• Configurable receipts
• Simple setup through Stripe Connect

Best for: Entry-level, Stripe-only dunning

Pros:

• Easy for your customers to update card detials
• Doesn't take much implementation

Cons:

• Outdated user experience and design
• URL you provide to customers to update cards reveals both Stunning ID and Stripe customer ID

Pricing: $$

8. Butter

Butter is an involuntary churn reduction tool that can help you recover declined credit card payments automatically and increase your recurring revenue and customer LTV. Butter is a platform that’s focused primarily on involuntary churn, so their features include authorization optimization, recurring billing recovery, intelligent payment routing, and a key metrics dashboard.

Features:

• Patented payments technology
• Optimizes your current provider's payment processing
• Focused on card authorizations

Best for: Multinational corporations 

Pros:

• Works with some of the largest enterprises on the planet
• Recovers failed payments with smart retry timing
• Optimizes retry times for each individual account

Cons:

• Implementation periods can take up to 24 weeks
• Pricing is optimized for only the largest multinational corporations

Pricing: $$$$

Dunning Software FAQs

What is dunning management?

Dunning management is a process that SaaS companies can use to track down their outstanding invoices and ensure they get paid on time.

Why do SaaS companies need dunning management?

​​Whether you’re VC-backed or bootstrapped, one of the most important things you need to keep an eye on is your cash flow. Dunning management helps you maintain stable cash flow, prevents revenue leakage, reduces your churn rate, and results in a higher valuation for your company. 

What is the best dunning software?

The best software for dunning management depends entirely on your specific needs. Popular options include Churnkey, billing platforms like Stripe and Chargebee, other churn reduction platforms like Churn Buster, etc.