Comparison

Last verified July 2026

Stripe shows payments. It doesn't show your MRR.

The short answer

You don't need to replace Stripe, you need a metrics layer on top of it. For Stripe-only SaaS, Mowt turns webhooks into live MRR, churn and LTV from $79/month. ChartMogul (free under $120K ARR) suits multi-source billing, ProfitWell Metrics costs nothing, and Sigma stays useful for SQL.

The reasons people search this

Why teams move on from Stripe reporting & Sigma.

01

Stripe's reporting answers payments questions, not subscription questions

The Stripe dashboard is built around charges, payouts, disputes and balances, and it's genuinely good at those. What it doesn't do is reconstruct subscription events into the movements a SaaS operator reports on: new business, expansion, contraction, churn and reactivation.Those movements are what turn raw payments into MRR you can put in a board deck, and rebuilding them is exactly the job every tool on this page exists to do.

02

The MRR figure in Stripe Billing is an estimate

Stripe does show an MRR number, but it doesn't normalize annual plans, proration, discounts and refunds the way dedicated subscription-analytics tools do. A customer on a $1,200 annual plan, a mid-cycle upgrade with proration, and a 3-month coupon all get handled differently by a purpose-built metrics tool than by Stripe's estimate. The gap between the two numbers grows with every annual plan you sell.

03

Sigma expects you to write and maintain SQL

Sigma, Stripe's paid analytics product, gives you SQL access to your Stripe data, and for ad-hoc payments questions that's unmatched. But standard SaaS analyses are each a non-trivial query to build and then keep working: a retention cohort, an LTV model, a normalized MRR movements table. If nobody on the team writes SQL comfortably, Sigma answers no questions at all.

04

No cohorts, LTV or forecasting out of the box

Retention cohorts, lifetime value, ARPU trends and MRR forecasts simply aren't native Stripe reports. You either build each one in Sigma and maintain it as your pricing changes, or you export CSVs into a spreadsheet that's stale the day after you make it. Teams usually tolerate this until the first investor update or pricing decision that needs a churn number they trust.

05

The Stripe mobile app is built for payments ops

Stripe's mobile app is genuinely useful for what it covers: recent payments, disputes, refunds. It's not a metrics app. There's no churn trend, no cohort view, no MRR movements feed to check from your phone. If you want subscription metrics on mobile, that has to come from a tool built for them.

What Stripe reporting & Sigma still does well

None of this is a knock on Stripe. It's the system of record every tool on this page depends on, its dashboard is excellent for payments operations, and its uptime and documentation set the bar for the industry.

Sigma deserves its own credit: full SQL access to your billing data means there is no question you can't eventually answer, which no packaged dashboard can claim. If you have an analyst and an unusual business model, Sigma's flexibility beats every preset metrics tool here.

The argument isn't that Stripe's reporting is bad. It's that it was built for a different job, and the subscription-metrics job is better served by a dedicated layer reading the same data.

At a glance

The Stripe reporting & Sigma alternatives, side by side.

Prices are published rates as of July 2026. They change; check each vendor before you commit.

Tool	Best for	Starting price	Free tier	Data freshness	Mobile apps
Mowt	Live SaaS metrics on Stripe, web + mobile	$79/mo (to $15k MRR)	7-day trial, no card	Realtime (Stripe webhooks)	iOS & Android, full parity
ChartMogul	Multi-source billing, deep cohorts	$59/mo (Starter, scales with ARR)	Free under $120K ARR	~10-min processing window	iOS & Android (Android limited)
ProfitWell Metrics	Free dashboards, benchmarks	Free	Everything free	Batch, up to ~90-min delay	iOS & Android apps
Chartsy	Ask questions in plain English	Paid plans referenced from $19/mo	Free (10 AI prompts/mo)	Realtime claimed for Stripe	Web only
Stripe reporting & Sigma	Payments ops, ad-hoc SQL	Dashboard included; Sigma billed separately	Dashboard comes with Stripe	Live for payments; Sigma updates periodically	Stripe app, payments-focused

The field, in detail

Each alternative, honestly.

ChartMogul

Best if Stripe is one billing source among several

ChartMogul is the consolidation pick: 25+ billing integrations normalized into one MRR view, with the deepest cohort tooling in the category.

Where Stripe's reporting stops at Stripe, ChartMogul merges Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly, PayPal and a long list of other sources into a single normalized revenue picture, then layers segmentation and retention analysis on top. The free Launch tier covers you until $120K ARR, which makes it a low-risk first metrics layer for an early team.

It's near-realtime rather than instant: ChartMogul's own help docs describe Stripe data as realtime with a roughly 10-minute processing window, and PayPal syncs every 3 hours. Capterra reviewers (4.7/5 across 44 reviews) praise the visualizations but mention sync discrepancies against their billing system, and some long-time customers on G2 describe repeated price increases as ARR grows.

ProfitWell Metrics (by Paddle)

Best zero-cost upgrade over the Stripe dashboard

ProfitWell Metrics is free with no paywall, connects to Stripe in minutes, and adds benchmarking against 30,000+ subscription companies.

If your complaint with Stripe's reporting is simply "I want MRR, churn and LTV without paying for anything", ProfitWell Metrics is the obvious first stop. Paddle acquired it for $200M in May 2022 and keeps it free as a funnel into Paddle's paid billing and retention products.

The trade-offs are documented. Paddle's help docs state that manual and API changes can take up to 90 minutes to reflect, so it's a batch product, not a live one. Capterra reviewers describe the interface as essentially unchanged for years and report data inconsistencies that needed manual correction, and G2 reviewers note unreliable mobile push notifications when payments fail.

Chartsy

Best for asking Stripe questions in plain English

Chartsy takes the Sigma idea, custom questions over your billing data, and swaps SQL for an AI chat box that builds the charts for you.

Chartsy connects to Stripe, Paddle or BigCommerce and lets you type questions like "MRR by plan for the last six months" instead of writing queries. For a founder who liked the promise of Sigma but not the SQL, that's a genuinely different approach, and it computes the standard metrics (MRR, churn, LTV, cohorts) automatically from your invoice data.

It's early. There are no native mobile apps, the paid pricing isn't fully published (a free tier covers 10 AI prompts a month, with paid plans referenced from $19/month as of July 2026), and its third-party review footprint on G2 and Capterra is close to nonexistent, so you're evaluating on the trial rather than on other people's experience.

Its own help docs also list hourly rather than realtime sync for Paddle Classic and BigCommerce, though Stripe sync is marketed as realtime.

Mowt

Best Stripe-native metrics layer with real mobile apps

Our product

Mowt is our product, so read this entry with that in mind: it's the metrics layer built only for Stripe, live to the second, with full apps on both phones.

Mowt does one thing: it listens to your Stripe webhooks and rebuilds them into normalized SaaS metrics as events happen. An upgrade, a cancellation or a failed payment lands on the dashboard in seconds, and every plan change is classified into new, expansion, contraction, churn or reactivation MRR, with annual plans, proration, discounts and refunds normalized properly.

Cohorts, LTV, ARPU, NRR and MRR forecasting are preset views, not queries you maintain. Setup is a read-only Stripe OAuth that backfills your full history in minutes, and the native iOS and Android apps carry every feature the web dashboard has. 500+ founders track over $1B in revenue on it.

The honest limits: Mowt is Stripe-only, so if you also bill through Paddle or Chargebee, ChartMogul consolidates and we don't. Dunning and churn-busting tools are coming soon, not shipped. And we're younger than the incumbents with a smaller review footprint, so do what we'd do in your position: run the 7-day trial next to your Stripe dashboard and check our numbers against yours.

The other side

When Stripe reporting & Sigma is actually the better choice.

Keep leaning on Stripe's own tools in two situations. First, payments operations: disputes, payouts, refunds and reconciliation live in the Stripe dashboard, and no metrics layer should try to replace that.

Second, genuinely custom analysis: if you have someone fluent in SQL and questions no preset dashboard anticipates (revenue by a custom metadata field, unusual proration logic, marketplace splits), Sigma's full query access beats every packaged tool on this page, Mowt included.

The realistic setup for most SaaS teams isn't either-or. It's Stripe for money movement, a metrics layer for subscription metrics, and Sigma only if the SQL questions actually come up.

Before you switch

Migration notes.

This isn't a migration, it's an addition. Every tool here connects to Stripe read-only via OAuth and backfills from your full history, so your Stripe setup, Sigma queries and payment flows are untouched.
Expect the metrics tool's MRR to differ from the Stripe dashboard estimate, sometimes by a lot if you sell annual plans. That gap is normalization, not a bug; our MRR calculation guide explains exactly where the differences come from.
Pick one tool's MRR definition as canonical before your next investor update. Two tools plus Stripe means three slightly different numbers, and the time to choose is before someone asks why they disagree.
Spot-check during the trial: pick five customers with messy histories (an upgrade, a coupon, a refund) and trace them through the tool's movements feed against Stripe.
If you already pay for Sigma, audit which saved queries the metrics layer replaces. Standard-metric queries usually can, ad-hoc payments investigations usually can't.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Stripe show me my MRR?

Stripe Billing shows an MRR estimate, but it doesn't normalize annual plans, proration, discounts and refunds the way dedicated subscription-analytics tools do, and it has no cohort retention, LTV or forecasting views. Dedicated tools rebuild those from the same Stripe data; try the difference on our MRR calculator.

What is Stripe Sigma and is it worth it?

Sigma is Stripe's paid product for running SQL queries over your Stripe data. It's worth it if someone on your team writes SQL and you have ad-hoc payments questions preset dashboards can't answer. For standard SaaS metrics, a dedicated tool is faster and needs no queries.

Do I have to stop using Stripe to get proper SaaS analytics?

No. Every tool on this page (Mowt, ChartMogul, ProfitWell Metrics, Chartsy) connects to Stripe read-only and sits alongside it. Stripe stays your billing system and source of truth; the analytics tool is a presentation layer reading the same data through the Stripe API.

What is the best free analytics tool for Stripe?

ProfitWell Metrics is completely free and covers MRR, churn, LTV and benchmarking, with batch updates that Paddle's docs say can lag up to 90 minutes. ChartMogul is free under $120K ARR. Chartsy has a free tier capped at 10 AI prompts per month (as of July 2026).

Why is my analytics tool's MRR different from Stripe's number?

Because they normalize differently. Stripe's figure is an estimate, while dedicated tools spread annual contracts monthly and handle proration, discounts and refunds by explicit rules. Small differences between tools are normal too; each vendor defines MRR slightly differently, so compare definitions before deciding which number is wrong.

Does the Stripe mobile app show subscription metrics like churn?

No. The Stripe app focuses on payments operations: recent charges, disputes and refunds. It has no churn trends, cohorts or MRR movement views. For subscription metrics on mobile, Mowt ships iOS and Android apps with full feature parity, and ProfitWell and ChartMogul have apps with narrower scope.

Can Sigma calculate churn and cohort retention?

Yes, if you build it. Sigma exposes your subscription data to SQL, so churn rates and retention cohorts are possible, but each is a query you write, validate and maintain as your pricing changes. Dedicated tools ship those analyses preset, which is the trade you're paying them for.

Keep comparing

Best Stripe analytics tools, ranked

Full field listicle

How Mowt connects to Stripe

Read-only OAuth, explained

ChartMogul alternatives

If consolidation is the need

MRR, defined properly

Glossary

Last verified July 2026. Competitor prices and features are their published rates at that date and will change; we re-check this page quarterly. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.

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