circuly vs. Recharge Payments.
Which Shopify subscription app is right for your subscription business?
Quick verdict
Both Recharge and circuly are Shopify subscription apps. Both handle recurring billing, customer portals, and standard subscription management. But they were designed around fundamentally different business models.
Recharge's Shopify app is a subscription app for consumable products such as coffee, supplements, pet food, beauty.
Pricing: starts from $25/month. Free trial available, no permanent free tier
circuly Subsciption & Rental app for Shopify is built for businesses with physical and consumer durable product that operate a subscription, rental or lease model for those products. circuly is built around core features like asset tracking, return management, buy-out flows.
Pricing: Free to install & run upto 25 subsccriptions. Paid plans start from $90/month up to $499/month. Free trial available for all tiers.
If your subscription business involves a physical product that you track, service, and potentially get back — circuly is the more complete platform. And it now runs natively on Shopify.
This guide is written for merchants who sell physical products on Shopify and want an honest picture of where each platform fits, and where each one falls short when it comes to operating a subscription-based business model for physical products.
Who each app is built for
Before comparing features, let's first understand the fundamental difference in what these two apps were designed to do.
circuly is primarily built for:
- Bikes, e-bikes & scooters
- Baby & kids' goods
- Consumer electronics & appliances
- Medical equipment & devices
- Furniture & home goods
- Sports & fitness equipment
- Any product that ships, gets used, and returns
- Brands running rentals, PaaS, subscribe-to-own
- Try-before-buy models
- Businesses with physical asset inventory to manage
circuly can also be used for:
- Consumable & replenishment subscription
- Subscription boxes and bundles
- Subscribe-to-own or try-before-buy
- Membership subscriptions
- Digital & service subscriptions
Recharge is primarily built for:
- Coffee & specialty beverages
- Vitamins & supplements
- Pet food & care
- Skincare & beauty
- Cleaning & household consumables
- Subscription boxes (curated)
- Any product that gets consumed and doesn't return
- High-volume DTC replenishment model
Feature comparison: Recharge vs. circuly
circuly on Shopify
circuly is now a native Shopify app
circuly has operated as a subscription management platform for physical product businesses for several years, building an enterprise customer base across Europe. Brands like Bike Club, Yuno, and StrollMe have used circuly to scale complex physical product subscription operations.
In 2025, circuly brought that operational depth directly into Shopify with a native app, available on the Shopify App Store, built around Shopify's native checkout, customer accounts, and theme architecture. Shopify merchants can now access circuly's physical product subscription infrastructure without leaving the Shopify ecosystem they've already built around.
For a Shopify merchant, this means:
- Install circuly directly from the Shopify App Store — no custom builds or external platform required
- Add subscription options to product pages via native Shopify theme blocks — no code needed
- Customers check out through the standard Shopify checkout, including Shop Pay
- Subscriber management sits within Shopify customer accounts — familiar to your team and your customers
- All of circuly's physical product operational capabilities — asset tracking, buy-outs, returns, invoicing — available through the same Shopify admin your team already uses
- Connect to the broader Shopify app ecosystem, including Klaviyo and ERP tools, without fragmented data
For merchants who've been piecing together Recharge for billing, spreadsheets for asset tracking, and separate tools for returns — this is what a unified, purpose-built solution inside Shopify looks like.
Pricing comparison: What to expect from each platform
Both platforms use a combination of a platform fee and a transaction-based component on subscription revenue. Here's the honest summary:
#1. circuly
- Getting started: Free to install.
- As you scale: Paid plans start from $90/month up to $499/month; custom pricing available for larger operations
- Transaction fee: A commission applies on subscription revenue — decreases as you move up plans
- Free trial: 14-day free trial available on paid plans
#2. Recharge
- Getting started: From $25/month. Free trial available, no permanent free tier
- As you scale: Plans go up to $99/month and above; enterprise pricing is custom
- Transaction fee: Percentage of subscription revenue plus a per-order fee on Standard plans