RevenueCat vs Adapty vs Qonversion: Subscription SDKs 2026

If you have ever tried to implement in-app subscriptions natively on iOS and Android, you know the pain. Apple's StoreKit and Google's Play Billing Library are powerful but unforgiving. Receipt validation alone can consume weeks of backend engineering. Handling edge cases like grace periods, billing retries, family sharing, cross-platform entitlements, and refund events adds months of work that has nothing to do with your actual product.

That is why 73% of top-grossing apps now use a third-party subscription SDK. These tools abstract the store APIs, provide a unified cross-platform interface, handle server-side receipt validation, and give you analytics dashboards that Apple and Google do not. The three dominant players in 2026 are RevenueCat, Adapty, and Qonversion. They all solve the same core problem, but they solve it differently, price it differently, and excel in different areas.

We have integrated all three across client projects at various scales, from apps with 500 subscribers to apps processing over $2M in annual recurring revenue. This comparison is based on that hands-on experience, not marketing pages. The right choice depends on your stage, your revenue, your experimentation needs, and how much you care about analytics granularity versus raw cost savings.

Pricing is where the RevenueCat vs Adapty vs Qonversion decision gets sharp. At low revenue, all three are effectively free or cheap. At $500K+ in annual mobile revenue, the differences are thousands of dollars per month.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat's free tier covers up to $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue (MTR) with most features included. Beyond that, their Growth plan charges 1% of MTR with a $100/month minimum. Their Enterprise plan (for apps over $1.5M MTR) is negotiated but still revenue-based. At $100K/month in subscription revenue, you are paying RevenueCat roughly $1,000/month. At $500K/month, that is $5,000/month. The percentage model is simple to understand but it scales linearly with your success, which means your subscription infrastructure cost never stops growing relative to revenue.

Adapty

Adapty moved to a flat-fee model in 2025, which makes it significantly cheaper at scale. Their Starter plan is free for up to $10K MTR. The Pro plan starts at $249/month and covers up to $100K MTR, including paywall A/B testing, analytics, and integrations. Their Enterprise tier is negotiated but still uses flat pricing bands rather than a percentage. At $500K/month in revenue, Adapty typically costs between $999 and $1,500/month depending on the features you need. That is 70% less than RevenueCat at the same scale.

Qonversion

Qonversion is the cheapest of the three. Their free tier supports up to $10K MTR. The Growth plan starts at $99/month for up to $50K MTR, and their highest published tier is $599/month for up to $500K MTR. Beyond that, pricing is negotiated. Qonversion positions itself as the analytics-first, cost-efficient alternative. At scale, it can be 80-85% cheaper than RevenueCat.

The pricing takeaway: RevenueCat's 1% model is painless at low revenue but becomes a serious line item as you grow. If you are building a subscription app with paywalls and you expect to cross $100K MTR within 18 months, you should factor the long-term SDK cost into your choice today. Switching later is possible but not trivial.

Paywall optimization is where subscription apps win or lose. A 10% improvement in paywall conversion at scale can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional annual revenue. The tools your SDK provides for experimentation directly impact your ability to iterate on pricing, trial lengths, and paywall design.

Adapty: Best in Class

Adapty was built around paywall experimentation from day one. Their remote paywall builder lets you design, deploy, and A/B test paywalls without app updates. You can test different pricing tiers, trial durations, paywall layouts, and copy variations. Adapty supports multivariate testing (not just A/B, but A/B/C/D), audience segmentation for targeted experiments, and statistical significance tracking built into the dashboard. Their paywall rendering engine also supports native paywall templates that render natively on iOS and Android, so you are not stuck with a WebView-based approach. This is Adapty's strongest differentiator, and it is genuinely excellent.

RevenueCat: Solid but Catching Up

RevenueCat added their Paywalls feature and Experiments (A/B testing) within the last two years. The experiments feature lets you test different offerings (product configurations) against each other and tracks conversion, revenue per user, and trial-to-paid conversion. Their paywall builder supports remote configuration and native rendering. It works well, but it does not match Adapty's depth in terms of multivariate testing, audience targeting, or the number of paywall templates available. RevenueCat's experimentation is good enough for most teams, but if paywall optimization is your core growth lever, Adapty gives you more tools.

Qonversion: Functional but Limited

Qonversion supports remote product configuration and basic A/B testing of offerings. You can test different product sets and pricing. However, their paywall builder and experimentation tools are less mature than both RevenueCat and Adapty. There are fewer templates, less granular audience segmentation, and the statistical analysis is more basic. If you are running simple price tests, Qonversion covers the basics. If you plan to run continuous, multi-variant paywall experiments, you will feel the limitations quickly.

The experimentation takeaway: Adapty is the clear leader here. If paywall A/B testing is a top priority for your growth strategy, Adapty should be your default choice. RevenueCat is a solid second. Qonversion is adequate for basic testing but will not support an aggressive experimentation program.

Apple and Google have both overhauled their billing APIs in recent years. StoreKit 2 on iOS and Play Billing Library v7 on Android introduce modern, async APIs, better error handling, and server-side transaction verification. Your subscription SDK's support for these new APIs affects reliability, latency, and your ability to use the latest store features like offer codes, win-back offers, and billing grace periods.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat has full StoreKit 2 support and has had it longer than either competitor. Their iOS SDK defaults to StoreKit 2 on devices running iOS 15+ and falls back to StoreKit 1 for older devices. On Android, RevenueCat supports Play Billing Library v7 with full support for subscription offers, prepaid plans, and the new purchase flow APIs. RevenueCat's server-side infrastructure also processes App Store Server Notifications v2 and Google Real-time Developer Notifications, which means entitlement updates happen within seconds rather than relying on client-side polling. This is the area where RevenueCat's market leadership and engineering investment are most visible.

Adapty

Adapty supports StoreKit 2 and Play Billing v7 as of their latest SDK versions. Their StoreKit 2 adoption was slightly behind RevenueCat's timeline, but the current implementation is solid and handles the key scenarios: introductory offers, promotional offers, offer codes, and subscription management. Adapty also processes server notifications from both stores for real-time entitlement updates. The gap between Adapty and RevenueCat on store API support has narrowed significantly in 2026.

Qonversion

Qonversion supports StoreKit 2 and Play Billing v7, though their adoption timeline for new store features tends to lag behind the other two by a few months. For example, when Apple introduced win-back offers, RevenueCat had support within weeks, while Qonversion took closer to two months. If you are building a mainstream subscription app, this lag rarely matters. If you are in a competitive market where adopting new store features early gives you an edge, it is worth noting.

The store API takeaway: All three support the modern store APIs. RevenueCat leads on speed of adoption for new features. Adapty is a close second. Qonversion is functional but slightly behind the curve on bleeding-edge store features.

Understanding your subscription metrics is not optional. MRR, churn rate, trial conversion, cohort retention, and revenue per user are the numbers that drive your product decisions. The quality of your SDK's analytics determines whether you need to build a separate analytics layer or can rely on what the SDK provides.

Qonversion: Analytics-First Approach

This is Qonversion's strongest area. Their analytics dashboard provides real-time subscription metrics with granular cohort analysis, revenue attribution, churn analysis by acquisition source, and LTV predictions. You get detailed funnel analytics showing where users drop off between install, trial start, trial conversion, and renewal. Qonversion also integrates with AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch, and other attribution platforms for campaign-level revenue tracking. If analytics depth is your primary concern, Qonversion punches well above its price point.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat's Charts dashboard is excellent and covers the key metrics: MRR, active subscribers, trial conversion rates, churn, and revenue per customer. They have good cohort analysis and support custom chart configurations. RevenueCat also provides a robust webhooks and integrations ecosystem, pushing subscription events to Amplitude, Mixpanel, Braze, OneSignal, Segment, and dozens of other tools. If your analytics strategy relies on a separate product analytics tool, RevenueCat's integration layer is the most mature. Their API for custom data pulls is also well-documented and reliable.

Adapty

Adapty's analytics are solid, covering MRR, subscribers, churn, and cohort retention. They are particularly strong on experiment analytics, showing clear breakdowns of how A/B tests impact conversion and revenue. Their integration ecosystem covers the major attribution and analytics platforms. The dashboard is clean and actionable. It falls between RevenueCat and Qonversion in terms of raw analytics depth, but the experiment-specific analytics are a standout feature that the others do not match.

For teams that want to understand why users churn and how to reduce it, the analytics layer of your subscription SDK is critical. RevenueCat and Qonversion both excel here, but in different ways: RevenueCat is better at pushing data to your existing analytics stack, while Qonversion is better as a standalone subscription analytics platform.

Switching subscription SDKs is not like swapping a UI library. Your entitlements, receipt history, and active subscriptions are tied to the SDK's backend. A bad migration can result in users losing access to content they paid for, which is the kind of bug that generates one-star reviews faster than anything else.

Integrating from Scratch

All three SDKs support iOS (Swift, Objective-C), Android (Kotlin, Java), React Native, Flutter, and Unity. RevenueCat has the broadest framework support and the most thorough getting-started documentation. A competent mobile developer can integrate any of them in 1-3 days for a standard subscription app. The differences show up in edge cases: handling family sharing, managing upgrades and downgrades between subscription tiers, and dealing with billing retry logic. RevenueCat's documentation covers the most edge cases. Adapty's documentation is clean but thinner on unusual scenarios. Qonversion's docs are adequate but sometimes lag behind their latest SDK releases.

Migrating Between SDKs

The good news is that subscription data lives on Apple and Google's servers, not on the SDK provider's servers. Your users' active subscriptions will continue to work regardless of which SDK you use. The migration process involves: (1) integrating the new SDK, (2) importing historical purchase data for accurate analytics, (3) mapping your product identifiers and entitlements, and (4) verifying that all subscription states (active, expired, billing retry, grace period) are correctly reflected.

RevenueCat provides a dedicated migration guide and import API that can ingest historical data from other providers. Adapty also has an import tool for RevenueCat data specifically, which reflects the fact that most migrations in this space are away from RevenueCat (usually for cost reasons). Qonversion's import tools are functional but less documented.

Realistically, budget 1-2 weeks for a migration between any of these SDKs, including testing. The technical risk is moderate. The operational risk is low as long as you do not rush the entitlement mapping. If you are implementing subscription billing for the first time, picking the right SDK now saves you from this migration entirely.

After integrating all three SDKs across multiple production apps, here are our direct recommendations.

Choose RevenueCat if:

• You are building your first subscription app and want the most comprehensive documentation and community support
• You need the broadest integration ecosystem (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Braze, Segment, and dozens more)
• You want the fastest adoption of new Apple and Google billing features
• Your monthly tracked revenue is under $50K and the 1% fee is not a meaningful cost
• You value stability and market leadership over cost optimization

Choose Adapty if:

• Paywall A/B testing and experimentation are central to your growth strategy
• You want native remote paywalls with multivariate testing out of the box
• Your MTR is above $100K and the flat-fee pricing saves you significant money versus RevenueCat's 1%
• You need audience segmentation for targeted paywall experiments
• You want a strong balance of features and cost efficiency

Choose Qonversion if:

• Cost is your primary constraint and you want the cheapest SDK at every revenue tier
• Subscription analytics and cohort analysis are more important to you than paywall experimentation
• You need detailed revenue attribution integrated with your mobile attribution platform
• Your experimentation needs are basic (simple A/B price tests, not complex multivariate paywall experiments)
• You are comfortable with slightly slower adoption of new store features

Our Default Recommendation

For most apps we work with, the answer depends on stage. Pre-product-market-fit: start with RevenueCat. The free tier is generous, the docs are the best in class, and you should not be optimizing SDK costs before you have optimized your product. Post-product-market-fit with growing revenue: evaluate Adapty seriously. The flat-fee pricing saves real money at scale, and the paywall experimentation tools are best in class for driving conversion improvements. Analytics-heavy teams on a budget: Qonversion delivers remarkable value for the price, especially if your growth team lives in dashboards.

The worst outcome is paralysis. All three are production-grade tools used by thousands of apps. Pick the one that matches your priorities today, knowing that migration is possible (if not painless) later.

If you are building a subscription app and want help choosing the right SDK, designing your paywall strategy, or integrating any of these tools, we do this regularly. Book a free strategy call and we will give you a specific recommendation based on your app, your revenue, and your growth goals.