Superwall vs RevenueCat vs Adapty: Which Paywall Tool Fits

Pick RevenueCat if you need subscription infrastructure that tracks who paid for what across iOS, Android and the web. Pick Superwall if the infrastructure already works and your problem is paywall conversion. Pick Adapty if you want one vendor that handles both jobs and you plan to run a lot of paywall tests. Plenty of apps run Superwall on top of RevenueCat, and that pairing is the most common answer when someone searches Superwall vs RevenueCat.

The confusion comes from the fact that these tools overlap in the marketing and barely overlap in the engineering. All three will show a paywall. Only two of them (RevenueCat and Adapty) were built to be the system of record for a subscriber. Superwall was built to be the fastest way to change what a user sees at the moment they decide to pay.

This post is for founders choosing a monetization stack before launch or in the first months after. If you want the older three-way comparison of RevenueCat, Adapty and Qonversion, we wrote that one already in RevenueCat vs Adapty vs Qonversion. This one is narrower. It is about who should own the paywall and who should own the subscription.

Before you compare prices, get the job descriptions straight. Mixing them up is how founders end up paying two vendors for the same feature, or worse, discovering in month four that they have no clean record of who is entitled to what.

RevenueCat: the subscription backend you did not want to build

RevenueCat sits between your app and Apple and Google. It validates receipts, listens to store notifications, and keeps a customer record that says this person has the "pro" entitlement until this date. You check that entitlement in your app instead of parsing store responses yourself. It also gives you subscription charts (MRR, churn, trial conversion), webhooks into your analytics and CRM tools, and in recent years its own paywall builder and experiments.

Superwall: the paywall layer

Superwall is built around one idea. Your paywall should be a thing you change from a dashboard, not something you ship in an app release. You define placements in your app (after onboarding, when someone taps a locked feature, on the third session), and Superwall decides which paywall to show, to whom, and records what happened. Its template editor, audience rules and test tooling are the product. It does not try to replace your subscription backend, and it can read purchases through RevenueCat or handle them itself.

Adapty: both jobs in one SDK

Adapty covers entitlements, analytics, a remote paywall builder and A/B testing in a single product. That is the appeal. You integrate one SDK and get a subscriber record and a paywall testing tool from the same vendor. The tradeoff is that you are betting one company can be the best at two jobs, and you are tying your paywalls and your entitlements together more tightly than you would with a pair of separate tools.

A simple way to remember it: RevenueCat answers "is this user paid," Superwall answers "what should this user see before they pay," and Adapty answers both questions with one integration.

The idea that you must choose between Superwall and RevenueCat is the biggest misconception in this space. Superwall supports using RevenueCat as the purchase controller. In that setup, Superwall renders and tests the paywall, RevenueCat processes the purchase and owns the entitlement, and your app checks RevenueCat for access. Your subscriber data stays in one place and your paywall experiments live in another.

Why would anyone run two vendors for one flow? Because the strengths are different. RevenueCat's customer record, integrations and charts are where a growing team spends its time after launch. Superwall's editor and audience targeting are where a growth person spends their time when they want to try ten paywall ideas in a week without waiting on App Store review. Splitting them lets each tool do what it was built for.

There is a cost to this setup. You integrate two SDKs, you have two dashboards that both claim to show conversion, and the numbers will not match perfectly because each tool defines its events a little differently. Decide up front which dashboard is your source of truth for revenue (it should be the one tied to the entitlement, so RevenueCat in this pairing) and treat the paywall tool's numbers as test-versus-control comparisons rather than accounting.

If you are not planning to run frequent experiments, you probably do not need the second vendor yet. A single paywall built in RevenueCat or Adapty, with a couple of offerings to test, is enough for the first few months. We cover that starting point in how to build a subscription app with paywalls.

The three vendors charge on revenue, but they measure revenue differently, and that matters more than the headline percentage. The figures below come from public pricing pages and secondary sources as of late October 2026, and sources conflict on the exact thresholds. Check each vendor's pricing page before you commit, because these plans change often.

• RevenueCat: free until you reach roughly $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue, then about 1% of tracked revenue on top of that. Tracked revenue means anything flowing through the SDK, whether or not a paywall played a part.
• Superwall: charges on revenue that came through its paywalls. Reported tiers put the free level at somewhere around $10,000 of paywall-attributed revenue, with paid plans in the neighborhood of $49 and $199 a month plus roughly 1% on that attributed revenue.
• Adapty: free below roughly $5,000 in monthly tracked revenue, then about 1% of tracked revenue. Some plan pages show different thresholds or flat tiers, so read the current one carefully.

What the meter means in practice

RevenueCat and Adapty bill on everything you track, so your fee grows with total subscription revenue. Superwall bills on what its paywalls generate, which means renewals that happen after the first purchase are usually the larger share of your revenue and may not all count in the same way. How attribution handles renewals is the detail to ask about. Get an answer in writing before you do the math.

Take an app earning $20,000 a month. At about 1% above the free threshold, RevenueCat or Adapty would cost somewhere around $150 to $200 a month depending on whether the 1% applies to the whole figure or only the part above the free level. Add Superwall on top and you could be paying another $50 to $250 or more a month. That is real money for a pre-seed company, and it is small next to a 20% lift in paywall conversion. Do the math with your own revenue before deciding what is cheap.

At $200,000 a month the same percentages put each vendor in the low thousands per month. This is the point where founders start negotiating annual contracts or asking whether building a thin in-house entitlement layer would pay off. For most teams it still does not, because the engineering time to maintain receipt validation costs more than the fee. We lay out that tradeoff in how to implement subscription billing.

If paywalls were all the same, this comparison would be short. They are not. The testing tools differ in how fast you can ship a variant, how finely you can target an audience, and how clearly the dashboard tells you whether a result is real.

Superwall

This is the tool's home turf. You build paywalls in a visual editor, assign them to placements, and set audience filters (new users, users from a certain campaign, users on a certain app version). You can run holdouts, test a paywall against no paywall, and change which variant wins without touching the app. If your growth model leans on paywall timing and presentation, such as showing the paywall after onboarding, after a first success moment or on a locked feature, Superwall gives you the most control over those decisions.

Adapty

Adapty has a remote paywall builder with native rendering and A/B testing tied to its own analytics. Because the entitlements and the experiments live in one place, reading results is straightforward. Its editor is less flexible than Superwall's for placement logic, but it is good enough for most teams, and you do not pay for a second vendor.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat's paywall builder and experiments let you test offerings and templates, and the results flow into the same customer record that powers your charts. The depth of audience targeting and the speed of the design workflow are behind Superwall's. For a team that wants a decent paywall with a few tests and does not have a dedicated growth person, that is fine. For a team that wants to ship a new paywall every few days, you will feel the gap.

A caution that applies to all three. Paywall tests need volume to mean anything. If you get 300 new users a week and 4% of them subscribe, you are looking at roughly a dozen conversions a week. A test with two variants would take months to reach a trustworthy result. Early on, change the one big thing (price point, trial length, whether the paywall appears before or after the first win) and judge by direction, not by decimal points.

All three work with Swift, Kotlin, React Native and Flutter. A competent mobile developer can add any one of them in a few days for a straightforward subscription app. Adding a second tool adds a day or two of wiring and a lot more QA, because you now have to test the combined flow on real devices with sandbox accounts for both stores.

Where the real work hides

The SDK call to show a paywall is the easy part. The work is in the cases around it: a user who bought on Android and signs in on iPhone, a user whose payment failed and who is in a grace period, a refund, a family-shared purchase, a promotional offer code, and the web checkout your marketing team will ask for six months from now. Entitlement logic touches all of these, which is why the tool that owns the entitlement is the hardest one to swap later.

Lock-in, ranked

Switching your paywall layer is the cheap change. Paywalls are presentation. You can rebuild them elsewhere in days. Switching your entitlement system is the expensive change, because your customer history, product mappings, integrations and analytics all hang off it. Choose the entitlement owner (RevenueCat or Adapty) with care, and treat the paywall layer (Superwall or a built-in builder) as something you can change as your growth needs change.

That ranking is also an argument for starting simple. If you begin with one vendor that owns entitlements and includes a basic paywall builder, you can add Superwall later without migrating anything. Going the other way, from a tangled two-vendor setup to a clean one, takes longer.

Most of the trouble is not in the choice of vendor. It comes from a handful of habits that show up again and again.

1. Testing before there is traffic. A tool that makes experiments easy also makes it easy to run twelve tests that none of your users will ever finish. Fix the obvious things first.
2. Optimizing the paywall while onboarding leaks. If half your users never reach the paywall, no template will save you. Look at the funnel before the screen.
3. Letting two dashboards disagree. Pick one source of truth for revenue and write it down. Otherwise every weekly review turns into an argument about whose number is right.
4. Hard-coding prices and product IDs in the app. The whole value of these tools is that you can change offerings remotely. Keep the product catalog in the dashboard.
5. Skipping the store rules. Apple has specific requirements for how subscription terms, trial length and price must be displayed, and a beautiful paywall that hides the renewal terms will get rejected. Read the current App Store guidelines before you design.
6. Treating the fee as the cost. A 1% fee is trivial next to a pricing mistake. Spend your attention on the offer, the trial and the moment of asking.

For the broader picture of pricing models, trials and what to charge for, see our guide to mobile app monetization strategies. A paywall tool amplifies a good offer. It cannot rescue a weak one.

Here is how we would map real product situations to a pick. These are opinions based on how the tools are built and priced, and you should confirm current plans before you sign anything.

• A first-time founder launching a subscription app with a simple monthly and annual plan: RevenueCat. It is free at your size, it is the best documented, and its built-in paywall is enough for launch. Add nothing else yet.
• A consumer app with a growth lead and a few thousand new users a week: RevenueCat plus Superwall. You have the volume to test and someone whose job is to run the tests. The second vendor pays for itself if it moves conversion by even a small amount.
• A small team that wants one vendor and one invoice: Adapty. You get entitlements, analytics and paywall testing in one SDK, and the cost stays contained while you figure out what works.
• A fitness, language or utility app where paywall timing is the whole growth lever: Superwall on top of RevenueCat. Placement logic and audience rules are where you will win or lose.
• A B2B or mixed web and mobile product where purchases happen in several places: start with whichever entitlement system handles your web billing too, and check that before looking at paywall features. For many teams that is RevenueCat, but verify it against your billing provider.
• An app with under a few hundred users and no revenue yet: whichever free tier you can integrate fastest. The decision does not matter at this stage, and the wrong choice is cheap to fix.
• An app with a dedicated platform team and a very large revenue base: run the numbers on negotiated contracts for all three, and ask what an in-house entitlement layer would cost to maintain before you assume it saves money.

The pattern is simple. Choose your entitlement owner first, because that is the decision that is hard to reverse. Choose your paywall tool second, because that decision follows your testing volume and your team.

Kanopy helps founders pick a stack and build the product on it, including the subscription and paywall flow. If you are still working out what adding subscriptions to a live app will cost in time and money, start with how much it costs to add subscriptions to an existing app, and when you are ready to talk through your own setup, Book a free strategy call.