The 5 Best WooCommerce Plugins for Recurring Orders

Setting up recurring orders (or subscriptions) on your WooCommerce store is a great way to generate guaranteed recurring revenue. In fact, if your eCommerce store sells stuff that users need to order on a repeat basis — anything from supplies and meals to curated boxes — enabling recurring scheduled orders on your store is a natural progression.

Customers, too, love the convenience autoshipping brings them. They don’t have to visit their preferred online store, find and add items to their cart, fill in their billing details or shipping address, or process a manual payment. A WooCommerce recurring order plugin automatically:

• Regenerates a renewal order for their product(s) in line with their subscriptions
• Picks up its shipping logistics from their existing data
• And rebills (and processes) automatic recurring payment(s) with the help of your payment gateway.

If you’re looking to sell subscriptions on your WooCommerce store, we’ve got you covered. We’ve rounded up five of the best WooCommerce recurring order plugins for you today. Here’s a quick snapshot of our top picks before we dive into the details.

Choosing the right WooCommerce recurring order plugin for your store

• Go with Autoship Cloud if you want to bring end-to-end subscription management and add Amazon-like Subscribe And Save upsells to your WooCommerce store’s product and cart/checkout pages.
• Choose WooCommerce Subscriptions if you have the bandwidth to build and maintain a robust, bespoke subscriptions setup with the core plugin and a host of additional premium add-ons.
• Pick YITH WooCommerce Subscription if you’re primarily looking only to sell physical or virtual product subscriptions on your store.
• Consider SUMO Subscriptions if you need a lightweight solution that works with PayPal and Stripe.
• Choose Subscriptio if you’re looking for a simple WooCommerce recurring order plugin that supports PayPal and Stripe.

Autoship Cloud

Your customers piggyback on their Amazon experiences when shopping online — including signing up for subscriptions. If you want to give your customers native Amazon-like subscription options on your product and cart/checkout pages, go with Autoship Cloud. 

Autoship Cloud is the only WooCommerce recurring order plugin that lets you fully recreate Amazon’s Subscribe And Save setup on your WooCommerce store (that too without any additional add-ons or complex custom coding).

With Autoship Cloud, you can add multiple subscription plans to each of your existing and new simple and variable WooCommerce products. Your customers can choose a subscription plan that gives them the most savings or one that ships as frequently as they need. They can also subscribe to multiple subscriptions simultaneously. Here’s Autoship Cloud offering an Amazon-like Subscribe And Save scheme on a WooCommerce store:

That’s not all. You can even pitch your subscription upsells on your cart/checkout pages. So your customers can upgrade anytime — Amazon does this too! Here’s the same WooCommerce store prompting customers to upgrade to a subscription plan on the cart/checkout page:

Autoship Cloud integrates with ten of the top WooCommerce payment gateways. So no matter what your preferred payment gateway is for processing recurring payments, Autoship Cloud plays well with it. 

Here’s how you can configure Autoship Cloud on your WooCommerce store:

Autoship Cloud is subscriber-friendly too. Your subscribers don’t just get subscription management tools to pause, cancel, upgrade, downgrade, switch, and resume their subscriptions but can also edit their upcoming deliveries — rescheduling an upcoming order for some other day of the month, for instance. They can even edit their autoshipping subscription deliveries (to add more subscription or non-subscription products to them or remove items) and billing schedules. However, you can freeze a “lock” window, post which orders won’t stay editable. 

You can make Autoship Cloud charge a signup fee or a trial period or sample. Plus, you get detailed reports on how your subscription business is doing.

Sign up for Autoship Cloud — the most complete WooCommerce recurring order plugin!

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions is Automattic’s very own WooCommerce recurring order plugin. You can use it to set up recurring orders and sell both simple and variable subscriptions on your WooCommerce store.  

Setting up a new subscription product is very straightforward with WooCommerce Subscriptions. By default, this is the best that WooCommerce Subscriptions does. But if you want to offer a product as both a subscription and a one-time buyable item on your product page, WooCommerce subscriptions won’t work for you. You’ll have to get an extension called All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions ($79/year) to enable this. Also, if you want to add a subscription option on each of your existing products (or to a select few), again, you’d need this extension. 

Likewise, if you need to add a subscription upsell to your cart page/checkout page, you’d need another premium WooCommerce add-on/extension (like Subscriptions Add-on for WooCommerce). 

WooCommerce Subscriptions also lacks essential features that need you to get additional plugins. For example, it doesn’t let you send an automatic email to your users before charging them a renewal payment and thereby giving them a window to pause or cancel their subscription. In its default setup, WooCommerce Subscriptions only lets you send your subscribers email notifications after a successful recurring payment processing.

If you’re an existing WooCommerce Subscriptions customer and are tired of adding more plugins to (complete) your WooCommerce Subscriptions setup, check out our roundup of the five best WooCommerce Subscriptions alternatives.

To get a feel of the plugin and learn how it works, check out our step-by-step WooCommerce Subscriptions tutorial. Our tutorial covers everything from the plugin’s basic configuration to setting up simple subscriptions and variable ones with it.

A quick note:

If you want to sell virtual products with WooCommerce Subscriptions (like a course) or use it with WooCommerce Memberships, the plugin’s prorating settings can come in handy. So for instance, if a subscriber begins a subscription in the middle of the month, you can charge them for just the remainder of the month and have their billing cycle start from another date — the first of the following month, for instance, and the bill on the same day every month.

YITH WooCommerce Subscription

YITH WooCommerce Subscription is yet another WooCommerce recurring order plugin that lets you sell simple and variable WooCommerce products as subscriptions.

By using this plugin, you’ll be able to add a subscription button to your product page. If you’re adding a new subscription product, this plugin works well. However, you can’t offer a one-time buy option along with the subscription upgrade on your product page. To do so, among other things, you’d need to set up your product as a variable product with two variations — one that’s a one-time purchase and the other that’s subscribable. 

Not just that, if you’d like to give users three subscription plan options for a product, you’ll have to set up three variations of your product. It’s unclear if YITH WooCommerce Subscription supports mixed checkout — i.e., letting your users buy both subscriptions and one-time products in the same checkout. If YITH WooCommerce Subscription doesn’t allow mixed checkout, naturally, you don’t need to upsell subscription offers on your cart/checkout page (as the orders will only be subscriptions).

Just like WooCommerce Subscriptions, you might find yourself adding additional premium plugins (especially for bringing more payment options and gateway integrations) from the YITH family to complete your YITH WooCommerce Subscription setup. 

That said, YITH WooCommerce Subscription is pretty subscriber-friendly and lets your subscribers pause, cancel, switch, and resume their subscriptions from their subscription settings. You can easily charge a signup fee, offer a free trial, and distribute free samples.

Subscriptio

Subscriptio is another WooCommerce recurring order plugin that lets you sell subscriptions on your store. With Subscriptio, you can sell any simple or variable product as a subscription. Also, Subscriptio works with both digital and physical products.

Subscriptio runs a 12-step subscription workflow each time a customer signs up for a subscription. This workflow starts with a subscription signup and ends with the subscription expiry with either the user canceling it or you suspending it (in case of failed payments or when a subscription completes its intended length). 

With Subscriptio, you can add a subscribe button to your product pages. However, you can only have a single subscription plan for each product. Also, the buy-as-a-one-time option doesn’t apply anymore if you set up a product as a simple subscription. So you’ll only have the subscribe call to action.

It’s also not possible to upsell subscriptions on your cart or checkout pages. But Subscriptio supports mixed checkout, so your users can checkout with both (multiple) subscriptions and one-time buys inside a single checkout.

Subscriptio supports only two payment gateways and offers both automatic and semi-automatic payment methods. With fully automated payment processing, you charge your user automatically. With semi-automatic recurring payment processing, on the other hand, your users receive an email with a payment link when they’re due to pay a subscription renewal payment. They need to click the link and complete their payment manually. You’d have to do some technical work to enable automatic payments with Subscriptio.

SUMO Subscriptions

SUMO Subscriptions by Fantastic Plugins is yet another WooCommerce recurring order plugin available on Code Canyon. You can easily set up new subscription products with SUMO Subscriptions. With SUMO Subscriptions, your subscription product page will use a single subscribe button in place of WooCommerce’s default buy button. So you can’t have the one-time purchase option and the subscription upsell together on your product page. 

Which means this WooCommerce recurring order plugin, like most of the plugins on this list, works the best if you’re only launching a simple subscription plan for a product and only want to sell it as a subscription and disable ad hoc one-time sales for it. If you’d like to offer a product as both (a one-time purchase item and a subscription), be prepared to do custom coding. Also, you have no straightforward way to add multiple subscription plans for a single product.

Just like Subscriptio, SUMO Subscriptions supports both automatic and semiautomatic recurring payments. For payment processing, this plugin works with two payment gateways: 1) PayPal and 2) Stripe. However, SUMO Subscriptions integrates with most WooCommerce payment gateways for manual renewal of subscription payments.

Other than these options, you can also check out Subscriptions for WooCommerce. We’ve covered it in detail in our roundup on WooCommerce Subscriptions alternatives.

Wrapping it up…

If you want to pitch your recurring order upsell offer against a one-time purchase option on your product page and emphasize the savings (just like Amazon does with its Subscribe And Save schemes), only the Autoship Cloud WordPress plugin allows you to do so (that too right out-of-the-box). Think about it: This is one of the most essential things you need a WooCommerce recurring order plugin to do. Sadly most options require you to do a lot of work to allow it. 

Also, compare Autoship Cloud with any other WooCommerce recurring order plugin, and you’ll see that only Autoship Cloud brings end-to-end subscription management to your WooCommerce store. And it does so without needing any additional plugins. Said another way: It’s the only complete WooCommerce recurring order plugin that brings all the functionalities you need to run a WooCommerce subscription model. This is important because you don’t want to sign up for one that requires you to get another ten!

Go ahead and sign up for Autoship Cloud’s free two-week trial and add subscribe and save schemes to your existing WooCommerce sales mix within a day or fully pivot to the subscription business model with just one plugin!