4 Churnkey Alternatives You Should Know in 2025 (And One You’ve Never Heard Of)

After spending months trying different cancellation flow tools, I wanted to share my candid impressions around Churnkey and its alternatives — what worked, what didn’t, and what I ended up building instead.

Before we jump in, Churnkey is a leading churn-prevention platform known for its customizable cancel flows, reactivation campaigns, and payment recovery automation. It’s a fantastic solution, but like any product it has its limitations – and that’s why many teams explore alternatives. Let’s start by examining why you might look beyond Churnkey, then we’ll dive into head-to-head comparisons of each of the following tools:

• Raaft

• Chargebee Retention

• ProsperStack

• Relixir

Why Look At Churnkey’s Alternatives?

Churnkey has made a name for itself by helping SaaS companies intercept cancellations and retain customers. Its strengths are notable:

• Personalized cancel flows with targeted offers (discounts, plan pauses, etc.),

• Configurable Reactivation email campaigns to win back former subscribers

• Automated payment recovery for failed charges

• Out of the box integrations with popular billing systems

• Churn analytics and basic AI feedback analysis

So, why look elsewhere? In my experience, there are a few reasons teams may seek alternatives:

• Limited Feedback Insights: Churnkey’s approach to gathering cancellation feedback relies on standard exit surveys (asking users “Why are you leaving?”). While this captures basic data, it often doesn’t deliver deep or actionable insight. Churning users tend to give cursory answers.

• Lack of Personalized Reactivations: Without access to granular context, Churnkey only allows templated email campaigns, with limited personalization. If a user left because of a missing feature, for example, Churnkey won’t automatically know or target that context beyond tagging the reason code.

• Pricing Model: Churnkey charges based on your monthly churned revenue. This volume-based pricing can get really expensive with high-volume churn.

In short, Churnkey is powerful for implementing save offers and basic exit surveys, but you might crave deeper feedback, smarter follow-ups, or different economics. Now, let’s examine four alternatives and see how they stack up against Churnkey on those fronts. We’ll cover pricing, pros/cons, and ideal use cases for each.

Raaft vs Churnkey

Raaft is a lightweight churn-prevention tool that focuses on quickly adding a cancellation flow to your SaaS. It advertises itself primarily as a nimbler alternative to Churnkey and other cancellation flow tools.

Pricing: Raaft’s pricing is simple and usage-based. There’s a Free plan at $0 for up to 20 cancellation sessions per month. Then the paid Basic plan is $79/month for 100 sessions per month​ (with additional cancel sessions charged at $3 ea)

Advantages:

• The biggest pro of Raaft is its ease and cost-effectiveness at smaller scales. It has a free tier, unlike Churnkey, which allows new projects to easily take advantage.

• In general, with Raaft it takes considerably less time to set-up due to its simpler flow and interface.

Disadvantages

• It lacks the advanced features ChurnKey has, like A/B testing, reactivations, and ML-based targeting.

• Pricing is very limiting and expensive, only allowing 500 sessions / mo at the highest tier, then $3 / session overages.

• It has less flexible customer segmentation attribution than Churnkey, resulting in a less personalized experience.

• Rudimentary feedback collection through exit survey cancel step

My Opinion: If you are working on a prototype or low-volume experiment, Raaft could be the better option due to the ease of setup and cost effectiveness. It provides a solid cancel flow for very minimal setup effort. But overall, Churnkey provides a larger feature set that encompasses the same functionality as Raaft (and more), at a better price. So it would in general be the better option for maximizing churn reduction.

Chargebee Retention vs Churnkey

Chargebee Retention is the churn management solution offered by Chargebee (a popular subscription billing platform). It is typically targeted towards arger subscription companies and has very robust features – but also a higher price tag and a focus on integration with Chargebee’s ecosystem.

Pricing: Chargebee Retention’s pricing is tiered and based on the number of cancel sessions. The plans start at $250/mo for up to 150 sessions / mo. Beyond this, it is required to go through the sales team and setting up the Enterprise tier. Overall, expect a premium price from Chargebee Retention relative to other cancellation flow tools

Advantages:

• An extensive proven track record, first as Brightback (that Chargebee acquired), and now within the Chargebee ecosystem. Proven from large client cases that their software can reduce churn by 23% on average.

• If you are already using Chargebee as a billing provider, integrating retention is seamless and doesn’t require a 3rd party tool

• It has the most customizable cancellations flows out of all the tools, where even more customer segments and logic operations are possible than ChurnKey.

Disadvantages:

• It is one of the more premium / more accessible options. Similar results can be attained at a cheaper price.

• It requires upfront implementation investment to setup & design flows and integrate, which will take longer than Churnkey or Raaft. 

• Their approach still relies on the classic “exit survey” paradigm which provides only high-level insights into churn reasons and customer problems.

My Opinion: For large SaaS companies, Chargebee Retention is a really competitive product as it supports the most customization and functionality. With Churnkey, its still more hands on than Raaft, but can still run relatively passive, while with Chargebee Retention you need to be actively hands on. It also comes in at a higher price point, so if the complexity it offers isn’t needed, Churnkey would be a better and more cost effective option

ProsperStack vs Churnkey

ProsperStack is another dedicated churn-prevention platform that often comes up as a direct competitor to Churnkey.

Pricing: ProsperStack offers tiered plans that scale with session volume, somewhat akin to Chargebee’s model but generally at a lower price point. The Grow plan starts at $200/month and is meant for up to 500 cancel sessions per month. The next tier, Prosper plan, starts at $750/month and is for 500+ sessions per month​.

Advantages:

• Heavily optimization focused. Compared to Churnkey, ProsperStack’s AI is more advanced. Autopilot delivers automated improvement to the cancel flow, while for Churnkey it is all manual

• It is very cost effective, below typical market value for 500 sessions / mo

• It provides more integration support, even providing the option for a custom hosted customer portal to make integration seamless.

Disadvantages:

• It is solely focused on the cancellation flow, it doesn’t go beyond to do payment recovery, or customer reactivations.

• Still focused on providing rudimentary feedback collection through exit survey cancel step

• Can’t be used fully self-serve, need to go through a sales call, which makes it less accessible to onboard onto.

My opinion: It is the best solution on the market when it comes to data driven experimentation and iteration. Prosperstack should be significantly considered if the SaaS team is planning on being hands-on for constant iteration.

Relixir vs Churnkey

Now let me get into Relixir, which is the newest entrant on this list, and the solution we created to address the limitations we found from existing tools. Relixir is an AI-native platform that focuses on conducting rich exit interviews with customers and using that feedback to drive both immediate retention and long-term improvements.

Pricing: We’ve aimed to make Relixir accessible, including offering a Free plan. The free tier includes up to 50 AI-driven cancellation interviews per month. The Strategic Growth plan is $299/month (for 500 AI interview sessions). Finally, an Enterprise “Scale” plan is custom-priced for unlimited usage and enhanced support​.

Advantages:

• The primary advantage is the richness of the feedback that is collected from churn events. By using AI to conduct exit interviews, you get far richer insight than any other tool provides – literally an order of magnitude more data per cancel. 

• Feedback incentives – We reward users for giving useful feedback, and our early data shows much higher response rates – roughly 5-6x more people actually give feedback when an incentive is offered, and the feedback is more substantive​.

• We open doors for strong, personalized re-activation campaigns, to directly address the problems customers faced to make them leave 

Disadvantages:

• Since Relixir is a newer solution, it is constantly evolving and features like automated reactivation campaigns are not public yet.

• Using AI and offering rewards is a new approach in the space, which could cause hesitation from teams to adopt without an extensive track record.

My Opinion On The Best Churnkey Alternative

After researching and even trying many of these tools, I came to believe that the best Churnkey alternative is Relixir – which is ultimately why we built it. Churnkey has a major gap in understanding the why behind churn. Other alternatives like Raaft, ProsperStack, and Brightback all iterate on the theme – they give varying degrees of improvement in offers, targeting, and maybe a nicer UX, but they all more or less rely on the same mechanism of a basic exit survey + incentive to stay.

Relixir was built to fill that gap by using modern AI to transform the cancel experience into something valuable for both the user and the company. Instead of a dead-end “Why are you leaving?” form, Relixir creates a dialogue.

Many times these days the cancellation flow is overlooked, as companies deem churning customers as gone for good. But this is far from the truth, there is a high likelihood that they could return if it is proposed at the right time, and with Relixir we are focusing on maximizing that likelihood.

If you are interested in further learning how we are revamping traditional cancellation flows with Relixir, please schedule a quick 15 min demo :)