Guides / Tooling
RevenueCat vs. Adapty — which should I use?
Start with RevenueCat unless you have a specific reason not to — it's the more mature, most widely integrated subscription infrastructure, and most attribution and analytics tools assume you're already using it. Move to, or add, Adapty when you specifically need more aggressive paywall A/B testing than RevenueCat's basic experiments offer.
This isn't a feature-by-feature comparison — there are plenty of those already, mostly written by the vendors themselves. This is what actually changes the decision after implementing both on live client accounts.
RevenueCat's real strength is breadth of integration and community size. It connects cleanly to Amplitude, Mixpanel, AppsFlyer, and webhooks into whatever else you're running, and when something breaks at 11pm there's usually already a Stack Overflow answer or a Slack thread with the fix. It's the lowest-risk default, especially across iOS and Android at once.
Adapty's real edge is paywall experimentation depth. RevenueCat's native experiments are basic — two variants, a fixed 50/50 split, new users only. Adapty allows more variants, custom traffic splits, and testing against existing users as well as new installs. If paywall iteration speed is genuinely your bottleneck, that difference is real and it matters.
What actually decides it in practice comes down to one question: is the immediate problem "we don't have reliable subscription or attribution data at all" — in which case get RevenueCat in place first and get the foundation right — or "we have the data, but we're stalling specifically on paywall conversion and need to test faster" — in which case Adapty's testing depth is worth the move.
One thing that gets missed in most comparisons: migrating later isn't free. The two APIs are broadly compatible on the surface, but revenue history and cohort continuity are things to plan for deliberately, not something to decide on a whim mid-engagement.
This decision matters less in isolation than most people assume — it's a tool choice inside a bigger diagnosis (attribution, paywall, channel), not the diagnosis itself. Get the diagnosis right first.
If you're mid-decision and want a second opinion specific to your setup, get in touch.