Comparison

Bastle vs Stripe's own analytics

Where Stripe is the better choice, where Bastle is, and what actually differs once you get past the feature lists.

Bastle or Stripe?

Stripe's built-in dashboards and Sigma are already in your account, already have every byte of your billing data, and cost nothing extra to start using — and Sigma's LLM assistant, which turns a plain-English question into SQL over your Stripe data, actually shipped, which is more than most vendors in this category can say. Bastle exists because Stripe reports what it billed rather than what the business earned: it counts trialing users as customers, offers no way to exclude your own test accounts, and its metric definitions are not yours to change. If Stripe is your only billing source and you are comfortable in SQL, Stripe's own tooling goes a long way.

Last researched July 2026. See every comparison

In their words

What Stripe is

Stripe gives every account free built-in dashboards covering revenue, subscriptions and churn, a Reports API for programmatic access, and Sigma — a SQL warehouse over your complete Stripe data with an LLM assistant that turns questions in plain English into queries. Nothing to connect, nothing to configure, and no third party holding a copy of your billing data.

Honest fit

Which one you should actually pick

Most comparison pages are written so that one answer is always right. These two columns get the same room, the same styling and the same amount of thought.

Choose Stripe if

You have zero setup appetite. Stripe's dashboards are already populated with your data; there is no connection step because there is nothing to connect.
You are fluent in SQL and want unrestricted access to the raw data model. Sigma exposes far more of the underlying billing detail than any analytics product will surface for you.
Sigma's LLM assistant meets your need. It ships today, it generates SQL from plain-English questions, and it is the most widely deployed AI feature in this space.
You want no third party holding your billing data. Keeping analytics inside Stripe is a legitimate and easily defended position.
Stripe is your only billing source and always will be. Multi-source normalisation is the main structural advantage of an external tool, and it is worth nothing to you.

Choose Bastle if

Your reported numbers need to exclude trials and internal test accounts. Stripe counts trialing users as customers and has no test-account exclusion.
You want subscription metrics rather than payment reporting — cohort retention, quick ratio, net revenue retention, MRR movement decomposition — without writing them in SQL.
You want an answer, not a query. Ask returns a sentence plus the customers and invoices behind it; Sigma returns a result set you still have to interpret.
You bill through more than one processor, or through Stripe plus a homegrown system, and need one set of numbers across all of it.
You want dunning that goes beyond Stripe's retry schedule — sequenced email, SMS and in-app messaging with a hosted card-update page — and cancellation reason capture, both included.

Side by side

Capability by capability

A tick means the capability ships today. A dash means it exists in a narrower or different form. A cross means it is not available. Nothing is marked absent merely because it works differently.

Capability comparison between Bastle and Stripe
Capability	Bastle	Stripe
Setup effortStripe requires none; Bastle needs an OAuth connect and a backfill	~2 minutes	None
Subscription metrics without SQLCohorts, quick ratio, NRR, MRR movement decomposition	Yes	Partial
Trialing users excluded from customer counts	Yes	No
Internal test-account exclusion	Yes	No
User-configurable metric definitions	Yes	No
Plain-English queryingSigma's assistant generates SQL; Ask returns an answer with cited records	Yes	Yes
Raw data access via SQLSigma exposes far more of the underlying model than Bastle does	Partial	Yes
Multi-source normalisationSeveral processors and imported systems merged into one set of metrics	Yes	No
Continuous refreshSigma data lags by roughly three hours	Yes	Partial
Sequenced dunning beyond processor retriesStripe retries the charge; Bastle also contacts the customer	Yes	Partial
Cancellation reason capture and save offers	Yes	No
Investor-facing live metric rooms	Yes	No
Revenue forecasting	Beta	No
No third party holds your billing data	No	Yes

Researched July 2026. Competitor capabilities change; corrections welcome.

Start here, honestly

If you have not looked hard at Stripe's own reporting, do that before you evaluate anything on this page. It is free, it is already populated, and for a company under a few hundred customers it may well be enough. Sigma goes considerably further: full SQL over your complete Stripe dataset, a Reports API, and an LLM assistant that turns a plain-English question into a query. That assistant shipped, and it works, which puts Stripe ahead of most dedicated analytics vendors on AI.

What Stripe is actually reporting

The gap is not sophistication. It is subject. Stripe reports what it billed; a subscription analytics tool reports what the business earned, and those diverge in specific, well-known ways.

Trialing users count as customers. If you run a fourteen-day free trial, your Stripe customer count includes people who have paid nothing and may never pay.
There is no test-account exclusion. Your own team's accounts, your demo accounts and your investor's account sit in the numbers with everyone else.
Delinquency is handled rigidly. Whether a customer whose card failed eleven days ago is still revenue is a business decision, and Stripe makes it for you.
MRR normalisation is Stripe's, not yours. How annual plans, quantities, add-ons and full-discount coupons roll into a monthly figure is fixed.

Every one of those is configurable workspace policy in Bastle, and changing one recalculates your history against the new rule. See how Bastle calculates metrics for the full list.

Sigma's assistant versus Ask

This is the comparison worth being precise about, because both are real AI features and they do different jobs. Sigma's assistant is a query generator: you describe what you want, it writes SQL, you run it and read the result. That is genuinely useful and it removes the biggest barrier to using Sigma at all.

Ask is not a query generator. It computes the answer through the same metrics engine that renders the dashboards, states it in a sentence, and cites the specific customers, subscriptions and invoices behind it — so the arithmetic is not something the model produced, and a wrong reading is visible rather than buried. It also spans every billing source you have connected, not one processor, and it applies your configured definitions rather than the raw table semantics. Sigma will answer questions about Stripe that Bastle cannot. Bastle will answer questions about your business that Sigma cannot see the shape of.

Multi-source, and the case against ever needing it

If Stripe is your only billing source and always will be, external normalisation is worth nothing to you and you should discount it entirely. It stops being hypothetical the moment you add a second Stripe account for a different entity, acquire a product billing through someone else, or invoice enterprise contracts outside the processor. At that point Stripe's dashboard describes a fraction of the business and the SQL to reconcile the rest is a project.

What you give up

A third party gets a copy of your billing data. That is a real cost with a real security review attached, and "trust us" is not an argument — ask us for the detail your review needs and decide on it. You also give up raw SQL: Bastle's API and CLI expose a great deal, but not the unrestricted data model Sigma hands you. And you add a connection step, though it is about two minutes of OAuth and a backfill rather than an integration project.

Who wrote this page

Bastle did, and Bastle benefits if you choose Bastle. That is a bias no amount of good intent removes, so the useful thing is to make it checkable rather than to claim it away. Every capability claim above is specific enough to disprove in an afternoon, the case for the other product gets the same room as the case for ours, and anything that works differently rather than not at all is marked partial.

Read this alongside the other vendor's own documentation, not instead of it. If something here is wrong about their product, tell us: corrections are treated as bugs rather than as debate, the page gets fixed and its research date is reset so you can see it was revised. That applies whether the correction makes them look better or us look worse.

If Stripe is on your shortlist, these usually are too.

Elsewhere

Bastle vs Stripe: common questions

Why do Stripe and a subscription analytics tool report different MRR?

Because they are measuring different things. Stripe reports what it billed: trialing users are counted as customers, your own test accounts are included, delinquency is treated rigidly, and MRR normalisation follows Stripe's rules rather than yours. An analytics tool reports what the business earned, after those adjustments. Bastle makes each adjustment configurable and shows the formula and source records behind every figure, so the difference between its number and Stripe's is traceable rather than a source of argument. A view that lists the adjustments line by line is on the roadmap.

Is Stripe Sigma's AI assistant as good as Ask?

It is genuinely good at a different job. Sigma's assistant turns a plain-English question into SQL over your Stripe data, which you then run and interpret — powerful if you can read a result set. Ask computes the answer through Bastle's metrics engine, states it in a sentence, and cites the customers, subscriptions and invoices behind it, across every billing source you have connected and using your configured metric definitions. Sigma will answer things about Stripe internals that Bastle cannot. Ask answers business questions without you writing or reading a query.

Do I need an analytics tool if I only use Stripe?

Not necessarily, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. Below a few hundred customers, with a simple plan structure and no trials, Stripe's own dashboards plus occasional Sigma queries cover a lot. The usual triggers for adding a tool are trials distorting your customer count, needing cohort retention or net revenue retention without writing SQL, wanting dunning beyond retries, or acquiring a second billing source.

How stale is Stripe Sigma data?

Sigma's data lags by roughly three hours, which is fine for reporting and awkward when you are watching something happen. Bastle's billing events stream in continuously and metrics recompute against them, with each event carrying both a business time and an ingest time so backdated corrections land in the period they belong to.

Does Bastle replace Stripe's dunning?

No, it works alongside it. Stripe retries the charge; Bastle's Recover contacts the human — a sequence you control across email, SMS and an in-app banner, pointing at a hosted card-update page that writes the new card back to Stripe. Recover is aware of processor retry activity so a customer is not chased for a charge that is about to succeed on its own, and sequences stop the moment payment goes through.

What data does Bastle hold if I connect Stripe?

Enough to compute your metrics: customers, subscriptions, plans, charges, refunds, coupons and their timestamps, backfilled from your first customer. It does not need or receive card numbers. Keeping analytics inside Stripe genuinely avoids adding a data processor, and if that is decisive for your security review it is a legitimate reason to stay put. Full detail on what is stored and how is on the security page.

The honest way to choose is to run both.

Connecting Stripe takes about two minutes; Bastle then backfills your complete billing history, so you can put its numbers next to Stripe's on your own data. Free while in beta, no card required.

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