Comparison

LicensorPro vs Easy Digital Downloads

This is a much closer contest than the Freemius one. EDD is self-hosted, takes no cut of your sales, and its Software Licensing extension does the same core job we do. The differences are architectural, not ideological — and if you already run a WordPress site you are happy with, EDD may well be the right answer.

Prices below are from Easy Digital Downloads' own pricing page, checked 30 July 2026. They were showing introductory rates with renewals at full price, so both figures are given.

The money

Neither product takes a percentage. Both leave you paying only your payment gateway. So this comes down to licence cost, and the thing that matters with EDD is which tier you need: Software Licensing is not in the cheaper plans.

The real difference: a store versus a service

EDD is a WordPress plugin. Your licensing lives inside a WordPress site, alongside your marketing pages, your theme, and every other plugin on it. That is a genuine advantage if you already run that site: one system, one login, one host.

It is also the thing that makes people look for an alternative. Your licence API's uptime becomes your WordPress site's uptime. A plugin conflict, a bad theme update, or a PHP upgrade on the host is now an incident in which customers cannot activate. LicensorPro runs as its own small PHP app — usually on a separate host or subdomain — so your store and your marketing site can break without your customers' activations breaking.

What EDD does that we do not

• It is a full storefront. Product pages, cart, discounts, reviews, upsells, and a large extension library. We have a checkout and a customer portal, not a store.
• Commissions and payouts for multi-vendor marketplaces, built in on the higher tiers.
• A very large ecosystem. More than a decade of extensions, integrations, tutorials and people who have already solved your problem.
• Everything in WordPress. If your team knows WP and nothing else, EDD is one fewer thing to learn and to host.
• Sales tax via extensions and integrations. We do not compute tax at all — see the warning below.

What we do that EDD does not

• Licensing is not coupled to a WordPress site. Separate app, separate uptime, separate failure domain.
• Licensing is in the base price. Our cheapest paid tier licenses software; EDD's two cheapest do not.
• Nineteen payment gateways with per-country routing, including Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Razorpay, Mollie and PayU — so buyers outside the US and EU get a processor that actually works for them.
• Not only WordPress. A dependency-free PHP client licenses any script or app against the same API.
• Lighter to run. PHP 8.2+ with SQLite or MySQL. No WordPress, no theme, no plugin stack under your licence API.

Feature by feature

Which one should you actually pick

Choose EDD if…

• You want one system: store, marketing site and licensing in the same WordPress install.
• You need a real storefront — product pages, cart, reviews, upsells.
• You run a marketplace and need commissions and vendor payouts.
• Your team is WordPress-only and adding a second stack is a real cost.

Choose LicensorPro if…

• You want activations to keep working when your WordPress site does not.
• You only need licensing and updates, and do not want to buy a store to get them.
• Your buyers are outside the US and EU and you need gateways that reach them.
• You sell, or will sell, something that is not a WordPress plugin.

See LicensorPro pricing Or compare against Freemius →