Last Updated on May 12, 2025 by Ewen Finser
If you’ve got to the point where you’re thinking about selling your business, it’s the sort of thing you may only do once or twice in your life.
It’s important you get it right.
Not unlike going to university, getting married, or buying your first home, it’s a big and expensive mistake if you make the wrong choice.
Now, I won’t go into the details of everything you need to pull together to start the sales process. There’s a useful guide here that contains a lot of what you need to know.
But I do want to talk about Flippa.
If you’re at the stage where you’re considering where and how to sell your business, then there’s no doubt you’ve heard of Flippa. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for you. Let’s look at some alternatives.
First: What is Flippa and is it the Best Option for You?
Flippa is one of the big names in small business M&A. It’s a trusted platform that’s been around since 2009.
Since it launched, over 100,000 deals have been done through the platform. It’s got an active community of 450,000 entrepreneurs (buyers and sellers).
However, it’s sector-agnostic, which could be an upside or downside, depending on your business and the type of buyer you’re looking for. If you want to go more niche, then casting such a wide net may not be useful.
Flippa is also a pay-to-play environment, and how much you pay (to expand your reach) depends on your budget. It also depends on your target sale price. (For anything over $100,000, you can enlist the active support of an M&A broker through Flippa, for anything lower than that, you’re on your own.)
Make sure you budget for all of this. An M&A Broker package with Flippa starts at $799/month, billed in 6-monthly lump sums, and if they do find a suitable buyer, then the success fee is a minimum of 10% of the sale value.
For context, brokers in general will take anywhere from 10 – 20% of your business sale value, so it’s worth investing time to find the right one. But, not every broker charges to list your business for sale the way Flippa does. That would be like a realtor charging a seller to list their house on the market.
Some brokers go off-market, so there aren’t any public listings to consider, and in many cases, this proves preferable to the DIY, public-listing approach that many M&A platforms offer.
With that in mind, let’s look at 6 of the best Flippa alternatives.
6 Flippa Alternatives
1. Quiet Light
The first option is to go off-market, go the broker route, and therefore avoid all of the stress and hassle of a public listing.
Quiet Light is a brokerage where the founders have all exited their own businesses at various points. This is a valuable skill and one that can’t be taught.
It shows that the team completely understands the upsides, pitfalls, and challenges when selling a business, and this is infused into how Quiet Light supports founders who want to sell, and buyers who are looking to make an acquisition.
It’s also useful and a credit to the Quiet Light team that they won’t try to sell any and every business that comes to them. They’ll first make sure that your business is sale-ready, and that you’re ready to go through the sales process, which will also ensure you get the best price possible.
All of these are things that M&A platforms won’t put as much emphasis on. Flippa (and most of its alternatives) are simply looking to get as many businesses listed and paying fees as possible, even if a company isn’t sale-ready. Quiet Light is different, and if your business is sale-ready, then they will support you every step of the way.
The upside of this is that, based on their processes and network of qualified buyers, they do everything possible to ensure that 85% of sales happen within 90 days. The downside, of course, is that you may not qualify.
2. Acquire
Next up is Acquire, another one that you’ve probably heard of, especially if you are a SaaS, solo/indie, or AI startup founder.
It’s not that they only serve those markets; it’s simply that those are the markets and segments that Acquire has the most experience with and serves better than others.
More than 2000 startups have been sold through Acquire, with a combined deal value of over $500 million. From start to finish, Acquire says that the process to sell is around 90 days, and reviews suggest they are good at this, with average ratings of 4.7/5.
Because the service is a mix of automated, done-for-you marketing and brokerage, it’s not cheap. But it could prove to be effective if you’re a SaaS founder looking for a buyer.
3. Investors Club
Investors Club seems to serve more of the lower-end of the M&A market, closer to the 5 than the 7-figure exit range. Hence why it costs zero to list and zero to shop for potential buyers.
For this reason, most listings are free unless you choose to pay for a Premium listing and support. If you do, then there’s also a success fee, which can be anywhere from 5% to 30% of the sale price of your business. You may have luck on here, but as always, you get what you pay for.
4. BizBuySell
With over 15 million page views and 65,000 businesses getting listed every year, BizBuySell is a busy and popular M&A platform.
However, the downsides of that are the fact that once listed, you could end up inundated with time-wasters and tire-kickers. That’s one of the dangers of listing on high-traffic sites like this.
Have a plan if you aim to sell via BizBuySell or similar platforms. Know how you will tackle the vetting process.
5. Onfolio
Onfolio is a little different. It’s neither an M&A platform nor a broker, although they will refer you to brokers if your business isn’t suitable but is sale-ready.
Onfolio is a Nasdaq-listed M&A portfolio that is busy buying (mainly) agencies with over $500K in profits, solid teams (or at least, solid processes), growth potential, and founders that want to hand over the reins to experienced operators/managers.
Onfolio has been around for a few years now, continues to grow and centralize certain functions, like sales, and could be ideal for agency founders looking to exit.
6. Empire Flippers
First launched in 2011 as AdSense Flippers, Empire Flippers has evolved into one of the world’s leading M&A platforms.
EF seems to specialize in selling Amazon-based businesses, and other eCommerce ones, so they’re more B2C and DTC than SaaS and B2B experts.
They’ve got an extensive list of criteria for what they can and can’t sell and what you need to give before they can list your business. As a result, it can take a while to get listed and then find a buyer.
If they do find you a buyer, then the success fees they take are on a sliding scale, anywhere from 15% for under $700,000, and going up (or rather, down) to 2.5% for anything valued over $5 million.
If I were going to sell a business today, I’d go with Quiet Light for numerous reasons. I think it’s worth it to have a team that knows how to position your company, will go out and look for buyers, and will vet them before making an introduction. That’s a massive time-saver and makes the whole process a lot less stressful.
Other top options include Acquire for SaaS and Onfolio for agencies. Both of these having niche specialties makes the process better for all involved.