BQE CORE vs. Chargebee vs. Recurly

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

Well-suited:

• In a B2B set up - Post achieving some scale and having outgrown Google Sheets/ Excels. Won't add much value if you are dealing with fewer than 400-500 invoices a year.
• We haven't explored their B2C subscription management side - but that is one of the key strengths of the platform.

Incentivized

Recurly is great for tracking transactions and reviewing payment method declines. The platform is extremely helpful when dealing with scenarios where someone believes they have been fraudulently charged for the product. Recurly allows for transaction filtering, which is very helpful when trying to find possibly fraudulent charges very easy. If expecting precise, detailed information about a card decline, Recurly would not be very helpful.

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• Reliable: We've had virtually no issues since launch.
• Care about customers: Chargebee's account managers/support team have always been very helpful/responsive.
• Feature-rich: Chargebee has a ton of features that help us do what we want and they are consistently adding new features every quarter.

Incentivized

• It handles 1:1 and 1:many accounts to subscription set up.
• It has a good billing customization option (cadence, pricing, etc.)
• Can easily set up a customer account and invoice - billing link can be generated so no need to take credit card info over chat, phone, or email.
• Great and responsive customer support.
• Supports multi-language.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

• It wasn't allowing us to add a one time purchase without making it an ongoing subscription with only one payment. They may have fixed it very recently but that was a big pain from a reporting perspective (it was including one time purchasers as subscribers)
• Email automation is not very robust. Difficult to customize triggers by subscription, you have to send the same message to all subscribers for a specific action
• Wish it had a way to write off and cancel the subscription of customers who haven't updated their cc info. That can be a long painful and very manual process. And if that feature is available somewhere they don't do a good job of making that clear.

Incentivized

• I really can't think of any shortcomings on Recurly because they have tried to cover all bases well. However, I believe that pricing could be little competitive because Recurly can become quite expensive when you have acquired a good number of subscribers. So apart from price, there are no shortcomings I can think of on product side.

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

I believe we would continue to use Recurly because they have shown that they are continually improving their software, and they listen to their customers

Incentivized

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.

Incentivized

Apart from a lot of scope, which it has for improvement, like analytics, api's, customer service, downtimes. It still provides a lot of value, it is helpful for us in Business crtical areas, managing subscriptions and creating and launching coupons, ease of usability, camparatively lower maintainence are some valid reasons to prefer Recurly.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

Chargebee is simple to use, and we have had little need for support.

Incentivized

They have always been quick to respond and help. I love their chat feature at the bottom right-hand corner of the platform.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

The major reason to go with chargebee is its costing as compared to its competitors it is much useful and value for money.Also it has many features that is very practical and efficient to use it.I recommend to the people who involves low costing as well as futuristic features.

Incentivized

Recurly does a much better job at handling subscription payments than QuickBooks Online. We only use QuickBooks Online when we have a client who cannot pay via credit/debit card. In those cases, we send out automatic invoices via QuickBooks Online instead. 95% of our clients are processed through Recurly.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• It was a step in the right direction compared to ReCharge
• It had negative impacts on our revenue before we had our developers put some work into improving its capabilities with our website and software
• Now, we are seeing some positive results (after some costly updating from our end)

Incentivized

• Providing an interface for our subscribers to manage their own accounts has simplified our business tremendously. This alone has freed up hours of our staff's time each day.
• Many customers receive new credit cards due to expiration or fraud. The time we spent in updating this information prior to using Recurly's Revenue Recovery feature versus now is significant.

Incentivized