Braintree, a PayPal service vs. Subscription Genius (discontinued)

Braintree is a lower cost alternative to many of the options business owners have through their bank. However, they will need to be techy or be working with a developer to set up. The setup and backend isn't as user friendly as alternatives. Braintree is a great option if you'll need to manually type in credit card details. Banks will sometimes charge a lot more for that option. The manual option is nice if your clients aren't as tech savvy and prefer to pay over the phone than to pay on your website.

Incentivized

I would avoid [it] for any subscription management. Personally, we had a torrid experience with the product and company. The platform is dated and feels like an afterthought or a sideline project for Pape Ventures. They certainly don’t invest any time in developing the product and it feels like there is a real ‘Can’t do’ attitude from the management.

• Braintree has excellent integration with the BigCommerce platform. The switch of our previous payment processing gateway to Braintree was very easy and only required a few clicks.
• Tying into Braintree's BigCommerce integration, for company's like ours that are on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, Braintree's rates for BigCommerce enterprise customers are extremely competitive and saved us money.
• Braintree has a pretty easy to use portal that can be accessed through the same login we use for PayPal which we are using in conjunction with Braintree with ease.
• I've only had to call Braintree twice and my customer service issues were handled extremely quickly and easily.

Incentivized

• Initial sales was strong.
• Their website looks the part.
• You feel like they are genuine.

• Not a very good subscription management platform for a Saas business, but they make up for it on the API with others that are
• Doesn't have a lot of additional features, but that's what you'd expect out of a payment processor
• Very expensive per transaction, but the reality is that any processor who helps early stage companies accept online payments are expensive.

Incentivized

• Failed to deliver on promises.
• Auto renew function never worked from the start.
• Facebook Pixel Tracking never worked.
• Support failed to return calls.
• Support failed to return emails.
• Generally ignored.
• It ended up costing us double. I had to waste time chasing them to deliver on a product that never worked.
• Feels like a side project or afterthought.
• No new development time.
• Feels like it has been mothballed.

There's a huge cost in migrating payment providers, and we're very happy with Braintree so far.

Incentivized

It just works.

Incentivized

Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.

Incentivized

It is simple for a developer to do.

Incentivized

Braintree is better at handling international payments and supporting a variety of payment methods that can all be configured from the same dashboard. Braintree supports PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. in addition to simply credit cards like Stripe. Braintree has a vault of existing user payment methods so the user doesn't have to re-enter their information each time.

Incentivized

• Simplified billing so we spend less time on it
• Saved $20 a month or more when compared to alternatives that have a monthly charge.
• It gives peace of mind because we know that any service we use in the future will likely integrate with Braintree

Incentivized

• We actually lost money and further time
• We ended up reverting back to manual subscription management