Chargebee vs. Recharge vs. Zoho Billing

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

If you are using Shopify and have plenty of ecommerce orders a month, Recharge is a no brainer when it comes to setting up and using a subscription service. We can't say enough about how well their team works and implements everything along the way. They also teach us common practice things to set up in the admin for customers to use, and help us with reporting and analysis to get better and grow.

Incentivized

[Zoho Subscriptions is great] for startup agencies or businesses that charge monthly subscriptions of some kind. For most other [softwares,] you are paying at least $100 per month just to have the software. Zoho [Subscriptions] gives you the chance to take advantage of starting at [zero dollars,] which keeps your cost down until you understand the software before you have to upgrade. I feel like you can easily bootstrap your startup business to keep costs down. As you [are] moving forward, and are bringing in several thousand per month in revenue, it can scale up without costing a lot. [The subscriptions] [...] [start] to cost more, [...] if you have one time payments; you then need additional software from Zoho [Subscriptions] to handle the needs, and it starts adding up to typical [back- end] management software, with multiple log in points which start to drain your time budget. [At] that point, I ended up looking for a more all in one software that manages both contacts, one time and recurring invoices, reminders, etc. By the time our revenue exceeded [$5,000] per month[,] I [needed] to save time and looked for other options. [However,] I have other friends who still use it and they are generating $10k or more per month.

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

• Auto trigger subscription orders
• Buy box widgets on the website

• Integrating with other ZoHo modules
• Pricing

• 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

• We would like to see a bit more design concepts with their product page widget
• It would also be nice if they had a "Points Program" rather than just a Loyalty Program that worked off of money back
• Very rarely their admin UI will hang, causing us to log out and try again.

Incentivized

• You need other Zoho tools like CRM and Books or Inventory.
• When changing an email in Subscriptions it changes it in the Zoho CRM.
• No notification of a failed payment.

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

In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.

Zoho Billing covers our subscription and invoicing needs well and fits nicely into our Zoho setup, but its broken GA4 integration is a real limitation for our use case.

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

Incentivized

In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.

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

We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).

Incentivized

Beats doing it manually...

Incentivized

• 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

• Our subscriptions are 33% up already from our previous system
• Email automation is working super smoothly
• Their tools (like Cancelation Prevention) really do help with order churn

Incentivized

• Professional look to billing and reminders which retains clients.
• Save time setting up recurring payments.
• Simple system to learn to get value quickly from software.

Incentivized