Chargebee vs. Recurly vs. Stripe 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

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

If you have a small to medium sized business Stripe is most likely the perfect solution for you. It will automate almost all of your billing, freeing up your time to be used elsewhere. If you have a large business I would recommend getting in touch with the Stripe customer support team first to ensure it will be a good fit for you.

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

• Stripe attempts to bill clients multiple times, so if the initial attempt to collect payment fails, they keep trying. Often payment is collected on the 2nd or 3rd try. This ability to re-try billing attempts with the same user on a monthly basis increases the overall amount we collect in payments.
• It is easy to search for customers using Stripe- type in the first few letters of the subscriber's name and they immediately appear. It's a simple feature, but very useful when fielding customer service calls.
• Stripe does make it easy to create new coupon codes or issue partial or total refunds.

• 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

• Dashboard gives too much info for dept. use, may vary for others.
• Be able to export multiple invoices as a PDF at once.
• Getting to the invoices can be tricky if you have to click on multiple links.

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

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

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

I have had no problems with Stripe support, they are prompt and it does not crash like other platforms or software. They are also great about notifying if maintenance is needed. Since the interface is so easy to use, I haven’t had to contact support that much, versus other platforms, it can be hard to be aware of certain features.

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

Our previous product was Cloudnet360, which provides an integrated shopping cart and CRM. With Cloudnet, our customers had to leave our site and go to an outside checkout page in order to purchase. In addition, Stripe provides a robust API which allows us to automate more of the work of maintaining a subscription service.

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

• 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

• By managing our e-commerce, Stripe makes it easy to have a subscription business, so it automates the whole thing.
• ROI would be much higher with better analytics -- having to create reports and segment customers manually is a pain and definitely eats into the ROI of the product
• I would also like to see more AI applied to the reporting and data for better insights

Incentivized