Maxio vs. Recurly vs. Zoho Billing

In my opinion, Maxio is well suited for a large company with simple products/billing scenarios and 10s of thousands of dollars available to waste on implementation, learning curve, and mistakes. For any other company, I do not advise purchasing Maxio.

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

[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

• Managing deferred revenue.
• Contract management is flexible and allows us to see data that we never had before.
• Billing is painless and is now done within a couple hours. Previously it would take at least 1-2 days.
• Business Metrics and Reporting.

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

• Integrating with other ZoHo modules
• Pricing

• Options for Cash-based businesses. While it's not GAAP compliant and most users are accrual, many SaaS start ups are still small and operating on a cash basis.
• Commissions Module since SO already has all our data intergrations
• So many different features and data entry points that manual data entry errors are common

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

• Declined payments, there wasn't a big alarm that went off automatically when a payment was declined. I have set up different notifications when this happens in the future though.

Incentivized

They are a crucial piece of what we do. We hope to have them as a vendor for a long time to come.

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

There is definitely a learning curve - to me the UI for reporting was not intuitive and often required me to ask our RevOps to pull data for me

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

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.

They are willing to help with most challenges and are pretty easy to get ahold of by phone. They are limited in their reach, when it comes to bulk cancellations, along with some other bulk edits. It is no fault to them, Chargify is just a system that hasn’t been upgraded much over the years.

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 inherited SaaSOptics from several predecessors that worked on it before me. I believe they used Chargebee or Chargify before SaaSOptics, but I haven't used them. I pray that the market comes up with a better product for subscription revenue management, SaaS metric reporting, and financial projections. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the team to be able to successfully complete the transition to new software at this time, so I feel like I'm stuck with SaaSOptics at this point

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

Zoho [Subscriptions] is a lot easier to set up recurring payments and notifications than [Stripe] or [PayPal] alone. They offer notification reminders that will help manage clients, versus setting up an API [..] communication system [to] your own with the others. Clients have an easier time changing credit cards around in Zoho [Subscriptions,] whereas in Stripe and Paypal, you have a lot more manual work.

Thryv is [an] all in one [package] for both one time and recurring payments, which I prefer over Zoho [Subscriptions], without having to create new client files in each system; [Thryv] [...] also has notification options which is a time saver. Thryv can also send test email review requests after a trigger or an [invoice] has been paid, whereas you would have to create an API integration with another service to do so in Zoho [Subscriptions]. Overall, Zoho [Subscriptions] is a great system, for most of my personal clients logging into different systems for different needs. [In] addition to subscriptions, [this] is the downfall, but it [is] still a great option for many businesses.

Incentivized

• Limitations in Chargify's invoicing capability has resulted in our finance team having to manually send invoices from our accounting system. This has resulted in 10-15 hours a week of resource wasted on something that Chargify should automatically do. If this isn't addressed, then the wasted time will increase as we scale.

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

• We no longer worry about missing payments or tracking the rental program.

Incentivized