Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.
N/A
Recharge
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
ReCharge, the eponymous subscription management software solution from ReCharge Payments headquartered in Santa Monica, is said by the vendor to have helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, they state ReCharge drives billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.
N/A
Pricing
Piano Activation
Recharge
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Piano Activation
Recharge
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Piano Activation
Recharge
Considered Both Products
Piano Activation
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Piano Activation
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building …
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 …
Recharge has been in use for a long time at this brand, before a lot of the emerging competition has sprung up. Whenever I research or use a different piece of subscription software, Recharge feels old and stagnate to me. It doesn't feel like they're keeping up with changes in …
Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
Recharge's entry level subscription plans are cheap, allowing small brands to spin up a subscription program and get started. But at scale, Recharge gets expensive compared to much of the competition and runs into many limitations around subscription acquisition, management, and retention. We run into regular bugs and issues that are time consuming to fix. In my opinion, much of Recharge's functionality updates are adding on new features that they charge you for even though much of the subscription related functionality is clunky, sluggish, and doesn't perform incredibly well.
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.
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.
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
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).
