Plaid vs. Square Invoices

Plaid is extremely well suited to be your payment API if you're a start-up looking to scale your banking connections fast and securely. Their API is fully functional upon integration. Most end-users have encountered Plaid before so it's a trusted platform for many consumers so even if you're a new app, users feel comfortable connecting their bank through Plaid.

Incentivized

Square Invoices is the best service that I have found for what it does: it's easy to use, nice to look at, and never seems to go to spam or be lost by clients. Clients mention that the setup is easier than services my competitors use. You can even attach your contract to the invoice, which is wonderful in case there are questions later on. Unfortunately, not being able to have clients alter quantities or select add-ons means for half of my services, I have to use a different, inferior service.

Incentivized

• Plaid connects with 100s of US consumer banks.
• Plaid continuously updates its software to meet the requirements of individual banks.
• Plaid can get your company's payment processing up and running faster than traditional methods.

Incentivized

• Adding a customer to invoice is super simple and takes minimal effort.
• Payment collection is easy and seamless because Square Invoices allows the recipient to pay using credit/cards.
• One of the fest features is allowing invoices to be recurring. If my contract stipulates a flat fee monthly, I can set the invoices to recur monthly for the duration of the contract.

Incentivized

• Consumer feedback or troubleshooting typically comes back to us because Plaid doesn't have an easy way of re-routing support once a user encounters a problem.
• Update timelines could be clearer when they are working on updating a connection with a certain bank.
• The search functionality for the user to find their bank could be a little more robust.

Incentivized

• The reports section is not always the easiest to understand. It seems like I have to stop and think about options instead of it being 100% intuitive.
• With the fees we pay per transaction, it would be nice to be able to add additional "limited" users for no extra cost.

Incentivized

The only time I had a problem was a false chargeback from a client. Square Invoices referenced our contract and ruled in my favor, and they did so in a timely manner. I sent them the contract and my email history with the client, and they quickly unfroze the amount of money.

Incentivized

Square Invoices is easier to use and automatically transfers your money to your bank account vs Paypal that holds your money and you have to manually transfer and it takes 3-5 days (many times more). Square Invoices looks better overall, and for the same fees as Paypal, provides a better service overall.

Incentivized

• Plaid got us up and running with most US-based and even some international banks with minimal engineering effort.

Incentivized

• I love that I can sort my invoices in total, or by a specific time period to see how my sales are doing and comparing to prior time periods.

Incentivized