Braintree, a Paypal service and subsidiary, is a billing platform which stores credit card data directly from the merchant’s systems on secure servers, and it allows for cards to be recharged or refunded . Braintree also supports international payments. Pricing is 2.9% plus a 30c transaction fee.
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Recurly
Score 7.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Recurly is a subscription billing platform and manages customer communications via email, business performance monitoring, and account changes. A merchant bank account is required to work with Recurly. A payment gateway is part of the product but it integrates with other gateways, such as PayPal, to give shoppers a more comprehensive suite of payment options.
$0
per month
Pricing
Braintree, a PayPal service
Recurly
Editions & Modules
Standard Pricing
2.9% +$0.30
per transaction
Custom Pricing
Contact for quote
Core
$0/month plus first $40k/mo. in revenue included for first 12 months
Braintree is a lower cost alternative to many of the options business owners have through their bank. However, they will need to be techy or be working with a developer to set up. The setup and backend isn't as user friendly as alternatives. Braintree is a great option if you'll need to manually type in credit card details. Banks will sometimes charge a lot more for that option. The manual option is nice if your clients aren't as tech savvy and prefer to pay over the phone than to pay on your website.
I think it works best for scenarios where it involves recurring billing. A subscription-based business model can benefit on the platform and maximize its features. It has great customization when it comes to billing cadence, pricing, prepayment, discount options, among others. It also works perfectly with one-off charges so either way, it's a win. It has great integration with Stripe too.
Braintree has excellent integration with the BigCommerce platform. The switch of our previous payment processing gateway to Braintree was very easy and only required a few clicks.
Tying into Braintree's BigCommerce integration, for company's like ours that are on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, Braintree's rates for BigCommerce enterprise customers are extremely competitive and saved us money.
Braintree has a pretty easy to use portal that can be accessed through the same login we use for PayPal which we are using in conjunction with Braintree with ease.
I've only had to call Braintree twice and my customer service issues were handled extremely quickly and easily.
It is very easy to track MRR, which gives you insights into your overall revenues and health of the subscriptions. Though MRR is pretty easy to calculate Recurly puts it beautifully on the dashboard which is very easy to read.
LTV, Recurly calculates lifetime value which is a good insight for adjusting Marketing spends. Even this is available on the dashboard.
The other features like Subscriber churn Rate, Average revenue per customer etc are really great and would help the marketing team a lot.
The coupons feature is a bit cumbersome. It can become tricky to set up, apply, and un-apply coupons for a particular client. If you have special billing cases where you discount for a few months or give a client service in any irregular fashion, using coupons can become tricky.
We have a referral program with our clients where they receive a perpetual monthly discount for each client they refer to use. The client receives this discount as long as their referral remains active with us. We would like to be able to apply a discount to a client account, and have the ability to remove that discount in the event a referral ends service with us. In some cases a client has referred several clients, and we would like to apply a discount for each referral, and still have the ability to remove one or more discounts as referrals begin and end service with us. Currently there is no way to do this in Recurly. There isn't even a very good work-around, which is disappointing.
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
Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.
Braintree is better at handling international payments and supporting a variety of payment methods that can all be configured from the same dashboard. Braintree supports PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. in addition to simply credit cards like Stripe. Braintree has a vault of existing user payment methods so the user doesn't have to re-enter their information each time.
Fewer codings are needed, however, the simplicity with Recurly is found once all the information needed is there. I have seen where Recurly is integrated with any other product we use; however, Salesforce does have the ability to be integrated with other products. This is done through coding.
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.
