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.
N/A
Recurly
Score 8.6 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.
$249
per month
Pricing
Braintree, a PayPal service
Recurly
Editions & Modules
Standard Pricing
2.9% +$0.30
per transaction
Custom Pricing
Contact for quote
Starter
$249
per month
Professional
Get a custom quote
per month
Elite
Get a custom quote
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Braintree, a PayPal service
Recurly
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
For startups and SMBs looking to launch today and grow their subscription business fast, the Starter plan (formerly Core) is available with no monthly platform fee plus no payment volume fee for first $40,000 USD per month in first 3 months for new customers only.
Braintree is a good payment processor if you are looking to accept multiple payment methods across multiple geographies and localizations. It is also a good place to keep a single source of truth for customer payments and keeping payment methods on file. If you are only in one geography or would be fine with accepting only a single payment type, Braintree is not a good choice.
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.
Recurly is very easy to use. Their UI is very clean and intuitive, so my staff has no problem understanding how to handle payments in Recurly. They just released a new UI, which is currently in Beta, but does an even better job making the user experience great.
Recurly really helps reduce the time involved in collecting payment from a client. They have a dunning process which detects when a transaction has failed, and automatically re-tries running the payment several times before giving up. Recurly gives you full flexibility on how the dunning process works, including the ability to send your client payment declined notifications every few days to inspire them to update their payment info.
Recurly just added a new feature which can automatically update credit card information from clients whose card has expired. They ping the credit card company (visa, MC, AMEX, Discover) to retrieve new card information for cards who have just gone past their expiration dates. This is extremely handy, and has reduced the number of times we've had to contact our client to get updated billing information.
Recurly has excellent customer service. You can chat with an agent and receive an instant reply to your questions. I love this.
Not all companies support the use of Braintree. I wish there was more back-end support on some of the sites we wanted to use. This is more about the sites we want to use and less about Braintree, but it's worth mentioning.
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
As a product, functionality has been fine for us. In our experience, some issues during On Boarding but because we had a dedicated Account Manager assigned to us, these issues were dealt with. Now we are a customer, it feels like they have stopped caring about us or aren't interested in working with us to resolve any issues we have.
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.
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.
Paypal's Business plan has a monthly charge in addition to the per transaction charges if you'd like to use recurring billing. Braintree gives you recurring billing options without the monthly charge and automatically sends a transaction receipt to the client each month. Once it is set up it is completely hands off which saves a lot of time.
Bank of America merchant products. They charge extra for setups that include manually entered credit cards. They also have high start up costs that would take a while to pay for themselves due since we don't process enough transactions to make it worthwhile.
We did try to custom build a recurring option in these tools that we've tried, but Recurly offers a different level of support on our ever growing customers who either fit into our normal subscription business/billing model and those who do not. It allows us to see what's going on in our side of the business without digging through a lot of codes and reports.
The competitive rates we are receiving with Braintree through their program for BigCommerce enterprise customers have saved us quite a bit in sales costs.
Braintree's fraud detection is likely set to very high as when we switched to Braintree we only received 1 fraudulent transaction in 2 years which is a huge relief.
Prompt disbursements have granted us faster ROI than other payment processors.
If you have considered spending a little and saving a lot of time, then Recurly is a great fit. We are a small team and we handle a lot of subscriptions and also get good insights into how our business is doing. So in a way Recurly is helping us a lot.
