ChargeBee is an all in one subscription billing solution designed to handle all the complexity of recurring billing. The product integrates with a range of other SaaS applications including SalesForce, accounting, and order fulfillment systems. Some key features include: Managed Subscription Billing, Flexible Billing Support and Automated Notifications.
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Recurly
Score 8.7 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
Chargebee
Recurly
Editions & Modules
Scale
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Starter
$249
per month
Professional
Get a custom quote
per month
Elite
Get a custom quote
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Chargebee
Recurly
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
No transaction based fees. No setup cost.
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.
Chargebee is also one of the best platform in order to provide proper billing management to the customers by providing their configuration needs to be corrected in order to deploy and made the connection relevant to the specific position which is one of the best usecase.It also provides support in order to rectifying issues.
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.
[I feel] customer service never actually fixes any problems. They make you gather information they easily could, write up a big report of the problem, and then tell you why it's not working (usually not even correct). [In my experience] they never actually solve a problem. Not to mention, [in my experience] you can never speak with anyone immediately and coms turnaround is usually over 24 hours.
So far, I can not get my customers to checkout online, even after hiring professional developers to help.
[I believe] QBO sync is a mess.
My account is set up to send payment tokens to Authorize.Net, and no matter how much I disable every possible security feature, I still have 100's of declined cards, that work perfectly well.
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
It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.
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.
Chargebee is a class apart from Zoho Books - better in all aspects - better interface, more functionalities, integrations that actually work, responsive support, customisable automated reporting, more customizability. The only difference is pricing - Zoho comes at about 10% of what Chargebee costs. So for startups looking to graduate from Google Sheets and on a budget - Zoho will serve your purposes - but eventually will have to move to something like a Chargebee.
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.
Chargebee has allowed us to focus on the most important part of our business: the product, instead of cumbersome development to manage subscriptions. The time ROI that it saved allowing us to get our product to market was invaluable.
Chargebee also made sense financially. Paying the subscription was far cheaper than developing something similar (or even far inferior) ourselves
Overall it's saved us quite a bit of time, money, and allows employees to easily manage subscriptions which is extremely important to us.
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.
