Recharge vs. Recurly

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Recharge
Score 5.1 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
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
RechargeRecurly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$249
per month
Professional
Get a custom quote
per month
Elite
Get a custom quote
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
RechargeRecurly
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsFor 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
RechargeRecurly
User Ratings
RechargeRecurly
Likelihood to Recommend
2.0
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
2.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
RechargeRecurly
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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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.
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Pros
  • Auto trigger subscription orders
  • Buy box widgets on the website
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  • 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.
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Cons
  • We would like to see a bit more design concepts with their product page widget
  • It would also be nice if they had a "Points Program" rather than just a Loyalty Program that worked off of money back
  • Very rarely their admin UI will hang, causing us to log out and try again.
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  • I would like it if an agent accessed Recurly for any reason that it tracks it using the agent's name or login information.
  • The time stamp on refunds processed can be confusing as it sometimes shows midnight when we don't, as such, I would like to see a change in that.
  • Would like if the report for transitioned showed who completed the transition.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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
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Usability
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.
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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.
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Support Rating
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.
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They have always been quick to respond and help. I love their chat feature at the bottom right-hand corner of the platform.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
We implemented Recurly ourself both for client, backend and bi in a weeks time
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Alternatives Considered
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).
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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.
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Return on Investment
  • Our subscriptions are 33% up already from our previous system
  • Email automation is working super smoothly
  • Their tools (like Cancelation Prevention) really do help with order churn
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  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Recurly Screenshots

Screenshot of payments with smart routing to improve transaction success rates and conversions by offering a variety of payment methods, such as credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH.Screenshot of the flexible ways to configure subscription billings workflows, and automate recurring invoicing based on the subscription parameters.Screenshot of automated dunning communications to increase collection effectiveness. Configurable across period and timing, if the payment is past due or declined, selected and personalized dunning campaign launch.Screenshot of the features to set up and test different products, plans, and pricing options, plus promotional tools like free trials, coupons, and gift subscriptions and cards to attract more customers.Screenshot of Recurly analytics, which provides a 360° view into the health of a subscription business's plan performance, churn trends, campaigns results, financial metrics. These inform decisions for business growth.