Braintree, a PayPal service vs. Maxio

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.

Incentivized

SaaSOptics is awesome for growing companies that want to automate their invoicing. I like that it is also aimed at subscription based sales structures rather than sales that occur at a single point in time (but has the ability to support both). SaaSOptics makes it super easy to keep track of subscriptions, renewals, co-terms, etc. The reporting is a great feature, but we are unable to use most of the reports as we are a cash-based accounting firm. SO caters to accrual accounting and GAAP compliant firms which makes sense as it is the most commonly accepted accounting basis here in the US, but many small SaaS start-ups are still operating on cash basis. We are one of those companies, so we are able to get a ton of use out of the invoicing side of things, a lot of the reports are useless for us. We also wish SO had a commission module since we already integrate our CRM and accounting softwares into it, but that is not a make it or break it for us. We love the time SO has saved us.

Incentivized

• Extremely reliable which is incredibly important for payment processing
• Accepts all payments types we need to be able to accept from all around the world, which is very important for an international company like ours
• Has a great, easy to use API for building out additional functionality that Braintree itself doesn't support

Incentivized

• Chargify's API is solid and easy to use, including JSON and XML interfaces.
• Chargify's customer service is responsive and thorough; always making sure your needs as a customer are met.
• Chargify listens to its customer base and their suggestions for feature enhancements.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We have contracts that are 12 months long but customers pay monthly. When terms change (raise or lower price) mid contract, changes are not easy.
• AR collection was an issue. However, SaaSOptics just released a report to track outstanding invoices and it works great.
• Integration with QuickBooks is OK but it isn't straightforward to issue a credit memo for a particular customer.

Incentivized

There's a huge cost in migrating payment providers, and we're very happy with Braintree so far.

Incentivized

They are a crucial piece of what we do. We hope to have them as a vendor for a long time to come.

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.

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.

Incentivized

They are willing to help with most challenges and are pretty easy to get ahold of by phone. They are limited in their reach, when it comes to bulk cancellations, along with some other bulk edits. It is no fault to them, Chargify is just a system that hasn’t been upgraded much over the years.

Incentivized

It is simple for a developer to do.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Maxio (via information we found on their website and in the initial sales call) seemed like the most comprehensive fit at the time and we liked the interface. We eventually found out that there was a massive gap between what was promised us and what was actually delivered. Below is an excerpt to an email that we sent to the technical solutions consultant and sales rep three months after purchase: "I am, however, frustrated that a solution promised in the demo call ended up being a solution that was so cumbersome that 1) no one knew how to implement it except [tech consultant], who I was never able to get ahold of 2) it delayed our launch by two months and resulted in real frustration for my team and thousands of dollars in lost revenue and 3) brought more effort and annoyance to our customers than we were anticipating. I'm bringing this to your attention because I strongly feel that there has been a discrepancy between possible solutions and actual solutions. It is frustrating to make a purchase decision based on features discussed during a demo call, develop a plan of action based on what was discussed, and then have to iterate for months on end. It is also frustrating to hear that something is an "easy" solution by one team member and then hear it is "difficult and not recommended" by another."

• 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.

Incentivized

• SaaSOptics has helped decrease the time spent on month-end. Their reporting is always accurate and reconciling deferred revenue is no longer a headache.
• Increased accuracy in billing which has decreased the amount of invoice inquiries by our clients.
• Sped up the quote-to-cash process with Salesforce.com and Stripe integration. Sales orders are processed faster and customers are utilizing "buttons" on invoices to submit payment details.
• Increased our ability to stay on top of past due invoices with new collections module.
• The metrics in SaaSOptics has improved financial presentations by providing more insight into our business.

Incentivized