Braintree, a PayPal service vs. WooCommerce Subscriptions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Braintree, a PayPal service
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
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
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a premium extension for WooCommerce which supports recurring payments and subscription-based services and products.N/A
Pricing
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Editions & Modules
Standard Pricing
2.9% +$0.30
per transaction
Custom Pricing
Contact for quote
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Considered Both Products
Braintree, a PayPal service
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
In my opinion, Braintree, a PayPal service, have a better user platform which makes it easier to see your daily/weekly/monthly revenue figures and processing refunds is simple to. Having functionality between Paypal & Braintree has been useful too which is why we opted to use …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
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 …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
Braintree allows our customers to integrate their existing merchant processor to the Braintree gateway, whereas the other options require you use their merchant processor (full stack).
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
We went with Braintree without trying or even investigating other alternatives which was a shame.
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
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 …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
We used Braintree over Stripe because our developer was more familiar with Braintree and was able to integrate it the way we needed to. However, Stripe seemed like a good option but there wasn't any compelling reason in price or other features that made it worth taking more …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
We started using Chargify, but migrated to Braintree due to its more up-to-date libraries and easy integration with Paypal. We have not tried any other competitor, however, Stripe seems very interesting, specially now that their cross-country support is really broad. We are not …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
At the time Braintree was cheaper and much quicker and easier to implement then Barclaycard. Braintree will pay you in the currency of your choice (within reason) which is a distinct advantage over PayPal which is limited to your domestic currency.
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
We use Braintree because we got recommended by another user, it has no fees at the beginning and it's very well documented.
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
The price and quality has been a part of why we chose Braintree as our main payment method. We started with PayPal but as the business was growing, we needed a system that was easy to implement to get paid by cards. We looked into Stripe, but it was more difficult to implement, …
Chose Braintree, a PayPal service
Prior to Braintree, we used authorize.net which is actually great however authorize.net's rates were not as competitive as Braintree's. One advantage that I would have to give to authorize over Braintree is their incredibly robust system which has settings and customization …
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe is a simple setup but doesn't offer customer subscription management. We use WooCommerce Subscriptions because we need that feature
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a good alternative in this case because it's built into our system which is already using Wordpress and WooCommerce Subscriptions for other products. The other systems I mention here are also useful and have their place, but do not integrate into …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
Stripe subscriptions, PayPal subscriptions, LearnDash. I like that WooCommerce works with multiple payment processors and it makes it easy to remove people from a group or membership if they haven't paid that month.
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
We liked that WooCommerce Subscriptions was easier to implement, use, and (slightly) modify over Shopify's subscription model. We can implement and grow Wordpress and WooCommerce (with subscriptions) on our micro-sites fairly quickly and without much long term hassle. The UI is …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
It's just much better than simply using Stripe or other WordPress payment plugins that only rely on Stripe. We can incorporate non-Stripe supported payment gateways such as PayPal and Amazon Payments which support recurring payments. More options for the user means less …
Chose WooCommerce Subscriptions
I have not used other subscription platforms so it is difficult to say how WooCommerce Subscriptions stacks up against them. We selected WooCommerce Subscriptions because we moved our site over to the Word Press platform. It has been a great plugin and does exactly what we need …
Best Alternatives
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Small Businesses
Stripe Payments
Stripe Payments
Score 8.5 out of 10
2Checkout from Verifone
2Checkout from Verifone
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
1.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
5.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
1.6
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Braintree, a PayPal serviceWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a solid option for WordPress based eCommerce sites, particularly if you are already using WooCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It works for simple subscriptions, allows for customization in terms of email notifications, pricing, coupons, etc. It obviously would not be a good fit for non-WordPress websites, and it may be too much if all you need are very simple subscription plans.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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
Read full review
  • Ease of ability for customers to purchase a product and choose their re-occurring timelines.
  • Well laid out admin UI to manage orders
  • Fair amount of customizable options within the plugin to suit varying needs
  • Updating the plugin is quick and painless
Read full review
Cons
  • 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.
Read full review
  • Better syncing to ActiveCampaign for renewal reminders
  • Make it easier for clients to update their credit cards and have it automatically apply to all subscriptions
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
There's a huge cost in migrating payment providers, and we're very happy with Braintree so far.
Read full review
We are very likely to renew our Woo Commerce subscriptions add on. We are dedicated to WordPress and plan to grow our business significantly. Woo Commerce subscriptions enables us to manage and extend our subscription revenue easily. We did not have this a few years ago and we have seen the uplift in revenue from using it!
Read full review
Usability
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.
Read full review
I like almost everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions EXCEPT one of the main reasons we started using it has never worked out. When we started this subscription box company, I discovered that it was difficult to track how many of each unique product we needed to order to fulfill subscriptions. In my naivete, I thought it was a simple task . 4 years later, I have recently developed my own custom solution (after learning 5 different programming languages) and I now use the WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions API to get the data I need from the store en masse. Basically, I offer multiple selections that customers can make as part of their subscriptions. WooCommerce does not offer totals or reports for anything up that is not tracked using a 'variation ID' which you have to manually generate. My products have 80 or so variations per product sometimes and the WooCommerce system was actually a little buggy when I tried setting them all up at once so I gave up. Now I know that without that info, the selections in orders are treated as metadata and handled almost as if they are not relevant to the order
Read full review
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
The ticketing system of WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions is not state of the art. I wish it were an intercom type of support, But I honestly very rarely need support so it's partially a non-issue. Documentation is also very good so it preemptively addresses things that you might typically need support on. One thing I hate about WooCommerce plugins' support MO is that you're always asked to reset to the standard WP theme and deactivate all plugins, which is near impossible to do in a production environment. So their preliminary steps for offering support are highly onerous.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
It is simple for a developer to do.
Read full review
It was a smooth and easy implementation for us. Downloaded the add-on and made a few integrations to salesforce and shipstation and we were up and running within a day
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high fees that Cratejoy charges per transaction in their marketplace and you would be setting yourself up for growth in the future as you continue to develop your own store.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Read full review
  • We were able to create a low-price recurring revenue offer
  • Additional recurring revenue totalled 5 figures a year from a fairly simple membership subscription in our case
  • Our admin team already know how to use WooCommerce Subscriptions so adding this in didn't require any extra resources
Read full review
ScreenShots