Recharge vs. 2Checkout from Verifone

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.

2Checkout Monetization Platform is well suited for emerging SaaS businesses because along with payment processing, they offer you exposure to Affiliates and make electronic code delivery easy. The dashboard is cumbersome and reporting graphs/options are not easy to comprehend so it might become trouble when the business grows and you want to show it to venture capitalists or any investor/buyer.

Incentivized

• Auto trigger subscription orders
• Buy box widgets on the website

• 2Checkout handles credit cards that I would not be able to accept from my country.
• Fraud prevention works. They saved me a couple of times and I appreciate that.
• I always received my payments on time. I never had to complain.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Local payments methods are an area for improvement. Not all are connected so far.
• Bulk updates for catalogs are missing at the moment, to be added in upcoming releases I hope.

Incentivized

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.

It is surreal. Everything feels like they don't really want you to use them. I had to beg them to approve my account because of stupid approval questions. Example: give ONE url where payments will come from. (my payments will come from a page inside my webapp which means absolutely nothing to users who don't have a user in my webapp. I also have many URLs where the users can pay from) Then their API is super complicated to use. I couldn't believe how complicated it is. It is not well explained in the documentation and you have to guess until you understand the underlying logic. I wouldn't use it if I Stripe was available in my country.

Incentivized

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.

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).

Incentivized

There's no comparison. Using PayPal as my payment processor was a nightmare. PayPal was really designed for the purchaser not for the seller. Yes, they were cheap but you get what you pay for. Customer service at PayPal was also non-existent. 2Checkout on the other hand is designed for the seller. Their system is mature and feature-filled. It does everything I would need and allows me to present a professional purchasing experience to my clients. The documentation is good, but the best thing about 2Checkout is that I can contact a friendly tech support rep 24/7 via live online chat. I tell them what I'm trying to do and they help me out. If necessary they can escalate the support request and I always receive a chat transcript in my inbox afterward.

• 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

Incentivized

• It allows for charging users
• Checkout is nice and to the point
• It delays everything with a lengthy approval process and crazy API to integrate with

Incentivized