Recharge vs. WooCommerce Subscriptions

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
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
RechargeWooCommerce Subscriptions
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
RechargeWooCommerce 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
RechargeWooCommerce Subscriptions
Considered Both Products
Recharge
Chose Recharge
Recharge has been in use for a long time at this brand, before a lot of the emerging competition has sprung up. Whenever I research or use a different piece of subscription software, Recharge feels old and stagnate to me. It doesn't feel like they're keeping up with changes in …
Chose Recharge
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 …
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
RechargeWooCommerce Subscriptions
Small Businesses
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
2Checkout from Verifone
2Checkout from Verifone
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
RechargeWooCommerce Subscriptions
Likelihood to Recommend
2.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
2.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
RechargeWooCommerce Subscriptions
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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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.
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Pros
  • Auto trigger subscription orders
  • Buy box widgets on the website
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  • 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
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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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  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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!
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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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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
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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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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.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
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
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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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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.
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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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  • 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
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ScreenShots