Recharge vs. Zoho Billing

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.

We moved from Quickbooks and integrated Zoho Subscriptions fairly easily. I believe this software is well suited for companies who find a need to manage many recurring or service add-on subscriptions. The payment portal is super easy to use and it is very easy to train others to use it fully.

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

• Simple interface to use and set up.
• Billing reminder emails prior to and upon billing.
• Notifications to billing team members and customers.
• Automated recurring billing.
• Simple reports.
• Easy to manage customer database, credit card info, etc.

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

• You need other Zoho tools like CRM and Books or Inventory.
• When changing an email in Subscriptions it changes it in the Zoho CRM.
• No notification of a failed payment.

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.

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

Zoho [Subscriptions] is a lot easier to set up recurring payments and notifications than [Stripe] or [PayPal] alone. They offer notification reminders that will help manage clients, versus setting up an API [..] communication system [to] your own with the others. Clients have an easier time changing credit cards around in Zoho [Subscriptions,] whereas in Stripe and Paypal, you have a lot more manual work.

Thryv is [an] all in one [package] for both one time and recurring payments, which I prefer over Zoho [Subscriptions], without having to create new client files in each system; [Thryv] [...] also has notification options which is a time saver. Thryv can also send test email review requests after a trigger or an [invoice] has been paid, whereas you would have to create an API integration with another service to do so in Zoho [Subscriptions]. Overall, Zoho [Subscriptions] is a great system, for most of my personal clients logging into different systems for different needs. [In] addition to subscriptions, [this] is the downfall, but it [is] still a great option for many businesses.

Incentivized

• 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

• We no longer worry about missing payments or tracking the rental program.

Incentivized