Deciding between Stripe vs. Chargify for your online payment processor?
This article fully compares Stripe and Chargify, including features, pricing, reviews, and more, so you can make the right choice for your business.
Stripe vs. Chargify: Features
Stripe and Chargify both have plenty of features to offer, and each platform has its pros and cons.
Stripe Features
The most important Stripe features include:
Large Ecosystem
- The Stripe ecosystem includes payment processing functionality, as well as solutions such as Stripe Terminal (for in-person payments) and Stripe Billing (for subscriptions and invoicing).
Rich Developer Toolkit
- Tools like Stripe Elements, Stripe Sources, and Stripe Connect allow developers to customize their payment processing solutions.
Wide Range of Payment Options
- Stripe includes support for more than 135 currencies and various payment types—such as MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, and mobile wallets such as Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Integrations
- Thanks to its popularity, Stripe has many different integrations with third-party services—such as
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Chargify Features
The most important Chargify features include:
Large Ecosystem
- Like Stripe, the Chargify ecosystem has several helpful tools to complement its billing and subscription management software, including accounting and in-depth analytics.
Flexibility
- Chargify includes over 20 popular payment gateways, including Braintree, Forte, Authorize.Net, BlueSnap, GoCardless, Square, and many more.
- The Chargify platform also allows for many billing scenarios, including one-time, recurring subscriptions, quantity-based, prepaid, usage and events-based, and more.
Integrations
- Chargify easily integrates with your existing workflow, with integrations that include CRMs (Salesforce and HubSpot), financial software (NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Xero), iPaaS connectors (Zapier, Cyclr, Trey.io, and Workato), and more.
Stripe vs. Chargify: Pricing
When considering Stripe vs. Chargify, it’s essential to consider the price. How much do Stripe and Chargify, respectively, cost?
Stripe Pricing
Most customers will use the basic “integrated” Stripe pricing model. This “pay as you go” option has a 2.9 percent fee for every transaction plus a flat $0.30 fee. In other words, if you sell a product for $100 using Stripe, the platform’s fee will be $3.20 ($2.90 + $0.30).
Note that there are a few variations on this Stripe pricing model, namely:
- Stripe’s percentage rate increases by 1 percent for international credit cards or currency conversions.
- Non-profit organizations using Stripe get a discount, paying only 2.2 percent plus $0.30.
- Stripe also supports ACH direct debit (which costs 0.8 percent per transaction with a cap of $5.00) and international payment methods such as Bancontact, iDEAL, giropay, Przelewy24, Sofort, and SEPA Direct Debit (with prices starting at $0.80 per transaction).
Chargify Pricing
Chargify pricing uses a three-tiered model for businesses of different sizes and needs. The first two tiers are:
Scaling ($299/month)
- This tier is intended for businesses with up to $50,000/month in revenue, as well as 1 percent of revenue on overages.
- It includes intelligent dunning, SaaS insights, testing and production environments, unlimited payment gateways, integrations with QuickBooks and Xero, and RESTful APIs.
Success ($599/month)
- This tier is intended for businesses with up to $75,000/month in revenue, as well as 0.9 percent of revenue on overages.
- It includes all of the features in the Scaling tier and advanced features such as events-based billing, customer hierarchies, forecasting, revenue recognition, and more.
Custom Pricing
- The third Chargify tier (“Specialized”) is a custom offering for businesses with unique needs. It includes features such as bespoke integrations, a personal customer success manager, and unlimited users and sites. Pricing requires a custom quote from sales.
Stripe vs. Chargify: Reviews
So far, our Stripe vs. Chargify comparison has discussed features and pricing—but how do these solutions stack up in real Stripe vs. Chargify user reviews?
Stripe Reviews
On the business software review website G2, Stripe currently has an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 88 user reviews.
One user, an administrator in marketing and advertising, calls Stripe “easy to use” and gives it a 4-star review:
“For starters, their customer service is out-of-this-world great. They have a chat where you can immediately speak to someone and they are always available to help me with any questions that I have.
I like that Stripe is easy to use and offers a platform on both mobile and desktop. Their mobile app is extremely user-friendly and allows you to do just about as much as you can do from desktop.
You can also set up the app to notify you of your total sales every morning, if you’d like. The fee (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) is a bit of a pain, but what can you do?
Also, keep in mind that their user experience is a bit confusing and can take a bit of time to learn.”
While the vast majority of Stripe reviews are positive, some users note specific issues with the Stripe platform such as the following:
- A pricing model (2.9 percent plus $0.30) can be too high for small and medium businesses.
- Advanced technical skills are needed to customize the platform.
- Lag times between payouts clearing and being available for the customer.
- The Stripe dashboard isn’t enough for monitoring business metrics. Using something like Baremetrics is better for real-time monitoring of your business.
Chargify Reviews
Meanwhile, Chargify has an average rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars on G2, based on 266 reviews.
Marketing manager Cameron D. gives Chargify a 4.5-star review, calling it “a good solution for our online sales needs”:
“Chargify has made it possible for us to add a subscription model to our online sales offerings. Their software makes it easy to process, track and manage online subscription purchases.
I really like their dashboard that provides an instant overview of what’s happening throughout the day. It also communicates well with several other apps we use… We use Shopify as our primary shopping cart and Chargify to handle the subscriptions. They both work well together.
Since implementing Chargify several years ago, our subscriptions have become a significant part of our product offering.”
Chargify reviews praise features such as the tool’s intuitive user interface, ease of third-party integrations, and many possibilities for automation.
The negative parts of Chargify reviews focus on the following issues:
- Challenges with limited filtering and searching during the reporting stage.
- There are a few gaps in functionality, such as the ability to set up multiple currencies within a single product and component value for international customers.
- A pricing model not based on usage, making it expensive for small and medium businesses.
Stripe vs. Chargify: The Bottom Line
Stripe is likely the better payment processing solution for the following types of customers:
Users who Sell Internationally
- Stripe includes support for many different payment types and more than 100 currencies, which makes it the perfect fit for businesses going global.
Users with Advanced Technical Skills
- According to user reviews, Stripe allows developers to make tweaks and customizations—but only if they have the technical skills to do so.
Meanwhile, Chargify is likely the better payment processing solution for the following types of customers:
SaaS Businesses
- Businesses that sell SaaS (“software as a service”) products are likely better off using a payment processing solution explicitly built with them in mind—such as Chargify. Learn about other SaaS analytics tools here!
Users who Prefer Monthly Pricing
- Whereas payment processors like Stripe charge a percentage-based fee for each transaction, Chargify charges a flat monthly fee, which may be a better fit depending on your charge model.
Conclusion
Regardless of where you fall on the Stripe vs. Chargify divide, you need to monitor the cash flow in and out of your online payment processor.
That’s why Baremetrics has built a powerful, user-friendly Stripe analytics tool for capturing and analyzing insights and trends from the Stripe platform, helping you make smarter, data-driven predictions and decisions.