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PayPal vs Recurly: What are the differences?
Introduction
Key differences between PayPal and Recurly are outlined below.
Payment Processing: PayPal primarily functions as a payment processor, allowing businesses and individuals to send and receive payments online. On the other hand, Recurly specializes in subscription billing management, helping businesses create and manage recurring billing plans for their customers. While PayPal can handle one-time payments, Recurly is designed specifically for subscription-based businesses.
Integration Capabilities: PayPal offers a wide range of integrations with various e-commerce platforms and tools, making it easier for businesses to accept payments online. Recurly, on the other hand, focuses on integrations with subscription-based businesses, offering specific features like dunning management, churn reduction, and revenue recovery tools to improve subscription billing efficiency.
Billing Model: PayPal charges a flat rate per transaction and additional fees for international transactions and currency conversions. Recurly, on the other hand, typically charges a percentage of the transaction value or a monthly fee based on the volume of transactions processed through their platform. This difference in billing models can impact the overall cost for businesses depending on their transaction volume and needs.
Subscription Management Features: Recurly provides advanced subscription management features like automated dunning emails, customizable billing cycles, and flexible pricing options. While PayPal offers recurring payments functionality, it lacks the extensive subscription management features that Recurly provides, making it a more suitable choice for businesses focused on subscription billing.
Analytics and Reporting: Recurly offers in-depth analytics and reporting tools specifically tailored to subscription billing metrics, allowing businesses to track customer churn, revenue trends, and subscription growth over time. PayPal provides basic transaction reporting but lacks the detailed subscription analytics that Recurly offers, making it more challenging for businesses to monitor and optimize their subscription revenue streams.
Customization and Branding: PayPal's checkout process can be customized to a certain extent, but it often retains the PayPal branding, which can cause a disconnect in the customer experience. Recurly allows businesses to create fully branded subscription signup pages and customer portals, providing a seamless and cohesive brand experience for subscribers. This level of customization and branding can contribute to higher customer retention and engagement for subscription-based businesses using Recurly.
In Summary, PayPal and Recurly differ in payment processing focus, integration capabilities, billing models, subscription management features, analytics and reporting, and customization options.
Currently, I am using PayPal, and it's working fine somehow. My business is an online job board to hire remote workers. It was built on October 11, 2022. I got my first paying user just this week and that person paid through Paypal for a premium job listing worth $75. My target customers are from the US.
I'm currently based in the Philippines and Stripe payments are not yet working in my country. Any suggestions on alternatives so I can put credit card payments on my site?
My current website is OnlineJobsPH.com , please advise.
Paddle may work, not sure if they have country limitations, but looks like a decent alternative to Stripe
Hi Folks,
I represent Showwcase, which is a network built for coders.
We're introducing a paywall for content creators on the platform to start accepting payments from their Followers for premium and unique content over and above the general free content. We are internally considering either Stripe or PayPal to handle this for us.
If we take the pricing out of the debate, what's the go-to choice when choosing which to integrate? Our current standpoint is that Paypal has wider consumer adoption, and since most creators are individuals, it makes sense to just use Paypal because they already have an account. However, our business uses Stripe, and so it makes it easier if both the platform (Showwcase) and creators to be on the Stripe platform. That being said, if creators don't already have an account, they will need to sign up with Stripe on the spot, which is a friction point.
I would like to hear the pros and cons in developer environments as well as any other things we might not know.
I prefer Stripe for developers' ease of integration and PayPal for providing the simplest user experience (i.e., improved revenue.) In my experience, neither platform requires a user register to pay via credit card. However, as noted, many people have a PayPal account, which allows quick and easy payments through a "more" trusted name.
I used Stripe and Paypal and settled on Paypal for the customer. However, the PayPal web hook back end is a complete mess (at least in PHP). Unless they have improved very recently, PayPal web hook integration is poorly documented and barely supported with bits and pieces of important code on GitHub and elsewhere. I can't speak for other languages. But given the popularity of Paypal (i.e., improved revenue), I decided to keep using Paypal after I got the web hook integration worked out.
PayPal is a dinosaur and a nightmare to work with, both in terms of API as well as on the business side. We support both because our A/B tests showed a material increase in conversions by offering both, but I would drop PayPal in a heartbeat if I could. Stripe is a joy to work with.
Stripe is strong because of their security. It is difficult for the programmer to install it, and in my case was impossible since my hosting provider did not have up-to-date software that it requires. I had to use another program on top of it as the shopping cart instead of using Stripe's shopping cart. But Stripe integrates with everything if you can get it to install, and is stable.
The big reason to go with PayPal is the 6 months same as cash or multiple payments over weeks for your clients. Some clients need this and you will lose them without PayPal. PayPal may change their policies, so in my opinion, PayPal is not as stable as Stripe. Some clients refuse or can't use PayPal, where Stripe is available to everyone with a credit card.
In summary, I set up both for my clients. And I used Zoho for everything else - shopping cart, accounting, CRM, banking, etc. It integrates with both Stripe and PayPal and pretty much anything else you use.
Be sure to read the Terms of both Stripe and PayPal, and I think that will help you with your decision.
After the initial investigation on which platform to use to process our payments, Stripe was a total no brainer.
We are heavy users of Stripe Connect, which allows us to collect payments on behalf of our client restaurants. Connect makes it super easy to collect, payout and manage any fee structure.
At the time that the platform was written it was also the only platform that was working flawlessly with Google Pay and Apple Pay on the Web.
Today we also give out to our clients Terminals from Stripe, allowing us to process all payments under a single unified interface.
We are looking forward to further integrations, like with AliPay and other local payment methods.
I used (tried to use) PayPal on one project and it was a total nightmare. At the time there was no cohesive "one" web-based product, you had to choose between three and the lines between them were very muddled. We reached out to developer support several times and they were no help at all. The documentation was old (incorrect) and confusing. Granted this was several years ago, but the pain remains. Given a choice of using PayPal and sticking hot needles in my eyes, I would first ask "How big and hot are these needles we're talking about?" Stripe is SO much easier!
Stripe is very well known for its developer experience and great documentation. We considered Recurly and other tools because of the easy tax-automations and subscription handling.
But lately Stripe introduces its own tax-handling feature, and it was just a perfect match for our usecase. Also we are migrating some of our billing to a Pay-per-Use system, wich Stripe supports very well.
We use GoCardless to simplify the way clients and partners pay for our services. What intrigued us is the quick and easy ACH feature that gives our clients the option to log in with their bank account and shoot the funds directly to our account. The fee, compared to Stripe is less. Stripe and PayPal charge 2.9% + 30c and Stripe also forces the client to enter in all of their payment details manually and then if the payment doesn't work, the client has to try all over again. GoCardless charges 1% + 25c which is much more reasonable dealing with the large projects that we are currently working on.
We integrate GoCardless with Xero to easily send out quick invoices, receive the funds and track all revenue in one place.
Pros of PayPal
- Most known service196
- Consumers know it135
- It's available for many countries113
- Easy70
- Best way to get paid outside US54
- Most widely used payment processor35
- Express Checkout25
- Consumers trust it16
- Flexible and secure15
- Digital Goods for Express Checkout6
Pros of Recurly
- Recurring billing22
- Simplicity10
- Works with multiple gateways9
- Supports Value Added Tax9
- Great support & easy to use7
- Simple4
- Amazing3
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Cons of PayPal
- Not well written recurring payment api1
- Less countries supported1
- Harder to get started with1
Cons of Recurly
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