Consultants, coaches, and other small business owners have a lot of online payment tools to choose from. And, while we’d love to have every one of these folks as users, we know that our software, in particular, isn’t perfect for everyone.
That’s why comparing ourselves with other tools (including Payfunels and MoonClerk) is an important step in choosing the best online checkout solution.
Here’s the bottom line, in our view:
- ChargeKeep is the best tool for those looking to both collect and manage one-time and recurring payments
- Payfunnels is best for those just starting out
- MoonClerk is the best option for brick-and-mortar businesses and non-profits soliciting donations
Below, we break down the features, pricing, and more that led us to each of those assessments.
Rather not spend time reading a comparison?
ChargeKeep is a super simple way to collect one-time and subscription payments. If you’re liking this blog post, you’ll probably love ChargeKeep too.
ChargeKeep vs. Payfunnels vs. MoonClerk Features
All three tools in our comparison offer a way to collect online payments, but the ways in which you go about doing that and the depth of the features of each tool varies. Here are the features that stand out for ChargeKeep vs. Payfunnels vs. MoonClerk, along with example use cases of those features.
ChargeKeep Features
Here at ChargeKeep, we’re passionate that you should not only be able to collect online payments using ChargeKeep, whether one-time or recurring but also to manage those payments and subscribers once they have been created.
To that end, we offer a set of features that we think go beyond the features offered by the other two tools in this list. Specifically, we offer:
- An easy way to manage failed payments
- A straightforward way to manage subscriptions
- A seamless way for customers to update their subscriptions and payment details
Prevent and manage failed payments
Unfortunately, failed payments are a part of running a recurring-payments-based business. Once your business grows to the point where you’re managing say, more than 10 subscriptions, you will see failed payments. Credit cards expire, banks decline charges for mysterious reasons, and customers lose the credit card they made their original payment with.
At ChargeKeep, we do everything possible to 1) prevent failed payments; and 2) to recover a failed payment as quickly as possible.
Prevent failed payments
Within, you can set up two notifications that help prevent failed payments. Often, failed payments can be prevented if the user simply updates their credit card. To that end, you can set up two notifications that are sent to your customer to notify them when their credit card is about to expire and to give them a head’s up that a subscription payment is scheduled to go through.
Both methods are a very effective way to prevent failed payments before they actually happen.
When your customer receives one of these notifications, they are able to update their credit card using our customer portal (more details below) and you are notified immediately when they do so.
Recover failed payments
When one of the above two methods fails to prevent a failed payment, you are notified immediately when a payment has failed and an email is fired off to your payer prompting them to update their credit card. That’s the first step in ChargeKeep’s recovery process.
Throughout that whole process, you are kept up-to-date on its progress and can view the history of our attempt’s to recover a payment:
You can see why a payment keeps failing and what attempts we’ve made to recover that payment.
At any point, you can also retry the payment manually yourself. We have found that sometimes (but not always) retrying the payment manually will result in a successful charge, regardless of whether the customer has updated their credit card.
Once a credit card has been updated by your customer, ChargeKeep retries the payment within 1/2 hour.
Manage subscriptions
At ChargeKeep, we strongly believe that managing subscriptions should be easy. Changing payment dates, canceling subscriptions, pausing them, changing the amount, and switching customers from one subscription to another should not be a headache that requires multiple steps.
To that end, managing subscriptions in ChargeKeep is a breeze. With one click you can do all of the above and more.
Customer portal
To effectively prevent failed payments and to manage subscriptions, your customers need a way to update their credit card or cancel their subscription.
ChargeKeep has a customer portal that’s convenient for you and super easy to use for your customers. With one click, your customers can sign in to the portal.
Once signed in, they can manage their subscription, helping you prevent failed payments and adding extra professional spark to your business.
The customer portal can even be styled to match your brand, with your own log and colors.
Payfunnels Features
Payfunnels offers the basic features you need to collect online payments. You can create a payment form (what they call an “invoice”) and send that invoice out as a link or integrate it into your website by embedding it or creating a button that opens a pop-up invoice.
We appreciate the ability to create invoices in different currencies, to translate those invoices into four languages other than English (Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese), and to add custom fields to invoices.
Those basic features are perfect for those that are just starting out.
Payfunnels also offers some payment and subscription management functions: you can cancel or pause subscriptions, process refunds, send a credit card update link to a customer, and get a notification when a payment has failed.
While ChargeKeep expands on these features and offers more ways for you to manage subscriptions and failed payments, there is something to be said for keeping things simple and only offering basic features.
MoonClerk Features
Since MoonClerk has been around for much longer than Payfunnels (or ChargeKeep) its feature set is more well-rounded and applicable to a wide variety of different businesses.
One of the two verticals that MoonClerk serves is brick-and-mortar businesses such as gyms and non-profits that solicit donations. While there are other tools that cater specifically to those types of businesses and organizations, MoonClerk has enough features to support these two verticals.
Like ChargeKeep, MoonClerk has a portal where customers can update their credit card, a way to manage subscriptions without having to log back into Stripe, and dunning / failed payment notifications, all of which are important features, especially for those collecting and managing recurring billing and subscriptions.
ChargeKeep vs. Payfunnels vs. MoonClerk Integrations
Integrations are an important feature of any payment system. As your business grows, you will find that the more processes you can automate through integrations with other tools you use in your business, the less effort you’ll need to grow your business.
That’s why at ChargeKeep we’ve added a Zapier integration, which allows you to integrate with pretty much any other tool you may be using, as well as native integrations that go one step beyond Zapier and allow you to run more complex processes. Currently, ChargeKeep integrates with:
- Zapier
- Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
Both Payfunnels and MoonClerk also offer a Zapier integration, but the amount of triggers available for you to use in both integrations is less than the ChargeKeep integration. In short, you won’t be able to automate as many tasks.
Payfunnels does not offer a MailChimp integration, while MoonClerk directly integrates with other email platforms such as ConverKit, ActiveCampaign, and Campaign Monitor.
ChargeKeep vs. Payfunnels vs. MoonClerk Pricing
ChargeKeep has tiered pricing. We charge $29/month for up to 100 subscriptions, with no added transaction fees. We don’t believe it’s fair to charge extra processing fees on top of Stripe’s payment processing fees, but we do believe in growing with you, so as your business grows our pricing increases by $10/month as you grow beyond 100 subscriptions.
PayFunnels is $29/month as well, with no added transaction fees. They do not provide the same level of features as ChargeKeep and MoonClerk so their pricing reflects that smaller feature set.
MoonClerk’s pricing starts at $18/month and goes up to $550/month, depending on your monthly payment volume. This type of pricing structure penalizes you for growing your business, as well as disadvantaging businesses that process larger payments.
What Customers Are Saying
At ChargeKeep, we have a lot of happy customers. We’re sure Payfunenls and MoonClerk do as well so let’s take a look at some recent reviews for all three platforms.
What Our Customers are Saying About ChargeKeep
After searching for forms that integrate wtih Stripe, we found that ChargeKeep was our best option. Pamela, sunshineenterprises.com
… your app was the only one I could get to work with Zapier and Stripe. John, mantortexts.com
I’m legit super impressed with your customer support right now. Cearagh, madeofmarrow.com
Easy to use… Amazing customer service. Mark, mintonlinemarketing.com
What Payfunnels Customers are Saying
Actual online reviews of Payfunnels are a bit hard to find, but we were able to dig up a few from 2020 on Facebook:
What MoonClerk Customers are Saying
MoonClerk reviews are a bit easier to find. Here are a few from the last few years:
For donors, it is easy to give a one time or monthly donation. Lane, deltahandsforhope.org
For donors, it is easy to give a one time or monthly donation. Alana, alanashirleyacademy.com
Wrapping Up
As we mentioned at the beginning, we know that ChargeKeep isn’t going to be the right one-time or recurring payments tool for everyone. The features, integrations, pricing, and customer reviews are why we believe:
- ChargeKeep is the best tool for those looking to both collect and manage one-time and recurring payments
- Payfunnels is best for those just starting out
- MoonClerk is the best option for brick-and-mortar businesses and non-profits soliciting donations
We’re convinced that if your focus is specifically on recurring payments, you’ll love ChargeKeep’s:
- Flexibility to create various types of recurring plans
- Subscription management features with the ability to cancel, pause, and edit subscription dates and prices
- Dunning or failed payment recovery tools which keep you up-to-date on failed payments and where in the recovery process a particular payment or customer is.
Still with us?
ChargeKeep is a super simple way to collect one-time and subscription payments. If you liked this blog post, you’ll probably love ChargeKeep too.