Dwolla Reviews

Pros

- They have a battle-tested product, with years of B2B payments expertise
- The integration was plug-and-play, allowing us to go-live with a very aggressive time-table
- Their support is fantastic, and is always available if we have questions
- They are constantly release new features and continuing to innovate, which we directly benefit from (allowing us to offer a best-in-class payments experience)

Cons

- Dashboard UI is a bit unintuitive for users
- Would be nice to have more automation in the KYB process

Pros

Dwolla has been with our startup up from the start. They serve as the backbone and primary translator of payments between accounts as defined by our users. Whenever we've made changes or had new ideas to explore, Dwolla has enthusiastically sat at the table to brainstorm ways to support us. They are the definition of a true partner.

Cons

Honestly. Nothing. We have partnered with Dwolla for over 7 years and have not experienced anything but satisfaction.

Alternatives Considered

Stripe

Reasons for Switching to Dwolla

Because of their approach to partnering with us. We went to their offices to share our vision, mission and model for empowering consumers to live, give and save with purpose. They have always worked with us on pricing at each changing stage of our business.

Pros

The software allows for ACH transfers in a API at a reasonable cost.

Cons

API document had several errors that we had to inform Dwolla about, also not as easy to integrate as advertised. Since I believe their clients are generally leasing or real estate companies, the checks they do on our customers is not ideal. Dwolla said they regularly send customers below the age of 26 in document or retry status, for a tech app, those customers will never come back due to the hassle of the dwolla process.

Pros

Their customer service and notifcations. Reliability of the product.

Cons

The speed of transfers- Particularly weekend tranfers. Consumers want rapid payments.

Pros

Once you set it up it is super easy to use. Sadly, they are getting rid of the Transfer function which is a nice feature.

Cons

Seems like there should be a Freemium model for startups with less that 100 transactions per month, then have a 100 to 1,000 price; 1,001 to 5,000 transactions per month price, and then an all you can eat price.

Pros

The Secure ACH bank transections.
Lowest fees out of all its competitors.
when you use Dwolla you pay for what you do on it less transections less revenue more transection more revenue its pretty straight forward and easy to use.

Cons

It cant be use out of the USA.
Its a very complex software that many find hard to use unlike PayPal and Google Pay.

Alternatives Considered

PayPal and Google Pay

Reasons for Switching to Dwolla

The Secure ACH bank transections. Lowest fees out of all its competitors.

Pros

Reliable platform that you can integrate with ease.

Cons

Nothing wrong with using Dwolla to date!

Pros

Well I use it with my property management software. The rates are okay, tenants set up their accounts and send rent via this portal. So it works for us okay.

Cons

Well, the set up is a bit clunky, and sometimes my tenants don't know how to make it work. But overall it is good.

Pros

no nonsense method of paying . i like how fees are based on the amount sent, as opposed to a flat rate

Cons

supposedly the product I will use will be ended in November. It was difficult to get a clear determination about that via customer support. didn't seem like they were reading the question i asked.

Pros

The software is easy to integrate with existing systems and is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of uses and functions.

Cons

The onboarding process was a bit cumbersome.

Pros

The number one pro for Dwolla is their customer service, we typically get answers in minutes when we have questions about anything in their API, or a question about a payment that was processed.

Dwolla's API Documentation, and support documents are top notch easy to read, and easy to understand.

Cons

There isn't much, I could say that I don't like about the software, but the admin dashboard portal could use a little attention to make it more robust. However Dwolla is in the process of making improvements to this area, and they even reach out to me and other customers to find out how they can best improve the Dashboard.

Pros

Really great customer service which is the biggest differentiator for us. Also, extremely low cost per transaction, and an api-first approach that fits our needs. API is well-documented, has good uptime, good rate limits, and good response times. KYC verification is also a well-done and reliable layer once you iron out with customer service the process of handling outliers. They also have some helpful integrations with other platforms.

Cons

There is limited functionality in their dashboard which is fine, but there are many things that can only be done through the api so prepare to build out a lot of internal-only api calls. Also, bank to bank transfers flow through a digital wallet layer which is in some ways helpful and in other ways a little harder to handle in terms of tracking status and handling status updates.

Pros

Consistently, robust, flexible! Prepared for challenging

Cons

We feeling so good with this software because always adapt to our needs

Alternatives Considered

Stripe

Reasons for Switching to Dwolla

100% I choose Dwolla over stripe

Pros

Dwolla has superb APIs for processing ACH payments of our customers. They also have the very best customer support. They have rapid turnaround and I know that when I send them a query I will get an immediate answer. I have used their competitors and their customer support was none existent.

Cons

I would like better reporting tools on their site.

Pros

Payment facilitation between our clients and their clients.

Cons

I was happy to learn that Dwolla had recently added a “pay as you go” option. This would allow our clients to now send payments to their clients as a referral incentive.

We obviously don’t want to spend $2k/mo for their “scale”package as we will gradually be processing more and more payments over time. Therefore we decided to start with the “pay as you” go option and then planned to migrate once we were doing a higher volume of payments.

We built out everything required with api’s and learned they needed us to submit an application before we could submit our mobile apps to the apple App Store. We submitted that several weeks ago and needed them to respond on an urgent timeline as our clients had urgent needs for their mobile apps to be released. We have contacted their support with zero response and have let them know of the urgency of the situation and it’s been crickets. (It’s still just sitting in their queue)

Anyway, hoping to salvage a relationship here, as we like the functionality. Just incredibly disappointed with the customer service options.

Pros

The API services provided by Dwolla have been reliable. In the 3 years we have used them since going live we have not had any major system issues and have had no downtime in our solutions due to any service outages from Dwolla

Cons

No major cons. We had a challenging and new use case for them to implement and didn't have any major issues when deploying

Pros

There are many things about the system that are great. The API and the documentation are excellent. The API is extremely robust, and the platform itself is easily navigable to perform actions manually.

The ability to vet users by creating verified customer records is excellent as well.

The initial sales conversation is great as well, and pretty much all expectations are answered.
Even afterwards, having dedicated account managers and a dedicated slack channel are great.

Cons

Getting through the legal review is an arduous process.
Afterwards, support through the slack channel is a bit slow.

There is no phone based support. After the phone conversations with sales, you cannot call them back for support. There is no phone based customer support. There is no phone based technical support.

Pros

We are a fan of all the services that Dwolla provides.

Cons

The customer support process could be improved.
It would be nice to see a list of issues we have reported in the past.

I have reported some serious issues in the past, where the support rep has told me that everything is working as normal, when in fact there were issues.

It seems that the average Dwolla support rep is not very interested in providing support.

It is time consuming to explain how Dwolla works to a Dwolla rep.

Pros

I was spending a ton of time issuing payments to our customers each week. We needed a solution that would integrate easily into our existing flow and Dwolla fit the bill. It was easy to implement and our customers are enjoying a more streamlined process for receiving their payments. Dwolla has also provided us with a more flexible payout timeline as customers are requesting their payouts rather than me issuing them on a predefined timeline. We are seeing balances sit for longer periods of time as customers wait for a higher balance prior to requesting a payout. This is a win-win for both sides.

Cons

Most of our customers have not heard about Dwolla so it has taken a bit of educating them to ensure the payment process is safe and secure.

Pros

I like how Dwolla interfaces with our platform and streamlines our payment process for customers.

Cons

The verification process can take awhile and if there's an issue with user's verification (i.e. blurry document image, mismatched information, etc.) Dwolla doesn't notify the the user and help explain the issue. There's still a lot involvement on our side (as Dwolla's customer) to look into the issue, troubleshoot it and help the user make the correction). Overall, Dwolla doesn't really account for user errors. I'm hoping this functionality is in Dwolla's product roadmap, because I can't imagine scaling our business using Dwolla with it's current functionality .

Also, the micro deposit verification method and time it takes to transact a payment from one customer to another seems too long when there is clearly the technology with other products to do even instant payments. Any way to tighten this window would be ideal.

Pros

The ease of integration matched with the low cost to process multiple ACH payments twice a week make this a great product.

Cons

The inability to process IAT or international payments.

Pros

Very easy to use. User interface is great and very intuitive. Customer service is very helpful and responsive as well

Cons

Initial implementation with our system was a tedious process but that is usually the case with financial software like this

Pros

Was able to get transfers working the way we needed it to work.

Cons

Not enough abstraction. Was exposed to - and had to deal with - too much detail. The API was waay too granular. On each "webhook", had to do multiple calls to the api to resolve various attributes associated with the transaction. Biggest issue was that it took some doing to resolve subsequent webhooks to find out which "parent" transaction the webhook was for.

Pros

Dwolla is the payment software I use to receive and send payments for work related services. We pay contractors and part time employees through Dwolla as it is easier to keep track of.

Cons

If dwolla could transfer money quicker that would be better because currently it takes about a week after your payment gets submitted to see it in your bank.

Alternatives Considered

PayPal

Reasons for Switching to Dwolla

Free to use and easier to manage

Pros

I can see who the transactions are made for.

Cons

No ability to download reports from platform. Unable to search for transactions on the initial dashboard.