Forte Payment Systems Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Pros
The system handles all the PCI requirements and offers very, very competitive one-time eCheck entries. VERY few companies I found will offer this so it is a GREAT benefit our church deeply appreciates.

Cons
Setup was a little involved, since we are not a typical storefront selling some kind of product. Our payments are all donations. As such, setting up to allow people to donate to various of our income stream was a little involved--regular donations, international fund, youth camp fund, assistance to the needy, etc. But we've been able to make it work for us.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Setting up the account was a pretty smooth process. We were assigned a merchant ID and given access to a virtual client to manually charge credit cards. They offer ACH processing with our invoicing software. When we decided to move to a different ACH process we left Forte. I was expecting a hassle cancelling our account, but it was straightforward and easy.

Cons
The virtual credit card processing client is very dated as is the navigation for reporting. Unlike Square, Forte charges a different percentage for American Express credit cards (and many of our clients use their business AmEx which created a functionally higher credit card processing rate.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
The only pro about your product is that it allows for our developers to write their own code to reconcile the transactions processed in Forte with our Quickbooks software. We have had to spent an absurd amount of resources to get it to work, but at least you allow us the option and a sandbox as other companies require a 3rd party software or close this information off completely.

Cons
Pretty much everything else. The Dex platform is a slight improvement, however, everything needs to be initially set up in the Virtual Terminal prior to being available in Dex (example, email addresses). The Virtual Terminal is horribly designed (literally painful to look at) the amount of clicks it takes in order to complete a function is excessive, the character max for email addresses is unnecessary. If we could switch off of this platform we would, but unfortunately many of the other processors out there do not play well with Quickbooks Enterprise.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 1/10

Pros
We use Forte mainly for processing eCheck payments. The secure web pay feature is very useful for customers to make payments and was pretty straight forward to implement into our website. I also appreciate that their fees are low and transparent.

Cons
I feel like the forte checkout option should be easier to implement, similar to the secure web pay feature. It's not a big deal but it would be nicer to use since it looks more mobile friendly, but I'll probably need a web developer to put it on my website.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Reliability. It just works. Up time is very close to 100%.

Cons
It's not pretty and takes a little bit to learn your way around, but it always works. Pretty isn't always better. I've seen many software companies release new prettier versions and lose the comfortable flexibility.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10