8am LawPay vs Shift4

PayPal

Venmo

Stripe

PayPal provides an end-to-end suite of tools that can integrate with a business's existing systems and service providers. Its network of shoppers and businesses provides AI-driven data insights to help businesses reach new customers and drive results.

Venmo is a digital wallet and payment gateway that allows customers to send money and make purchases via mobile device, and share activity via the purchase feed

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform that enables businesses to accept payments online and in person. It offers a suite of APIs for payment processing, subscription management, fraud prevention, and financial services integration Stripe provides both developer-focused tools with extensive documentation and no-code solutions for businesses without technical staff.

8am LawPay is an online payment processing and management solution used by various types of law firms, including bankruptcy law firms, family law firms, criminal defense law firms, immigration law firms, enterprise legal departments, and CLE firms.

Access Controls/Permissions

Accounting

ACH Payment Processing

Activity Dashboard

Alerts/Notifications

Automatic Billing

Billable Items Tracking

Billing & Invoicing

Billing Rate Management

Case Management

Client Management

Contact Database

Credit Card Processing

Customizable Branding

Customizable Fields

Data Security

Debit/Credit Card Processing

Digital Wallet Payments

Electronic Payments

Expense Tracking

Financial Management

For Legal Professionals

General Ledger

In-Person Payments

Invoice Processing

Mobile Payments

Multiple Payment Options

Online Payments

Partial Payments

Payment Links

PCI Compliance

Real-Time Data

Recurring/Subscription Billing

Reminders

Reporting/Analytics

Reporting & Statistics

Status Tracking

Third-Party Integrations

Time Tracking

8am LawPay

Web-based

iPhone

Windows

iPad

Android

Square Payments

Clio

Tabs3

Basic

Custom

Administrator

Overall, 8am LawPay is a dependable and user-friendly solution for client payments. While there is room for more customizable reporting features, the platform consistently delivers secure and efficient service.

Paralegal

The platform is easy to use, simplifies payment processing for both staff and clients, and helps make managing legal payments and payment plans much more efficient

Accounting Assistant

The reporting on the system is not the greatest and the time available to issue a refund (only 6 months) can sometimes make it difficult especially when you are utilizing a trust account with LawPay.

Attorney

With LawPay’s automated payment reminders and recurring billing options, we spend less time chasing down payments and more time focusing on our cases.

LawPay allows for easy, secure payment processing for our clients and seemlessly integrates with our case management program.

The platform is specifically designed for the legal industry, so it handles trust account compliance (ABA and IOLTA) without us having to worry about the technical details.

I can send a link for payment through my mobile app or desktop.  

Office Administrator

PCI compliance, reasonable merchant fees, recognized widely in legal services, meaningful reports.  

Director of Technology

Wish it would integrate more with different platforms, and not require manual payments to be entered.

AR Manager

The canned reports are good, but I sometimes need something a little more robust for those meetings with our [sensitive content hidden]

Managing Partner

There could be more customizable report options. But nothing that cannot be handled.

Bookkeeper

Our clients like it because it is secure and they feel comfortable about usng their credit cards to pay our fees

Legal Assistant and Intake Specialist

The system also doesn't punish me for simple misspellings when running charges.

Managing Director and Owner

LawPay is seamlessly integrated with MyCase. If you use MyCase practice software, you won't want to use any other payment system.

Once a transaction is processed, I find it difficult to identify the email used to send the receipt to a client.

I don't love using cards to accept money, but I think this is the best platform to use for cards.

Legal Assistant

By this time, we were already used to the current Cloud-based software that we use, and so unfortunately the software LawPay acquired does not compare to the one we currently use.

Office Manager

It makes it so easy to process payments and send links to our clients!

My clients tell me they feel their credit card information is secure.

Paralegal and Administrative Assistant

We have had to record the payments in 8am MyCase after they've gone through 8am LawPay.

Controller

Also, it seems that some of the reporting features used to be simpler.

I am glad we are able to provide potential clients with financing options that we previously were unable to do.

Attorney Owner

I would like to have more options for electronic payment.

Managing Attorney

The tool has good security, and makes clients feel comfortable.

Owner

Law pay is either immediate, or within a week.

It is very simple to use and integrates with our case management system.  

I just wish I remembered to charge them to my client each time.

I have not had any issues since I began using 8am LawPay, it is simple to use and is a very stable application.

Ease of use, effective means to send requests and receive payments.  

Owner Attorney

I am able to see when payment request are received by clients and potential clients.

By that I mean a feature where, if we send out a bill and it is not paid or not paid in full, LawPay software will automatically resend the bill periodically to the Client until paid in full.

Client Accounting Analyst

Features like QuickBill, mobile payments, and Card Vault provide options to automate and reduce barrier to payment.  

The necessity of electronic payments is the main reason I obtained LawPay for my firm; we needed an electronic payment processing system that was secure and easy to use, as well as the ability to forward payment links to clients.

so we could continue to use it with other devices in our office instead of entering payment manually.

I wish there was a document we can provide to a client to explain Lawpay to them.

I have had my clients use it since 2014.  

I had a payment link, and my bank was connected fairly quickly.

Overall, it has been great, the customer service team is always helpful and quick, similar to their processing system which we have been very pleased with.

I had used merchant services through my bank and cut my processing costs by probably 50% or more by switching to LawPay plus with LawPay I have more options such as echeck and PayLater

They deposit funds into my accounts promptly and their partnership with Affirm offers an excellent option for payment plans should my clients want them.

The invoices that are sent to clients are pleasant and enable the client to pay with very little friction on their end thereby ensuring prompt payments.

On the rare occasion that we have an issue, it is fairly easy to communicate with someone and get the issue resolved.

We understood that LawPay acquired their own legal software company in 2023.

I am a customer who uses this monthly to pay my lawyer

It doesn’t save my payment information for the next time I use it

The credit card processor device has not been working every time lately and we have to type in all of the card information and billing adress.

One time, when I did not have my authentication code, their rep called me on a Sunday and got it for me.

It's a versatile tool, makes it easy to get paid.

attorney

The app should allow the same activities as the web based page, look at transactions, cancel them, refund them etc

Payment Processing

Client Payment

Payment Link

Report

Invoice Payment

Pricing

Card Payment

Legal Compliance

Email Payment

Law Credit

Small Business

Large Enterprises

Freelancers

Mid-size Business

Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) is boldly redefining commerce by simplifying complex payments ecosystems across the world. As the leader in commerce-enabling technology, Shift4 powers billions of transactions annually for hundreds of thousands of businesses in virtually every industry.

Electronic Signature

Multi-Currency

Receipt Management

Transaction Monitoring

Shift4

Square Point of Sale

Clover

Cash App

Shopify

Wave

Manager

After 40 years of delivering food trying to change and have third company handling my delivery need, Barely started with skytab, at the same time with chownow to handle my delivery’s customers and found out that these two doesn’t work together, hoping they start soon

when you call for issues, you're on the phone for ever. If you have a Server that runs a credit card on the wrong check and the guest has already left, you as the merchant eat that check amount!

Shift4 then deliberately circumvented this block by using alternate business names to attempt to process payments—a blatant act of fraud.

POS system was unreliable, I was on the phone for 2-3 hours every month with them to push updates that would rarely come through.   When I called to cancel they wanted me to buy the contract out on the back end even though there was a documented history of their system not being reliable.

It was a pretty easy system, The workflow was nice with starting tabs and I enjoyed the backend product.

Companies like this do not deserve a chance to earn your business, save the nightmare and go with toast, this company sucks!

The terminals were returned and I did not hear anything else until I got an automated ticket notification 2 months later and then a RMA request another 2 weeks after that.

Our experience with Shift4 / Lighthouse has been nothing short of a nightmare, and we want to warn other businesses before they fall into the same trap.

Cases were marked as “resolved” automatically after five days, even though nothing had been fixed or explained.

I would be willing to change my review if customer service would work with me on the fee as they have been good in previous years about reversing fees for services was not using when calling in.

They hide the contract length and early termination fees for their contract via a website titled terms and conditions.

Customer service was helpful at this time and reversed some previous fees for services I was not using and put me on a basic plan and assured me there would be no additional charges.  

Integration Specialist

It seems to have its ability to grab information and connect to many sources for our CRM.

President

I moved from IRN card processing to Shift4 with the understanding that monthly Reporting and Fees would be more transparent and easily understood. While the fees charged actually showed up in the month they were incurred, the reporting did not reflect the actual transactions.

We had outages with Shift 4 and that impacted checking in guests for our hotel.

owner

They have added monthly fees and a contract which is charging $525 in early termination fees.  

We strongly advise all small businesses to avoid Shift4 / Lighthouse at all costs.

Shift 4 is our processor but cannot help you retrieve a credit card mistake!

The icing on the cake was our new card processor could not get us installed before our 12 month contract expired, so Shift4 charged us for the entire following 12 months of support and reporting.

Co-CEO

They are now trying to have me cancel and pay $2,400 or charge me $310 a month in no usage fees

General Manager

After telling us they would match we stayed only to find out they didn't match.   When we approached shift 4 with this, the response was sign this new contract.  

At the start of 2025 ( January 2nd) noticed a 189.00 charge on my bank account  and called the next day to find out what is was for.

This all-in-one system simplifies operations, allowing us to focus more on customer service and less on administrative tasks.

They refused to refund me even though I had proof that I was unable to access the equipment to return it.

It offers a seamless blend of sales processing, inventory management, and customer tracking.

Delay in processing credit cards.   After you select cc you have to wait until it connects to the reader,  Only about 5 seconds but seems like a long time when we are busy.

They said if I switched over to charging the customers 3%, there would not be any fees.  

I also do not like that they do not involve the sales rep and others when developing the menu for your resturant, the developers need to observe how a restaurant is run before they build it out.

Continued to charge fee after service cancelled and then charged high fee to cancel.

This thing is like learning another language.

No where on the agreement is any mention of contract length or fee for early termination.

Even though our hotel was in DC and centrally located it took a long time for anyone to figure it out.

We went with Clover after spending over 50 hours on hold with them and getting nowhere and now we can’t even ship their crappy product back to them because they don’t have us listed as owners of the company that they send bills to.

It has been a terribly exasperating experience to try and get information out of them to try and understand their reports.

Then when I need just certain things from a daily report it gives me too much information and there is no way to tailor it to what we need and customer support does not help much as they don’t seem knowledgeable.

We called several times and told them WE DON'T have them and "customer service " said there is nothing they can do.  

Nothing to report because we didn’t receive anything but debits to our bank for nothing.

Shift 4 charged me $2600 for not having the equipment returned in time!

We still took the $3K buy out option, just to get rid of this awful company.

Customers have to jump through hoops to get technical support.  

I have a great local rep that I always have to call because the larger company usually cant help.

Customer service can improve, when I call several times they seem not as knowledgeable and have to follow up everytime keeping me hold for a long time.

8am LawPay vs Shift4 Comparison (2026)

8am LawPay

Shift4

Overview

Video & Screenshots

Pricing

User reviews

Key features

Integrations

Alternatives