- Standard PayPal Your customer must have a PayPal account which could lower your conversion and for sure does not give a professional image. You can schedule a payment to happening each month but it is an amount not a product/plan, making managing customers very difficult and reporting almost impossible. Similar issues apply with Google Checkout and Amazon Payments
- PayPal Website Payments Pro This is a gateway and merchant account combination that they offer as a package to try and attract merchants. There are some simple recurring payment options but nothing really. The bigger problem here is errors and support. Try calling PayPal when something does not work, good luck. We have a senior level account manager and direct contact with the Director of Support for this product and this bug has been open for 3 weeks and they still cannot fix. http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3296-decline...
- Real gateway and merchant account Your best option and not a lot of effort if you are in the US or have a US bank account. Overseas it is a little more effort but nothing crazy. If you are concerned with getting the best rate and quickly, we have a few partners for this at http://chargify.com/merchant-accounts/. And you can use this and not use Chargify, so it is just there to help you.
While there are many reasons you might want to use Chargify or a similar type of service rather than doing this directly you can of course build it yourself. Just think about what you would prefer to spend your time on. I encourage you to talk to actual customers of any product you pick, look at the community around the company and who participates and then make a decision.
As a founder at Chargify, I would love to see you working with us, but more important I want you to make the right choice for your business so I would say almost anything is better than PayPal.