I was a developer/maintainer/admin on this for a number of years at my last company

Pros

as long as you stay within what the product does out of the box it functions very well for a billing platform. It functions best in a transnational environment but was improving for service oriented billing. It does a good job with making history and audit trails available. Pushing usage data is surprising well handled as is issuing refunds and credits. They also take care of all credit card handling making it one less iso hurdle to clear for a company.

Cons

Customizing this is not an easy task, the API's and the object model behind the scense is not easy to deal with and still kinda buggy. Depending on your charge model, it may be a real pain to implement within the system, for example they allow for tiered pricing but flexibility for setting up plateaued prices and such requires a LOT of initial setup. Recognizing split revenue is also a hassle when outputing to finance software (think a support charge attached to a licensed monthy cloud service). To their credit when I left the position where I was working with them they were getting better so it's possible they are in the process of closing some of these gaps. One last thing is that there is no production matching sandbox, they can refresh a sandbox for a certain snapshot in time (for a price) but in an enterprise environment that is stale moments later plus their sandboxes for some reason have slight implementation differences that come to light when leveraging the API heavily.

Needs more power

Although I have learned a lot about Zuora functionality, I still lack confidence in being fully capable using the software. This stems from Zuora's lackluster knowledge base as well as not so good customer support. I feel like there are too many limitations, most of them in place to make you upgrade.

Pros

Good to use for subscription services. The software allows for some basic billing functions and AR reporting.

Cons

There is a lot of functionality that is left to be desired. Out of the box reporting and data manipulation is very rigid and makes it hard to run recurring reports. If you have the money you can buy more functions but a lot of it should be included if you ask me. Invoices are messy and are limited on what and how the information can be represented. Customer service tries to hard to close the ticket quickly instead of being more thorough. Although works decently, still needs more work.

Zuora Review

Been great so far, great tool for any SaaS company

Pros

Excellent for any subscription business. The subscription object model by Zuora is solid and you can slice and dice the subscription offerings to provide lots of options for your customers.
Very easy to integrate to your other systems using their APIs. Salesforce Zuora connector is awesome. Very easy to set up credit card processing through on of the partners.

Cons

Reporting is moderate at best, it can be improved.
I would not recommend zuora to customers who sell their products through a reseller.

A powerful product

Pros

Zuora can do pretty much anything. It has a lot of capabilities when it comes to billing, invoicing, dealing with international currencies, etc. But you definitely have to think in advance about how you *want* to do billing, e.g. is it a per transaction model, a per month model, a per minute model, what happens if there are overages etc. Zuora will let you get as complicated as you want. And sometimes that's too complicated.

Cons

Implementation is non-trivial. It's not like buying an off-the-shelf solution that's plug and play. You have to customize it and you'll need an implementation team. Even if you use Zuora to do the implementation, you need an internal IT-savvy person to lead the project, make decisions and make sure it all makes sense. Zuora can do anything, but you have to decide what it should do in company.

The best subscription billing

Zuora staff were great to work with. GREAT support and always ready answer questions. They helped us get everything moved and confirmed that it could handle all of our crazy use cases.

Pros

We moved from an archaic system to Zuora and it was amazing!!! Out of the box it handled so much of our data that was hidden behind a black box. Anyone could login and see where we were or run a report and get churn numbers or ARR, MRR, and other great reports.
We got it connected quickly and it worked without too much hassle. It just works!

Cons

There are SO many features we didn't use. We didn't need them but I saw them in the tool and made the UI a little clunky to figure out where you needed to be in the tool.

It's good in an overall point of view

Pros

It's easy to create reports. Data Source contains most of the objects to create complex reports. When a request is sent to the support team, it is responded in short time. There is plenty of information in the community website.

Cons

I have to create amendments as many as product I need to add or remove. I have to wait 1 min for a bill run to create an invoice. The UI could be more modern. The search engine needs improvement. It takes at least 2 minutes to find a paymet using the payment number.

Implemented this Product for a Start-up

My overall experience was great! Once we were up and running I had few questions and the questions I did have were answered quickly and efficiently.

Pros

My first job out of college was a start-up technology company. They had just purchased Zuora and it was my job to implement it. It was a seamless and great experience. The system is intuitive and easy to use despite our implementation specialist (who is no longer there). I was able to teach myself a good amount and use the product daily.

Cons

The reports provided were not exactly what I needed so I was left to create many manual reports. I still obtained the information I needed, but it too longer.

A must for subscription-model businesses

Pros

Z-billing offers a lot of ways to amend a customer's subscriptions based on their needs, such as turning off auto-renew, adding and removing products to the subscription, and change the price . Zuora also integrates with SalesForce so quotes can be made in SalesForce and will automatically create subscription within Zuora. They have an incredible interactive learning center that will show you step-by-step on how to create, amend, and cancel subscriptions.

Cons

Because of its robustness, it does take time to learn all the functionality of the software.

Excellent subscription-based billing platform

Pros

Zuora offers a robust and flexible platform, which can meet anyone's needs, from a small mom & pop shopping website to a big corporation, which is trading publicly. They provide outstanding technical and customer support and they will hold your hand until you're finally happy. And once everything is setup, you will not need to think about Zuora setup, it's just doing its work, collecting money, extending subscriptions, calculating MRR, dealing with taxes, sending you reports, etc.

Cons

Learning curve might look too steep, but it depends on your experience with subscription based services.

Great SaaS Billing System

Overall, we've enjoyed our transition to Zuora and it's saved our billing team so much time.

Pros

Zuora is a great customizable billing system our SaaS company has used efficiently. It has powerful integrations with Salesforce and our other apps so all of our data is integrated together.

Cons

There seem to be many work-arounds we've had to create for scenarios we would expect to be fairly straightforward, such as prorations.

big upgrade from previous billing system

Pros

We are a growing startup and work off of reoccurring monthly payments. It was clear that our previous provider would not be able to handle the amount and frequency of payments we had and we were referred to Zuora. The transition has been great. Not only can Zuora handle the amount of payments we are processing, but bring additional features and functionality that we had not even thought of. From my experience, Zuora = Salesforce of payment systems.

Cons

It is a bit complex. We needed to have someone become an admin for our Zuora account to make sure that it is integrated with our other systems. If it was a bit easier to set up/maintain, it would get a 5 star.

It’s so slow, it has delayed my sales process by A LOT

Very, very slow and laggy. When our management asks our sales teams what’s the one thing they could help us with in order to sell more, we all say “FIX ZUORA”. I honestly think I’d be better off creating a quote template in a Google doc.

Pros

That it’s in English? Not many I can think of.

Cons

It’s so PAINFULLY slow. I can’t count the amount of times I was on the phone with the prospect trying to build them a quote and it would just stop working. It may be good for a 1-line item business with no price customization, but as soon as you enter more than 2-3 products and, God forbid, change the price or something, forget it. It’ll die on you. To generate a PDF takes 30minutes. Can you afford to keep the customer with a credit card on the phone for 30 minutes? Yeah, a lot of them might just say “call me back when it’s working” - and good luck chasing them.

Robust functionality for subscription-based companies of all sizes

I streamlined the money we have coming in, viewed more efficiently, and could view data analytics on the projects I was working on.

Pros

I loved how almost everything I and my company wanted to monitor, such as the money we had coming in and the success of certain products within our catalog, were all possible through Zuora. I strongly believe that for businesses that are attempting to scale up or find a more efficient way of managing the money they have coming in, Zuora is the best tool for this.

Cons

I dislike the complexity of Zuora. Many of the features are designed for extremely large companies, so there is a huge learning curve with the software. In addition, it requires many clicks to finally complete an action that I would like, only because there are many layers of complexity.

Very efficient, recurring billing and management software.

Organized and great looking. Once you find a groove in this software, it's pretty easy to use!

Pros

Great looking platform that manages all clients and deals well. Also has in-depth reporting to make sure everything is controlled.

Cons

Can be overwhelming. THere are lots of reports and features that can be hard to use and figure out. Alos the speed of the reporting is a little laggy due to the memory space available.

Solid billing software

Simplified our recurring billing process, enhance our ability to report on billing/subscriptions

Pros

Interface is straighforward, handles the majority of our use cases, reporting capabilities are pretty powerful

Cons

Building reporting can be a bit complex & it can be pretty slow to pull certain reports. Inability to link between multiple data sources in reporting which can be frustrating

A previous Billing manager - Used Zuora

Pros

The #1 thing you want from a billing software is reliability - since you're dealing with customers money. Overall - Zuora is very reliable and had very few hiccups.

Cons

When starting out with Zuora, had a few learning curves to hurdle over (just like any new software/system). Making updates to subscriptions can be a bit cumbersome (depending on the size of the update).

Zuora is clean and simple to use.

Pros

The ability to pull customer and data reports is really nice. It's great that you can use the tool with other softwares, as well.

Cons

Zuora lacks customization for individual accounts and isn't completely dummy proof so agents can easily make mistakes.

Strong product with a lot of engineering work behind it

Pros

Sold product. Covers a lot of use cases with some good custom-ability features. Definitely a big time saver when fully setup.

Cons

Analytics are lacking, with some questions on how accurate/recent the numbers are. People were nice but never really went above and beyond.

Finally

Glad to finally have something reliable.

Pros

Zuora is the first billing system that has actually got the job done for us. It fully encompasses our needs.

Cons

While Zuora does meet our needs, it comes at a steep price. Despite pricing, the benefits of having a reliable billing system are worth it.

Implementation difficulty

Pros

Should work for subscription needs but we are still new to the software and just finished implementation.

Cons

Implementation team very difficult to understand - language barriers. Move quickly to "train" before setup is done so it's hard to understand. Push for meetings but should focus more on meetings after setup is complete to train.