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.

Getting Better

For the first 2+ years, my billing team experienced lot of frustration because it seemed like Zuora had plenty of limitations. Come to find out, they do have limitations, but they are continuously improving and if you have the time and resources you can customize and get a lot out of the billing system.

Pros

The Zuora billing system has grown on me. I attended Zuora's annual conference in 2019 (I highly recommend going) and learned a lot about existing and upcoming features. Zuora's representatives are dedicated to helping my company customize the billing system and recommending best business practices. Zuora is alway improving and adding functionality, so I do expect it to continue to get better and to meet more of my company's billing needs. They also offer "Zuora University" which is a series of online interactive videos that provide a lot of good information.

Cons

Zuora was not easy to use at first and the implementation process was rough. Zuora is not particularly intuitive so it took a lot of trial and error, reading through their help articles, and requesting help from their support team. You have to invest a LOT of time and resources to get the full benefits of the system. My company has also found that we have to purchase additional features in order to improve upon our experience.

An excellent application to automate billings.

In the company we use Zuora together with our CRM software, the first one provides the second with information regarding billing, such as the renewal dates and from this point our renewal team ensures that our clients in general have a hassle-free renovation experience. In general terms, Zuora's job is to automate billing, update our CRM with information regarding bills, and send the relevant billing notifications to emails.

Pros

Zuora's notifications are undoubtedly one of the best qualities it has, since it allows us to send them via email to all customers who require it, before their renewal date. In addition to this, it has a very good customization capacity, an aspect that becomes crucial when redirecting the original software matrices according to the specific needs of our company. On the other hand, the integration of the software with others in the market is very good, such is the case of our CRM that joins perfectly with Zuora.

Cons

The learning curve within Zuora is very slow, due to the robustness of the software and the different characteristics and potentialities that it possesses, taking this into account, it is necessary to focus on training new users because this point tends to be a challenge. Another fundamental detail of Zuora is its low segmentation with respect to who the emails with the information regarding the billing notification are addressed to, so we can only select the country where they will be sent.

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.

Pricey, but good for the right size of company

We had a devil of a time implementing it, and there is an appetite to replace if possible. It is so big, and challenging. It feels like we should retain a developer just to help the experience between our systems and Zuora. With a better, more thoughtful integration on the front side, I am sure that much of it could be resolved before ever being a problem. It did solve some specific pains, and it does the job (however expensively).

Pros

The software has a lot to like. The UI is quite robust (if a little hard to use at times). The rules are easy to follow, and it does it's core business well. We were able to integrate it, and we spend most of our days in this software from a customer team side, as it is our source of truth for billing and products.

Cons

The launch was rough. This was 4 years ago, but there was a hefty price tag for professional services, and there was a severe mismatch of alignment on what the software would do out of the box versus what we needed to program on our own side. It ended up being fine, but we spent a lot of dev resources to keep it functioning. That was certainly not ideal, but very likely it was due to us not asking the right questions. The other con is that it is a pricey software, and becoming a giant organization. Getting support is a challenge as it seems to be entirely disconnected from every other part of the organization. It is the most enterprise software buying/negotiating/"you have to get a consultant to build out this part of that" experience that we have had outside of SalesForce. New features that come out are good, but siloed and very pricey. Granted, they are a public company and have to deliver value to shareholders.

Great product, terrible data and reports

Subscription management for b2b customers

Pros

The most customizable in the industry. Great integrations with salesforce.

Cons

Data nightmare. Nothing on the reports and data export side is documented. The company is of little help. The team provided by Zuora for the integration was very hard to work with.

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.

Powerful and flexible subscription management platform

Zuora was valuable to us because it provided a turnkey solution to set up a subscription business. It requires a properly-sized initial setup and learning phase, so it is important to very clearly define the project scope (eventually with the help of third-party integrators)

Pros

Zuora allowed us to set up a complete subscription service, with the ability to manage and configure most aspects of the subscription order-to-cash process (rate plans, payment gateways, charging and invoicing, reporting).

Cons

The setup and license costs are a barrier to entry: the investment makes sense for concrete, sizeable business cases - less so for small-scale or exploratory attempts.

Billing application for subscription based companies

Pros

By this app, it is possible to mange several types of billing methods which include Mobile, Online, Recurring and Subscription Payments as well as Invoicing.

Cons

The set up for the integration could not be easy and require more time than expected.

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 billing

Personally, it's our only software we use at the moment for billing. I believe other functions would be extremely helpful once they become available such as the workflow.

Pros

Our company uses this software daily. We use it to submit invoices, to email out notifications, to set up accounts, etc.

Cons

The things I like least about this software is that it offers much more functions for our day to day process but it cost extra. Support is extremely hard to get in contact with, it would be really nice to have some sort of a chat option. Some of the settings are not accurate.

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.

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.

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.

Customer Service needs improvement

Pros

I am not sure I can name a pro of this software. We had a pretty bad implementation and it has not seemed to improved since then.

Cons

Customer service is lacking and professional services hours are extremely expensive. There are no SLA's in place for the support team to get back with you. There integration from Zuora to SF is awful and half of the time the data does not appear.

Was a nightmare for our organization.

Pros

Not many. Barely got the job done for our needs.

Cons

Didn't scale with out tech stack. So many outdated features. Implementation was extremely pricey.

Good tool, but lacks UX enhancements and easy support

Pros

What sets Zuora apart is it's ability for revenue recognition and for the more financially integrated pieces required for accounting.

Cons

The tool however can be confusing to use at times and support is not easily accessible. Zuora really needs improvements to their UX to make it more user friendly.

Our company loves Zuora!

Pros

Seamless integration with Salesforce, making it convenient to work out of a single application rather than multiple ones.

Cons

Sometimes can be confusing with how it sends to Z billing but for the most part I don't have much to complain about.

Edge-to-edge platform for subscription business

Pros

This platform has integrated billing engine, analytics & insight, marketing automation and pricing tool for SaaS business.

Cons

Free trial period is not enough to understand tools' features. Because it needs more time to integrate.

Good billing functionality, lightweight on sales

Lots of functionality to support complex billing processes but loses usability once the sales process gets more complex. For simple subscription quoting and complex billing it's a great fit. If you have any complexity in your sales process it will be a stretch.

Billing product

Integrating with CPU was difficult, billing only good for subscription products. New CPU zuora app is good for basic use cases only. Not fit for enterprise use cases and CPq functionalities . Product needs a lot of improvement

Probably What I need, but tough to get going

We started implementing Zuora in January. 9 months later we are still making little adjustments to get things just right. It works great, and has been helpful to us, but required more than expected to get setup properly.

Zuora Review

Pros

Supports lots of billing models and different pricing structures, billing periodicity, frequency, etc. Has native integrations with Salesforce.com and different payment gateways. User friendly system, well designed for subscription billing. Supports multiply features.

Cons

Expensive pricing structure. Long implementation time.

Best Billing Platform For Subscription Business

Pros

I like the seamless experience in updating the billing plans when I either make changes to the prices or add/take away features from my subscription

Cons

I don't like the limited data verification in the software. For example, there is no email address validation in API when creating Contacts

Ok but could be better

Not as flexible as I would like. I used it along with Salesforce and I had to do a lot of manual entry. Wish it was more automated.

Good tool for Billing

Very helpful tool for Billing the Customer and sending the information to customer and maintaining the billing information.

Zuora for billing

Pros

It's a great tool for billing on a subscription service. Sometimes the system can be too complicated with the way it can be setup.

Cons

Reporting needs some work, especially out of the box it's not the easiest to run.

Very useful tool for sales team

Pros

Mainly used for billing and agent commissions. Very much helpful for calculating the percentage wise agent commissions.

Cons

Need customer support for customization and for training. Need a team for maintenance as it is very complex tool to be handled.