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.

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.

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.

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.

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.