Adyen vs. Recurly vs. Zuora

Wherever a payments solution needs to be offered relatively fast, it's easy to set up and powerful, with strong technical capabilities. It works well both in settings where there isn't a dedicated payments department or team, as it can be customised with relative ease and low technical know-how

Incentivized

Recurly is great for tracking transactions and reviewing payment method declines. The platform is extremely helpful when dealing with scenarios where someone believes they have been fraudulently charged for the product. Recurly allows for transaction filtering, which is very helpful when trying to find possibly fraudulent charges very easy. If expecting precise, detailed information about a card decline, Recurly would not be very helpful.

Incentivized

Zuroa is very well-suited for B2B businesses that primarily have a subscription stream of revenue. It is less appropriate for B2C and retail, if you are only selling one-time products or services, this tool would be overkill and confusing instead of helpful. However, if you need to recognize revenue from subscriptions over the service period, Zuora is a lifesaver.

Incentivized

• PCI DSS Compliant Solution
• Provided options to configure a specific list of payments, like Alipay, ACH, PayPal, etc.
• Good support and quick solution for the technical help
• Well described documentation on technical integrations
• Drop in framework to display the payment options

• Recurly is very easy to use. Their UI is very clean and intuitive, so my staff has no problem understanding how to handle payments in Recurly. They just released a new UI, which is currently in Beta, but does an even better job making the user experience great.
• Recurly really helps reduce the time involved in collecting payment from a client. They have a dunning process which detects when a transaction has failed, and automatically re-tries running the payment several times before giving up. Recurly gives you full flexibility on how the dunning process works, including the ability to send your client payment declined notifications every few days to inspire them to update their payment info.
• Recurly just added a new feature which can automatically update credit card information from clients whose card has expired. They ping the credit card company (visa, MC, AMEX, Discover) to retrieve new card information for cards who have just gone past their expiration dates. This is extremely handy, and has reduced the number of times we've had to contact our client to get updated billing information.
• Recurly has excellent customer service. You can chat with an agent and receive an instant reply to your questions. I love this.

Incentivized

• The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
• Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
• The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.

Incentivized

• I would like to be able to create my own reports, like a combination between "Received payment details" and "Interactive payment accounting".
• Maybe you can have a better integration with PayPal. The disputes are reflected all wrong in Adyen, for example if we accept a chargeback in PayPal, in Adyen we see a "chargeback reversed" status first, then we see a "refund" status. This is very confusing for us, we have accepted that chargeback, which means we have lost the case, what are a Chargeback Reversed and a Refund statuses doing here? I think PayPal is trying to unblock the transaction that received the chargeback, but this is a very confusing way of handling the chargebacks. If I look at the "Dispute transaction details" reports, all the PayPal chargebacks are "won" because of that "Chargeback reversed" status, which is obviously wrong, we lose some cases and we win others.
• Amex chargebacks could be integrated. We don't see them in Adyen at all.

Incentivized

• I would like it if an agent accessed Recurly for any reason that it tracks it using the agent's name or login information.
• The time stamp on refunds processed can be confusing as it sometimes shows midnight when we don't, as such, I would like to see a change in that.
• Would like if the report for transitioned showed who completed the transition.

Incentivized

• User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
• Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
• Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.

Well, Ayden is a very easy system to manage, it allow the user a nice visibility and many details about the clients. It integrated very easily to our system and allow us to increase our activity. In addition, Ayden have a very good help center that available all the time and very helpful.

Incentivized

I believe we would continue to use Recurly because they have shown that they are continually improving their software, and they listen to their customers

Incentivized

Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.

Apart from a lot of scope, which it has for improvement, like analytics, api's, customer service, downtimes. It still provides a lot of value, it is helpful for us in Business crtical areas, managing subscriptions and creating and launching coupons, ease of usability, camparatively lower maintainence are some valid reasons to prefer Recurly.

Incentivized

I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.

Incentivized

Response time are as expected, and Adyen team is always knowledgeable and are clear subject matter experts. Quite often I am assigned an engineer who is not in our time zone and sometimes 8-12 hours different from me. This causes delays in resolution due. It would be great to have a support agent who is located in the US.

Incentivized

There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.

Incentivized

Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.

Incentivized

They have always been quick to respond and help. I love their chat feature at the bottom right-hand corner of the platform.

Incentivized

A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface

Incentivized

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

Incentivized

It was reliable.

Incentivized

I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.

Incentivized

Ayden has proved to be much more reliable with transactions and faster at completing them. We also have been benefited by their affordable rates and that it doesn't feel like a scheme to take from our profits. Lastly, the reports they provide help us to know what next steps we should take as a company, thankful for that direction.

Incentivized

We did try to custom build a recurring option in these tools that we've tried, but Recurly offers a different level of support on our ever growing customers who either fit into our normal subscription business/billing model and those who do not. It allows us to see what's going on in our side of the business without digging through a lot of codes and reports.

Incentivized

Briefly evaluated BillingPlatform during routine vendor review but decided to stay with Zuora. I don't really have any insights; I just wanted to understand other players and see how Zuora stacked up in the competitive landscape. Prior to the implementation of Zuora, we used a homegrown legacy system that the Company outgrew.

Incentivized

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• After implementing payment integration, payment of B2B orders is instant which really helps business financial planning.
• Using Adyen payment integration, businesses are also able to provide payment options based on their geography.
• It provides multi-currency support.
• It also provides key and secret-based security for sites and origin.

• If you have considered spending a little and saving a lot of time, then Recurly is a great fit. We are a small team and we handle a lot of subscriptions and also get good insights into how our business is doing. So in a way Recurly is helping us a lot.

Incentivized

• Positive impact: we're able to invoice our customers timely and correctly.
• Positive impact: recurring payments are simple and accurate.
• Negative impact: Zuora and the Customer Management System that my organization use are no longer integrated because of some issues in the past with double billing and things of that nature.

Incentivized