Likelihood to Recommend I think the case when I would recommend Conga CPQ is in a legacy org. In that case, the older style and configuration might be more useful, and you are less likely to find yourself forced to upgrade to lightning. If you are already using lightning, or migrating to lightning, then I would only recommend Conga CPQ if the alternative does not support the features you need.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package. It was developed on the Force.com platform. They provide multiple releases of their product per year. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Apttus has not completely transitioned from a product suite to a product platform vendor. Upgrades of certain products can have interoperability issues with other products in the Apttus stack. Our pain point here was attempting to use Apttus Xauthor for Excel to get around product line limitations in the Apttus CPQ shopping cart. The ultimate resolution was for us to upgrade and leverage the latest version of CPQ, where pricing callback limitations were addressed by client side processing, rather than the hybrid Xauthor process we tried to use. Upgrades in general require significant testing to ensure no unanticipated issues occur. We have a complete Salesforce sandbox dedicated to providing an environment for testing any modifications or upgrades. Apttus support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. Given the CPQ system is complex, the level of skilled support available through basic support require you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is critical to our sales process. We are not satisfied with all aspects of the product and have gone through many tough experiences with their PS, support, and PD teams -- but we're not unhappy enough to re-build what we're already built
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have not heard of any issue
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program. I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.
Read full review 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
Read full review In-Person Training The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.
Read full review Online Training We attended 5 hours worth of webinars early on. We had to understand how objects worked to figure out how to structure our data. I would have liked more in-depth training but it would have been an additional cost
Read full review It was reliable.
Read full review Implementation Rating Be iterative. Take the opportunity to build a catalog based on how Apttus works well. Learn the tool yourself or use an SI. Take the time to build a configuration / pricing migration tool with X-Author for Excel or roll your own. Stick with OOTB Apttus as any customization will cost you every time a new version is released
Read full review 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.
Sri Rajan Senior Product Manager - Digital Subscriptions
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected Apttus CPQ over SteelBrick due to the simplicity of SteelBrick's out of the box pricing and ability to customize quoted products. As a global organization with selling a highly configurable products, we felt the ability of Apttus to handle our requirements as standard functionalty rather than a customization was a material difference between the platforms.
Read full review In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly.
NetSuite and
SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
Read full review Scalability The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease
Read full review Return on Investment The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers. As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently. Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service. King Ou Director Systems and Solutions
Read full review Poor support has slowed down our implementation of features and resolution of issues Lack of flexibility has led to some complex and unwieldy workaround solutions No useful built in AR reporting so we had to come up with our own solution Challenges with finance due to unreliability of Salesforce sync Read full review ScreenShots