Chargebee vs. Zuora

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Chargebee
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
ChargeBee is an all in one subscription billing solution designed to handle all the complexity of recurring billing. The product integrates with a range of other SaaS applications including SalesForce, accounting, and order fulfillment systems. Some key features include: Managed Subscription Billing, Flexible Billing Support and Automated Notifications.
$249
per month
Zuora
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.N/A
Pricing
ChargebeeZuora
Editions & Modules
Rise
$249
per month
Scale
$549
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ChargebeeZuora
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsNo transaction based fees. No setup cost. No monthly contracts. No hidden fees.—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ChargebeeZuora
Considered Both Products
Chargebee
Chose Chargebee
We evaluated Chargebee vs. Zuora and Stripe. Zuora has a lot of enterprise-level companies, so from an optics perspective is "safer", but we found their integration to be more difficult, their cost to be more expensive, their UI to be more complicated, and their APIs to be …
Chose Chargebee
A strong balance between flexibility and simplicity -- Chargebee has proved to be a product that is well liked across the organization, and from a technical standpoint does not present too many hiccups for our developers. We also feel the pricepoint is good in a market which …
Zuora
Chose Zuora

Recurly was too basic for our needs. We didn't believe that we could scale with that technology.

Stripe would have required that we integrate it along side 3 other pieces of technology in order to hack together a billing system. Chargebee was too new a player for us to trust …

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
ChargebeeZuora
Small Businesses
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.5 out of 10
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.7 out of 10
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ
Score 7.7 out of 10
Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ChargebeeZuora
Likelihood to Recommend
6.9
(19 ratings)
1.1
(134 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(14 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
7.6
(17 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
1.0
(13 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(2 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(9 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
6.6
(3 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
ChargebeeZuora
Likelihood to Recommend
Chargebee Inc
Well-suited:
  • In a B2B set up - Post achieving some scale and having outgrown Google Sheets/ Excels. Won't add much value if you are dealing with fewer than 400-500 invoices a year.
  • We haven't explored their B2C subscription management side - but that is one of the key strengths of the platform.
Read full review
Zuora
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
Chargebee Inc
  • Reliable: We've had virtually no issues since launch.
  • Care about customers: Chargebee's account managers/support team have always been very helpful/responsive.
  • Feature-rich: Chargebee has a ton of features that help us do what we want and they are consistently adding new features every quarter.
Read full review
Zuora
  • 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
Chargebee Inc
  • It wasn't allowing us to add a one time purchase without making it an ongoing subscription with only one payment. They may have fixed it very recently but that was a big pain from a reporting perspective (it was including one time purchasers as subscribers)
  • Email automation is not very robust. Difficult to customize triggers by subscription, you have to send the same message to all subscribers for a specific action
  • Wish it had a way to write off and cancel the subscription of customers who haven't updated their cc info. That can be a long painful and very manual process. And if that feature is available somewhere they don't do a good job of making that clear.
Read full review
Zuora
  • 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
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
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
Chargebee Inc
It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.
Read full review
Zuora
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
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
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.
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Performance
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
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.
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Support Rating
Chargebee Inc
Chargebee is simple to use, and we have had little need for support.
Read full review
Zuora
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
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In-Person Training
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
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
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
It was reliable.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Chargebee Inc
The major reason to go with chargebee is its costing as compared to its competitors it is much useful and value for money.Also it has many features that is very practical and efficient to use it.I recommend to the people who involves low costing as well as futuristic features.
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Zuora
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
Chargebee Inc
No answers on this topic
Zuora
The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease
Read full review
Return on Investment
Chargebee Inc
  • It was a step in the right direction compared to ReCharge
  • It had negative impacts on our revenue before we had our developers put some work into improving its capabilities with our website and software
  • Now, we are seeing some positive results (after some costly updating from our end)
Read full review
Zuora
  • 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

Chargebee Screenshots

Screenshot of Recurring Business Command CentreScreenshot of Customizable Hosted Checkout PageScreenshot of Reporting and MetricsScreenshot of Subscription ManagementScreenshot of Customer Portal: Self-Service Portal