Chargify vs. SaaSOptics

If you are a small startup, likely to be charging only in one currency, then Chargify will likely be suitable for you, as it was for us when we first started. However, as you expand and need to charge in additional currencies and require good reporting, you might find Chargify becomes more cumbersome. You do get a very stable and reliable billing platform with Chargify. I can't recall any downtime dues to issues. In the last 5 years, there have been only been 2 times where the app was down, both for scheduled maintenance. The communication leading up to the downtime was excellent, the app was up and running well within the maintenance window and everything kept functioning smoothly afterward.

Incentivized

SaaSOptics is awesome for growing companies that want to automate their invoicing. I like that it is also aimed at subscription based sales structures rather than sales that occur at a single point in time (but has the ability to support both). SaaSOptics makes it super easy to keep track of subscriptions, renewals, co-terms, etc. The reporting is a great feature, but we are unable to use most of the reports as we are a cash-based accounting firm. SO caters to accrual accounting and GAAP compliant firms which makes sense as it is the most commonly accepted accounting basis here in the US, but many small SaaS start-ups are still operating on cash basis. We are one of those companies, so we are able to get a ton of use out of the invoicing side of things, a lot of the reports are useless for us. We also wish SO had a commission module since we already integrate our CRM and accounting softwares into it, but that is not a make it or break it for us. We love the time SO has saved us.

Incentivized

• Chargify's API is solid and easy to use, including JSON and XML interfaces.
• Chargify's customer service is responsive and thorough; always making sure your needs as a customer are met.
• Chargify listens to its customer base and their suggestions for feature enhancements.

Incentivized

• Tracking and renewing all contracts with numerous customers
• Invoicing customers via email
• Tracking payments by customers by both credit card, ACH or check

Incentivized

• Reporting - It doesn't provide the reporting we need so I have to do it manually. It doesn't track individual components like we need it to for monthly reporting.
• Emails - The system's emails sometimes end up in junk mail, so I also follow up once a customer has missed 2 payment attempts.
• Transactions - An easier way to get to the transactions would be nice. It takes many clicks to see the transaction history.

Incentivized

• I can barely use the full functionality of the software because of reporting and transaction issues that are not easy to resolve, and appear to be system limitations. For example, the cohort report doesn’t make any sense, the gross renewal and reports are completely inaccurate, and they still haven’t created an accurate, standard MRR and ARR report (order dates before the subscription period could result in overlapping transactions, which will be excluded from the ARR report, so your ARR is understated and you could make uninformed decisions)
• You cannot renew transactions between customers, which is a total pain. There is very little guidance on how to handle mergers and acquisitions and there has been a significant amount of M&A in the market lately. Their customer support says you need to move the invoices to the new customer in your GL system, but I don’t want to change any historical information that could potentially change our audited financials.
• It is too easy to make mistakes and not understand or realize where and how the issue was created and how to resolve it
• There is very limited information (MRR and ARR at End of Month, and Total AR Balance, which isn’t groundbreakingly helpful) you can send from SaaSOptics to Salesforce, and the Salesforce IDs can easily change without you knowing, which stops the information from flowing from SaaSOptics to Salesforce
• They have a Dropbox functionality to save executed contracts, but I think it would be better to store them in your CRM where the sales, AM, and CS teams can access the docs instead of trying to teach your team members how to us SaaSOptics.
• They have a Clearbit integration to get more detailed information about your customer, but I haven’t set this up, and am unsure why you would use it if your CRM already imports information from ZoomInfo
• They don’t have an integration with Bill.com, so I don’t understand how they expect customers to use their expense module
• There is no need to use their expense module for 606 commissions if you already have a commission software that can handle 606. I haven’t had to implement 606 on the revenue side, but that seems to be a more practical use case.
• You can’t natively integrate with a customer success software, like ChurnZero. You need to hire a developer or pay more.
• It is difficult to collaborate and share reports with other parties. Their reports doesn’t export cleanly either and requires additional Excel manipulation. There is no multi-year reporting without creating custom fields and additional data entry. You can’t easily create a bookings report based on the order date or signed date, which could be different than the subscription start date.
• The granularity of security settings is not great and they don’t help you organize and direct users to use the software. My preference would be to not have any report users in the system.
• There are poor notifications about invoice issues. For example, our AR invoice email keeps getting unsubscribed when we want to have a copy of the invoice saved in our email to prove it was sent. If an invoice is rejected or kicked back, then you will not know until the invoice becomes past due and you start investigating why your customer hasn’t paid you yet.
• Invoice template changes impact all previous invoices, which doesn’t make sense and distorts your audit trail. Invoice template changes should only impact the present and future invoices. You also can’t easily add invoice 1 of 8, invoice 2 of 8, etc. You have to have manually type it in the invoice description.
• The detail for revenue and deferred revenue does not sync to the GL. You have to make a manually summary journal entry once a month.
• There is no data validation on the billing and shipping state fields so when you run a report of “Sales by State”, you will have uncombined rows for “CA”, “California”, “Ca”, which isn’t helpful as we try to do an economic nexus review for sales tax.

They are a crucial piece of what we do. We hope to have them as a vendor for a long time to come.

They are willing to help with most challenges and are pretty easy to get ahold of by phone. They are limited in their reach, when it comes to bulk cancellations, along with some other bulk edits. It is no fault to them, Chargify is just a system that hasn’t been upgraded much over the years.

Incentivized

Chargify met a list of set requirements and our budget at the time. The main items were:

1. Salesforce integration
2. Payment gateway support
3. Billing portal / self service
4. Strong API
5. Tax invoice support
6. Multi country and multi currency support

Incentivized

Zuora is a B2C subscription billing system best used for companies like Netflix. For a B2B company, the sales process can be much more complex and Zuora was never able to handle that. For the 2 years we struggled with Zuora (now referred to the dark ages within our company) we had limited access to knowledgeable support reps who understood the system and accounting/finance. Zuora did not integrate with our GL system, so only summary level data was available, which made reconciling a pain. The reporting never matched up and we had to hire a resource to go through all historical transactions to find the errors. Once SaaSOptics was implemented, it has immediately improved our ability to close our financials in a timely manner. In addition to that, their support team is the best that I've worked with across all vendors. After dealing with Zuora, we spent at least 6 months evaluating SaaSOptics to Zuora and other systems. They convinced us that they were what we needed in order to finally have accurate revenue data. Overall, we selected SaaSOptics because their system is designed for B2B, integrates with our CRM and integrates with our GL, syncing important customer level invoice data.

Incentivized

• The positive impact was mostly when we actually did need subscriptions. The negative impact came when we pivoted to a more focused type of product, which did not need user subscriptions. Because we were reusing the code and had already done all the setup (and had a skeleton crew), we stayed with Chargify, but many times it got in the way. Had we continued as a business, we would have switched to just using Braintree.

Incentivized

• Not sure about ROI yet because we've only been using it for about 4 months, but it is saving time.
• Our management team now has standard reports with which we can manage the business.