Checkout.com headquartered in London enables businesses with technology designed to make payments seamless. Checkout.com boasts the fastest, most reliable payments in more than 150 currencies, with in-country acquiring, fraud filters and reporting through one API. Checkout.com can accept all major international credit and debit cards, as well as popular alternative and local payment methods. The company launched in 2012 and now has a team of over 1100 people across 18 offices worldwide.
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Zuora
Score 8.0 out of 10
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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.
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Pricing
Checkout.com
Zuora
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Checkout.com
Zuora
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Checkout.com
Zuora
Considered Both Products
Checkout.com
Verified User
Manager
Chose Checkout.com
Both CyberSource and Ingenico provided poor support on any types of issues. Integration was a nightmare as it took months just to set them up as compared to Checkout.com.
Checkout.com provided us with quick integration and constant monitoring of our transactions which is what we …
Checkout offers great service and expertise and stands above its peers in full-service offering, integration, and ongoing support. However, Checkout is not suitable in a scenario where Paysend is fully licensed and a direct acquirer of the scheme. In this scenario, Paysend can perform the full value chain in-house.
Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the last 3 years that I have been working with Checkout.com, they had an unplanned outage that lasted less than a few minutes. Their uptime is amazing. If they have maintenance, unlike banks, they don't have downtime during this time. We frequently require their support and Checkout.com responds to us within minutes. When we have important rollouts, I schedule calls with our merchant support manager to monitor the rollout/perform tests, etc. It is always easy to find time lost even with short notice.
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.
Checkout.com performance as an acquirer and a PSP is excellent. We have too many transactions per day, therefore reports take some time to generate before they are available for downloading. But it indeed takes reasonable time. We use native/h2h integration therefore, there is no redirection issue, all pages load quickly on our side. Based on my experience, Checkout.com will never never integrate with software or systems that will slow them down. Amongst all payment methods they offer, all are processed immediately, without delays.
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.
When we were discovering the possibility of opening an entity in the United States to process transactions as domestic cards, Checkout.com did not just quickly provide the requirements to open that market as we asked them to but showed us slides with all the possibilities we had for each of their licenses in the world, calculating an estimate of the acquiring costs and acceptance rate we would have, based on the cross-border volumes we were processing with them, to evaluate other ways to improve our business.
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
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.
Both CyberSource and Ingenico provided poor support on any types of issues. Integration was a nightmare as it took months just to set them up as compared to Checkout.com. Checkout.com provided us with quick integration and constant monitoring of our transactions which is what we really needed.
Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.
Our tech team implemented payments API to process payments online. Analytics team receives transaction repots that we use to build our own performance dashboards and help to reconcile transactions. API is indeed flexible - we don't use all features but if required we can easily implement them. When Checkout.com adds new features or functionalities, some of them can be used even on an older API version which saved us tech resources and implementation time. We use the same API to expand into new markets - technically we don't need to change anything when we want to launch payments in a new country.
Checkout has allowed us to enter markets worldwide without having to find a new provider—the same seamless experience across Europe, the UK, and Australia.
The efficient chargeback setup on the portal allows us to monitor and respond to chargebacks promptly and efficiently, and help is always available for cases that are a little less black or white.
