FastSpring vs. Zuora

FastSpring is better option for small business and enterprises as well. But if you're a single person managing a person, or don't have a developer on your team, you may need to hire one to integrate the platform on your site, otherwise, it works great on all the parts. Have integrations with Apple, Google and Amazon Pay and accept most of the cards. And handles and tax automatically, which is a plus.

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

• FastSpring makes the process of selling ebooks from my website quite painless and virtually invisible for me. I let FastSpring handle all details of the transactions, and I rarely have to get involved directly with the customers who purchase the books.
• FastSpring is very responsive with respect to technical and customer support. I have had a few occasions when a customer was having difficulty completing a purchase transaction, and FastSpring has always been responsive and helpful in resolving such problems quickly and efficiently.
• FastSpring offers a flexible set of options for customizing ordering pages that can be included in my website. There are many options, such as promotional coupons, discounts, multiple file downloads, and others.

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

• FastSpring uses 2 separate GUIs for store owners. Some features work with one GUI implementation and not the other one.
• Some other providers do provide lower credit card processing fees, compared with FastSpring. But I have been very happy dealing with FastSpring overall in terms of support and overall usability - so I am happy to continue using FastSpring. If I was selling 10x or 100x my current sales volume, I might consider a change, but I have no plans to change at the present time.

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.

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.

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

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

Compared to Paddle – FastSpring has much more experience in the e-commerce solution market. They already patched many things that Paddle might still go through. And Avangate is just very user-unfriendly (In my personal opinion). Their dashboard and checkout are just outdated. As a software company that builds and sells software via online in 2018 – we need to implement a fresh and simple experience for our potential customers. FastSpring offered this and Avangate didn't.

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

• Great impact on the cost efficiency of the payments.
• Good impact on the "abandoned cart" users: we could reach out to such users and in several cases re-add them as paying users.
• Good impact on customer support: FastSpring support is extremely helpful and available, in very rapid times.

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