Impact Radius is a partner management platform from the company of the same name in Santa Barbara, California. The platform touts tag management without technical assistance for marketers, tracking of all media channels for multi-channel and mobile marketing, call tracking for inbound calls, and affiliate / partner program management capabilities. Central to the platform is the Partner Manager, with its pay-for-performance affiliate management capabilities.
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Recurly
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Recurly is a subscription billing platform and manages customer communications via email, business performance monitoring, and account changes. A merchant bank account is required to work with Recurly. A payment gateway is part of the product but it integrates with other gateways, such as PayPal, to give shoppers a more comprehensive suite of payment options.
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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.
It's more of a SaaS oriented solution than just payment processing and billing software. The advanced analytics is a huge advantage over the competition.
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 …
We had attempted to move away from Zuora last year due to the high cost, but were unable to because: Intacct did not support our payment gateway or have SalesForce quoting Recurly does not have usage tiers in their SalesForce quoting QuickBooks does not have the bells and …
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 …
More customization is offered by Zuora, such as for permitting multiple sales channels and sales processes. Zuora is too expensive and in hindsight not worth the benefit realized after we are implemented now.
Zuora was by far the superior product and most reputable. It gave us the best opportunity to scale quickly without causing the business to slow. We felt Zuora was the right fit for our 300k+ subscribers worldwide and could help solve our decline rates.
Most of our use cases have been met only by Zuora. We based our decision on the following factors: 1. Choosing the software that meets 80-90% of our needs. 2. Awesome customer support
Any publisher looking to monetize their blogs would be a great fit. The size of the publisher probably doesn't matter. They have a wide selection of advertisers and publishers can sign up for free. Advertisers that are looking for great partners for their affiliate programs would be good fits. One of the benefits is that Impact really focuses on recruiting high-quality publishers.
Recurly is great for tracking transactions and reviewing payment method declines. The platform is extremely helpful when dealing with scenarios where someone believes they have been fraudulently charged for the product. Recurly allows for transaction filtering, which is very helpful when trying to find possibly fraudulent charges very easy. If expecting precise, detailed information about a card decline, Recurly would not be very helpful.
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.
I really can't think of any shortcomings on Recurly because they have tried to cover all bases well. However, I believe that pricing could be little competitive because Recurly can become quite expensive when you have acquired a good number of subscribers. So apart from price, there are no shortcomings I can think of on product side.
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.
I believe we would continue to use Recurly because they have shown that they are continually improving their software, and they listen to their customers
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.
Impact has had a major impact on our business. It is pretty easy to use if you don't have multiple accounts with them, so be sure you keep things streamlined. Otherwise, it can be confusing if you have to bounce between different accounts you've applied to. While they are managed under a single login, they can be difficult to distinguish between when trying to see how successful your campaigns are.
Apart from a lot of scope, which it has for improvement, like analytics, api's, customer service, downtimes. It still provides a lot of value, it is helpful for us in Business crtical areas, managing subscriptions and creating and launching coupons, ease of usability, camparatively lower maintainence are some valid reasons to prefer Recurly.
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.
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.
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.
We've been reaching out requesting support for two months and no one has responded. They completely ghosted us. We've emailed the original sales rep, our account manager, our sales rep and account manager's bosses, and others. Still no response, though I can see the emails have been opened multiple times. I've never experienced worse support.
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.
First promoter has been a phenomenal affiliate platform to use. It has everything I need from a reporting perspective. It has everything I need from a payout perspective. It has all the links, tips, and tools I need for promoting products. Overall it is a far better tool to use
Recurly does a much better job at handling subscription payments than QuickBooks Online. We only use QuickBooks Online when we have a client who cannot pay via credit/debit card. In those cases, we send out automatic invoices via QuickBooks Online instead. 95% of our clients are processed through Recurly.
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.
Providing an interface for our subscribers to manage their own accounts has simplified our business tremendously. This alone has freed up hours of our staff's time each day.
Many customers receive new credit cards due to expiration or fraud. The time we spent in updating this information prior to using Recurly's Revenue Recovery feature versus now is significant.
