Maxio vs. Proposify vs. Zuora

In my opinion, Maxio is well suited for a large company with simple products/billing scenarios and 10s of thousands of dollars available to waste on implementation, learning curve, and mistakes. For any other company, I do not advise purchasing Maxio.

It is costly to properly set up Proposify and retain its use ongoing. If you have a plan to implement your proposals you can get some good cost-saving use from it. I cannot stress enough to have your assets, graphics, and snippets ready before you start. I also recommend that you fully understand templates and asset library or you will quickly be overwriting templates and themes with client-specific verbiage.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Managing deferred revenue.
• Contract management is flexible and allows us to see data that we never had before.
• Billing is painless and is now done within a couple hours. Previously it would take at least 1-2 days.
• Business Metrics and Reporting.

Incentivized

• TEMPLATES: The ability to work from customizable yet standardized templates allow for a consistent end-user experience for our clients, and elevates the perceived professionalism of our sales team.
• ANALYTICS: Unlike merely sending estimates or proposals via email, the tracking analytics available within Proposify's dashboard not only enables our project managers to more strategically engage with clients, but also gives our upper management an objective way to track the effectiveness of our sales team.
• EASE-OF-USE: Overall, Proposify's platform is easy to use and the UX is intuitive enough that the learning curve to use it is minimal.

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

• Options for Cash-based businesses. While it's not GAAP compliant and most users are accrual, many SaaS start ups are still small and operating on a cash basis.
• Commissions Module since SO already has all our data intergrations
• So many different features and data entry points that manual data entry errors are common

Incentivized

• Export into Word would be useful
• SFDC integration sometimes doesn’t seem to search/find contacts/opps perfectly
• Some of controls (editing proposals and templates) could be more clear/intuitive
• Difficult for businesses where redlined contracts/proposals may find this software does not support client/vendor collaboration

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.

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

We require a fair amount of back and forth of editing so this tool while helpful is not ideal for us

Incentivized

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.

There is definitely a learning curve - to me the UI for reporting was not intuitive and often required me to ask our RevOps to pull data for me

Incentivized

Overall it's great. There's definitely a learning curve, and I wish that some things were easier to use. For example, changing images isn't the easiest thing to do in it, but I'd love to be able to quickly add and change header images in my proposals. So far I've figured it out, but each time I do it I forget how it's done since it's not intuitive.

Incentivized

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

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

I've actually never used Proposify support, so I'm unable to speak about it. I suppose that's a good thing. If I did need to use it, I would hope that they'd be responsive and intelligent, but, again, since everything has worked smoothly I don't really know how the support functions or how good it is.

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

I inherited SaaSOptics from several predecessors that worked on it before me. I believe they used Chargebee or Chargify before SaaSOptics, but I haven't used them. I pray that the market comes up with a better product for subscription revenue management, SaaS metric reporting, and financial projections. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the team to be able to successfully complete the transition to new software at this time, so I feel like I'm stuck with SaaSOptics at this point

It was highly recommended by an associate and we have been on the receiving end of Proposify proposals and impressed by it. I don't recall if we looked at others but if we did they paled in comparison. There was no question as to using Proposify. It met all the needs, was easy to use, looks great and was exactly what we wanted and needed.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• Limitations in Chargify's invoicing capability has resulted in our finance team having to manually send invoices from our accounting system. This has resulted in 10-15 hours a week of resource wasted on something that Chargify should automatically do. If this isn't addressed, then the wasted time will increase as we scale.

Incentivized

• The detailed proposal has saved me time explaining a game plan to potential clients.
• They have customizable tables where the client can choose how many of a certain item they desire. For instance, if they want to buy graphics from you, they can choose how many. This allows for increasing profits by putting the choice in the customer's hand.
• When you send a contract you are alerted when a customer views the proposal. This has saved me time and money trying to go back and forth with my customers.

Incentivized

• 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