Maxio vs. PROS Smart CPQ

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.

Is my IT team ready to handle the challenges with data integration ? Are all the features offered by my current quoting tool being offered by Cameleon? Do I need a SaaS based quoting tool? Would it be easy and intuitive for my sales team (who,quite frankly, worship MS Excel) to use Cameleon ? Do I need a real-time/near-real-time quoting tool or would delays in data refreshes be acceptable

• 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

• Salesforce.com integration via a plugin that lets end users access Cameleon CPQ systems.
• Quoting made easier with complex business rules.
• Good support from the Cameleon team with fixes and enhancements.

• 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

• Integration with other onsite systems such as Oracle databases require the expertise of knowledgeable developers. Manual upload of flat files are always an option , but not necessarily the cleanest.
• Better Cameleon CPQ Designer UI would go a long way. Currently UI is a stark contrast to the intuitive UI of SalesForce.com or similar SaaS based tools. Not too much to ask for , considering the fact that we work in the era of Facebook and Twitter.
• Real time data availability is a long way to go for Cameleon CPQ. Updates to data pushed over as batches to Cameleon are reflected at Salesforce.com only after a 'versioning' process is launched. Current recommended frequency for this process is once a day (an upgrade to make it twice a day is in the works).

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

There are a few features that we expected from the tool but Cameleon's CPQ has fallen short on these. Possible enhancements and product fixes should be made as soon as possible to change the perspective. Unexpected bugs in the tool have come up during the roll-out that has caught the implementation team off-guard

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

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 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

SaaS based tool. Better quoting rules.

• 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

• A salesforce.com -esque approach to CRM has a whole gamut of advantages. Cameleon CPQ complements this approach.
• Expect down times , feature problems or general disagreement about Cameleon's capabilities initially. This is true for adopting any new tool or technology. Hold on and it will tide over.
• As a person who has used Cameleon purely as a developer standpoint , I do not have anything more to add-on.