NetSuite is a suite of ERP and accounting modules which is sold in various editions aimed at different size customers. The multi-country, multi-currency version is an additional module called OneWorld. Netsuite is a SaaS system and is not offered in an on-premise edition.
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Zuora
Score 7.9 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
NetSuite ERP
Zuora
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NetSuite ERP
Zuora
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Users subscribe to NetSuite for an annual license fee. The license is made up of three main components: core platform, optional modules and the number of users. There is also a one-time implementation fee for initial setup. New modules and users and can be added as a business grows.
Zuora - does one thing and not that well. The best thing about it is consolidated invoicing. It's a point solution that thinks it's a platform. It's difficult to navigate, the navigation doesn't make much sense, and any customization is really just a deceptive crutch. NetSuite …
Due to its comprehensive, cloud-based, and highly integrated suite of applications covering financials, CRM, supply chain, and more, providing a single source of truth for business data. Its scalability is a significant advantage, allowing businesses to easily add modules and …
We don't have the need for an enterprise level solution like SAP, Oracle, or PeopleSoft so NetSuite ERP was a better fit. We had outgrown the functionality provided by our previous ERP system and of the three different solutions that we demo'd, NetSuite ERP checked the most …
NetSuite is significantly more intuitive and user friendly than SAP. SAP navigation was slow and difficult to find what you're looking for without backend codes. With NetSuite, there's a useful global search feature to quickly find what you need and robust capabilities for …
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 …
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to …
Zuora is great for recurring payments and automated billing. For usage based subscriptions, it was not as strong as NetSuite as a solution. For accounting close, Zuora offers great reporting, though we are still learning how to best utilize the customization options for our …
Zuora provides a good buffer between Salesforce and NetSuite. It is primarily used by our billing team, so our accounting team can use it with NetSuite to leverage their reports. However, revenue recognition is still a manual process since the integration between Zuora and NetSu…
Against Workday, Zuora does have quite a few limitations. Because of Zuora's limitations for a business like ours which is high in volume, with a variety of billing models, and global, we have a lot of manual intervention in the daily and month end processes.
Invoice management is useful but once again if an invoice had been created by error it is impossible to fix it. Automated billing has made collection efforts easier but at the same time entering billing information sometimes does not work seemlessly with the other software …
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.
We have had many issues with communication between our credit processors and NetSuite which resulted in a large loss of income on our part. We have not had any issues what so ever with Zuora in regards to this.
Stripe is far easier to implement with a much lower price threshold to use. It allows easier implementation for the end user and offers far more flexibility than what Zuora can offer.
As NetSuite is our accounting system we evaluated their subscription billing platform and it wasn't able to accomplish the things we needed it to and didn't have near the features that Zuora had. As mentioned earlier, the Accounting functions in Zuora do not appear to be useful …
We use Zuora primarily for invoicing, we have another actual accounting software that does our accounting close. We generate and send all invoices from Zuora and allow half of our batches to run automated; the other half we manually work with them as they are more complicated …
Zuora is quite flawless in our recurring billing and the BI info we are able to extract from zuora allows us to be very dynamic. It seems to sync seamlessly with netsuite which manages our finances. These capabilities allow us to maximize cash flow and revenue and any other …
Zuora offers better volume recurring billing than NetSuite. We had to copy and paste from the previous monthly billing when doing new monthly billing in NetSuite which was very manual and time consuming. With Zuora we simply do a batched bill run for all clients on a billing …
Zuora is incredibly effective, and much more detailed than any other billing platform when it comes to invoice creation and management. With a business of our size, growth and change, there aren't many systems that can counted on with 100% certainty. Zuora is one platform that …
Best suited for mid-market to lower scale enterprises (under 2,000 employees) especially if migrating from Quickbooks or another fragmented small business system. Also, multi-entity and global operational businesses are very well suited as there is robust functionality around multi-subsidiary, multi-currency and multi-tax controls. Finally, businesses with inventory & supply chain heavy businesses would find the functionality very useful as the system allows warehouse management, lot/batch tracking, fulfillment, etc. Not well suited for startups (a lot of functionality not needed) or very small businesses (under $3mm in revenues). Overkill in complexity and cost and implementation leg-work is necessary relative to the underlying operations of the business. Also, companies with a heavy manufacturing business (shop floor execution) lacks depth with true manufacturing ERPs like Epicor, Infor, etc. and companies expecting consumer grade UX feels like the interface isn't modern or very intuitive right out of the box.
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.
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.
The area for the largest improvement needed is the implementation process. Especially when it comes down to an accounting based ERP setup rather than a CRM model. The experts should have accounting backgrounds in addition to the system knowledge for implementation.
There should be more training focused on the Dashboards and the maneuverability of the data focused for each graph or report within the dashboards.
The AP system is a little problematic with more complex company hierarchy. Due to the AP Invoice headers being driven by "main line" but the expense distribution being driven by journal entries - the AP aging is hard to verify the accuracy and can be distorted by different types of transactions.
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.
NetSuite is able to cover all of our needs, spanning multiple departments and managerial levels. We use it daily for a multitude of functions, including creating promotions, estimating inventory, pulling historical reports, forecasting sales, and more. Overall, we're very satisfied with NetSuite as an ERP solution and recommend it to medium to large businesses.
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.
NetSuite is a cloud tool, and is easy to implement for mid-sized organizations. It comes with standard forms/ printing layouts, and financial reporting (both summary and detailed), which are very handy for business users. In addition to these, with 99.99% service availability, NetSuite makes it one of the most reliable ERP tools available on the market.
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.
It has been very reliable. I can only think of 1-2 times in 4.5 years that we have had issues getting in, and in each case were able to get back in within 1 hour. There has not been a major downtime
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.
Most of the time the performance is very good. Pages load in a few seconds; financial reports take less than 5 seconds; basic searches take a few seconds. But performance can be sporadic throughout the day and cause the run time to triple.
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.
I would like to give 8 rating for NetSuite support and reason for that is below: Whenever we faced any technical or functional issues we tried to reach out to NEtSuite support but response was not immediate. We told them about the urgency of the issue but still we were not getting response on time. Then, we have to reach out to AE to get things resolved.
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 had in person training for a day when first got the software. The training was good. The challenge was that there was a large gap between training and when we went live so we forgot quite a lot
I felt NetSuite Professional Services did an excellent job of guiding us in the implementation. I also felt our internal teams were a little resistant to the change and engagement of new software. Had we performed better engaging and buying into the new software, I would be able to rate the implementation better. Therefore, the lower number should not be viewed as a deficiency with the software or the professional services teams, but as an reminder of how important complete buy-in from the local users is.
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.
QuickBooks Online is, by far, a better and easier-to-use product for smaller companies. Only switch to Netsuite if you have to. We switched to NetSuite because we have numerous subsidiaries, and QuickBooks would not be able to handle the complexity.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
We have been able to scale our business 25X without any major overhaul with Netsuite. Its dashboard setup makes onboarding new employees very easy and allows data to be shared across multiple offices. Its cloud setup does not put any pressure on IT to scale servers or other infrastructure. We have been able to become much more efficient in all aspects of the business.
