Recurly vs Zuora

• It is very easy to track MRR, which gives you insights into your overall revenues and health of the subscriptions. Though MRR is pretty easy to calculate Recurly puts it beautifully on the dashboard which is very easy to read.
• LTV, Recurly calculates lifetime value which is a good insight for adjusting Marketing spends. Even this is available on the dashboard.
• The other features like Subscriber churn Rate, Average revenue per customer etc are really great and would help the marketing team a lot.

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• 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.

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• The coupons feature is a bit cumbersome. It can become tricky to set up, apply, and un-apply coupons for a particular client. If you have special billing cases where you discount for a few months or give a client service in any irregular fashion, using coupons can become tricky.
• We have a referral program with our clients where they receive a perpetual monthly discount for each client they refer to use. The client receives this discount as long as their referral remains active with us. We would like to be able to apply a discount to a client account, and have the ability to remove that discount in the event a referral ends service with us. In some cases a client has referred several clients, and we would like to apply a discount for each referral, and still have the ability to remove one or more discounts as referrals begin and end service with us. Currently there is no way to do this in Recurly. There isn't even a very good work-around, which is disappointing.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• It is automated to an extent that very less manual intervention is required. Which itself is an FTE saver. If on a traditional tool we were employing 5 members, now 1 for half a day for day to billing and subscriptions task suffices. This is just one team. Imagine what impact on the organization it would have brought.
• If integrations are part of the project where Zuora is connecting the dots with other systems, I will recommend verifying the available tangibility with integrations. Batch runs could be effective in a slow-paced (<10-50 transactions per day) but in voluminous sides (>200-1000 transactions per day) I would encourage going for real-time solutions.
• Billing's most integral part today is to be able to make swift updates, be it Contact updates, Date changes, Credit/Debit memo creation, and other accounting task. Zuora handles them very effectively and is really quick which is the edge in the fast-paced nature of business today where everything is required to be completed instantly.

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