Recurly vs Zuora

• Recurly is very easy to use. Their UI is very clean and intuitive, so my staff has no problem understanding how to handle payments in Recurly. They just released a new UI, which is currently in Beta, but does an even better job making the user experience great.
• Recurly really helps reduce the time involved in collecting payment from a client. They have a dunning process which detects when a transaction has failed, and automatically re-tries running the payment several times before giving up. Recurly gives you full flexibility on how the dunning process works, including the ability to send your client payment declined notifications every few days to inspire them to update their payment info.
• Recurly just added a new feature which can automatically update credit card information from clients whose card has expired. They ping the credit card company (visa, MC, AMEX, Discover) to retrieve new card information for cards who have just gone past their expiration dates. This is extremely handy, and has reduced the number of times we've had to contact our client to get updated billing information.
• Recurly has excellent customer service. You can chat with an agent and receive an instant reply to your questions. I love this.

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• The CPQ quote engine makes our quoting much simpler and allows us to configure quotes quickly. The added advantage is it allows to turn the quotes in to subscriptions at the click of a button when the business is won.
• One of the great things is the one you least think about. It simply sits in the background and does its job. Each subscription is configured to be invoiced and payments collected on daily schedules. We only know when things aren't right - which is rare.
• Having the subscription information in Salesforce is a godsend. We have used the power of Salesforce workflows, formulas, reporting etc to make this data work for our customer-facing teams.

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• It would be great to have the ability to generate a single payment invoice that details all the past due invoices, etc. This can be tough for larger customers that may have multiple in a month.
• It would be extremely helpful to be able to re-generate an invoice once it's been set up. Sometimes we need to update a customer's company name if it's changed and have to do it manually rather than in the system.

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• The user interface is a disaster. There are many things that make no sense, such as clicking on a hyperlinked Subscription number that takes you to an invoice instead of the subscription.
• Extremely limited customization capability to improve poor UI
• Searching/reporting is very weak and difficult to use. The format of exported data is at least different than what many other systems tend to use. I find it unintuitive and difficult to manipulate or perform tasks such as vlookups and filtering; perhaps it's really smart and I just don't get it
• The concept of a credit memo does not exist...yet. They keep promising it but have not delivered. Their solution has been Invoice Adjustments and Invoice Item Adjustments, which at least don't make sense for my business.

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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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• We've been able to close deals faster with the implementation of Z-Force Quotes and DocuSign within Salesforce. Plus, this puts the tools in the hands of sales to do the work, not support staff. Added bonus of having better information within Salesforce in regards to previous quote history and current subscription numbers.
• Our finance team is better able to act like gatekeepers in some instances when it comes to the kinds of deals that get created because the product catalog and pricing plans are more standardized. A plus in transparency between sales and finance.
• Standardizing your product catalog into a model that works within Zuora can be challenging IF, as a business you've not already formalized your catalog and you do a lot of non-standard things like packaged deals or 'bundling' as some people call it. Having a successful Zuora implementation may mean being flexible in how you sell, but the good news is that making that standardization is good for the entire company, not just sales and finance.
• There is a real sense that you need to find the ROI in Zuora, especially in the early stages but I don't think most people will. When you have to migrate part of your accounting & business to Zuora it shines a very bright light on a lot of flaws you may already have. It takes time to adjust and normalize data in Zuora and in many cases you may not get the kind of accurate business reporting (churn, MRR, ARR) you were hoping for in the first year if your subscription business is based on annual or multi-year deals. If you're monthly, you should have none of these issues.
• Customer service has greatly improved. Our team has better transparency into the subscriptions of our customers and it makes it easier and faster for our CSA staff to zero in on the products and services our customers are using.
• Sales has much better information at their fingertips in Salesforce to help them make better sales.
• Making the migration from wherever you are into Zuora can be very challenging. In our case we had a homegrown solution so the migration was a bit difficult. Post-migration we felt a bit like we got kicked out of the nest with some rising frustration. This has since changed with added account management and increased support.

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