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$25
per month
Zuora
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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.
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 …
We are currently considering switching to Salesforce CPQ, due to the high cost of Zuora and level of customization it has required. Zuora meets all of our needs, it just comes with a hefty price tag.
I don't know of the current capabilities of the nearest competitors to Zuora as it's been in our business 5 years now. At the time we looked there was no realistic competition and Zuora was a no-brainer! As it's always done what we needed we have not had the need to look …
We had attempted to move away from Zuora last year due to the high cost, but were unable to because: Intacct did not support our payment gateway or have SalesForce quoting Recurly does not have usage tiers in their SalesForce quoting QuickBooks does not have the bells and …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Zuora
As a hosting organization, Zuora does not easily talk to outside systems.
More customization is offered by Zuora, such as for permitting multiple sales channels and sales processes. Zuora is too expensive and in hindsight not worth the benefit realized after we are implemented now.
We moved from Xero to Zuora for our invoicing. We now use Zuora for invoice management and automated billing. We would like to long term do more research to automate the payment piece, which now still occurs outside of Zuora while leveraging the payment run functionality to …
Brightpearl is an amazing omnichannel retail management solution with live accounting, however, it is not the best fit for a subscription based business and does not track recurring revenue the way that Zuora does. Again I will reiterate that the automated invoicing and …
As previously noted the automated billing, recurring billing - touchless approach has been extremely helpful and cremated scalability for our high volume business.
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…
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 …
I feel like Zuora in a lot of ways is better than the previous systems that I have used. Its invoice management, automated billing, and recurring payments are very easy to navigate and understand. Most of our members use automated billing, so this is one of my favorite options.
Autopay is fully integrated between Zuora and IPP gateway (which we chose), and it is great. We have had a 3% uplift on the auto pay sign up in the first few months after moving to Zuora platform without any paper involved. End of month close is so much easier, no more manual …
Zuora has been extremely helpful in our accounting close. We are able to quickly enter the journal entries generated by the system and get reports of all the transactions that created that entry. On top of that, managing invoices, recurring payments, and automated bill runs has …
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.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. It is easy to customize this platform to meet the ever-changing business needs and requirements. It is easy to integrate with other platforms and offers incredible features that help businesses generate leads, automate their marketing processes, and collaborate effectively.
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.
Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.
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.
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.
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
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.
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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.
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
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.
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
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.
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
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 attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
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.
At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.
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.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.
