Synapse vs. 2Checkout from Verifone vs. Zuora

Synapse is great for companies would like to pay their bills on time without the hassle of reaching out to each vendor.

Incentivized

2Checkout Monetization Platform is well suited for emerging SaaS businesses because along with payment processing, they offer you exposure to Affiliates and make electronic code delivery easy. The dashboard is cumbersome and reporting graphs/options are not easy to comprehend so it might become trouble when the business grows and you want to show it to venture capitalists or any investor/buyer.

Incentivized

Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.

Incentivized

• Simple
• Hands On
• Easy to navigate

Incentivized

• 2Checkout handles credit cards that I would not be able to accept from my country.
• Fraud prevention works. They saved me a couple of times and I appreciate that.
• I always received my payments on time. I never had to complain.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ability to update information
• Formatting
• More email report options

Incentivized

• In the 2Checkout dashboard, searching for transactions is a bit awkward
• I wish there were more reports available for me in the 2Checkout dashboard

• 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.

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.

It is surreal. Everything feels like they don't really want you to use them. I had to beg them to approve my account because of stupid approval questions. Example: give ONE url where payments will come from. (my payments will come from a page inside my webapp which means absolutely nothing to users who don't have a user in my webapp. I also have many URLs where the users can pay from) Then their API is super complicated to use. I couldn't believe how complicated it is. It is not well explained in the documentation and you have to guess until you understand the underlying logic. I wouldn't use it if I Stripe was available in my country.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

Incentivized

It was reliable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not been a user of SynapseFi

Incentivized

Avangate digital commerce is the only available leading payment gateway service provider for Sri Lankans. That is the main reason to choose Avangate for my web store. It's easy and cost-effective and easy to use as a payment gateway service provider overall. Pricing, customer care, payout process and reporting is very good at Avangate.

Incentivized

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 simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.

Incentivized

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• Less interest charges
• Happier clients
• More credit card usage which leads to benefits

Incentivized

• I now get excellent customer service as compared to when I was with PayPal
• I no longer have to subject my customers to the pain of maintaining a PayPal account
• 2Checkout allows me to offer the same service as any large company and I'm a 1 man show

• Poor support has slowed down our implementation of features and resolution of issues
• Lack of flexibility has led to some complex and unwieldy workaround solutions
• No useful built in AR reporting so we had to come up with our own solution
• Challenges with finance due to unreliability of Salesforce sync