Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
$120
per month
Zuora
Score8.5 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.
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
