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Zuora is a versatile software that offers several key use cases for businesses across various departments. Users, such as Surf Air and …
Overview
What is Zuora?
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…
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What is Zuora?
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…
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Product Demos
Zuora Advanced Consumption Billing - Micro Demo
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Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 2)
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Zuora CPQ Micro Demo
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Zuora + Workato | Custom automations that fit your business
YouTube
Zuora Revenue Micro Demo
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Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 1)
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Zuora?
Zuora is software for subscription businesses. The software is designed to provide an end-to-end subscription management solution that includes billing, finance, commerce and insights, helping users establish a subscription business model and establish, nurture, and monetize recurring customer relationships.
Zuora spans across commerce, billing, collections, revenue recognition, and analytics. The vendor says their products aim to help users:
- Go to market with their subscription offerings, then grow and retain their customer base across multiple channels
- Automate billing, collections, and revenue recognition to scale their business and support their go-to-market strategies
- Deeply understand their subscribers and the health of their business at all times
Zuora is headquartered in Foster City, CA with 11 offices around the world. The company services over 800 clients, including HP, Dell, Financial Times, Box, YP.com, Vivint, Hubspot, and Schneider Electric.
Zuora Features
- Supported: Product Catalog
- Supported: Subscriptions & Amendments
- Supported: Zuora for Salesforce
- Supported: Billing & AR Settlement
- Supported: Payment Processing
- Supported: Revenue Recognition
- Supported: GL Integration
Zuora Integrations
Zuora Competitors
- Braintree, a PayPal service
- Maxio
- Vindicia
- Microworks Prism POS
- 2Checkout from Verifone
- Ericsson Enterprise & Cloud Billing (formerly Metanga)
Zuora Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of Zuora are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Zuora is a versatile software that offers several key use cases for businesses across various departments. Users, such as Surf Air and Branch, have found value in using Zuora as their primary revenue and subscription management system. It handles the complexity of subscription management, invoicing, and billing seamlessly, allowing finance, technology, customer service, and product strategy teams to automate manual processes and save time. Zuora has also proven valuable for the finance and accounting departments, serving as a centralized billing system that consolidates billing accounts and avoids the need for manual revenue reconciliation. Additionally, the integration of Zuora with Salesforce allows sales operations to manage the product catalog accurately and enables sales representatives to generate accurate quotes. Furthermore, companies implementing Zuora globally have benefitted from its ability to address subscription-related problems, recurring payments, prorations, discounts, invoicing, and reporting. The software has also been praised for its flexibility and support in scaling businesses during seamless transitions from other vendors. Overall, Zuora's features cater to multiple departments within organizations by facilitating financial transactions, managing subscriptions efficiently, providing valuable insights through data analysis tools like Zuora Insights, and aiding in compliance with company guidelines during field inspections.
Flexible Pricing and Customization: Several reviewers have mentioned that Zuora's subscription modeling allows for pricing flexibility and customization to meet specific business needs. Users appreciate the well-thought-out pricing structure and ability to request new pricing and discounting options, indicating that Zuora provides a customizable platform.
Seamless Integration with Salesforce: Many users have praised the integration between Zuora and Salesforce, stating that it streamlines sales processes and improves overall efficiency. With this integration, salespeople can easily build product quotes with flexible rate plans and have visibility into Zuora subscriptions and financials within Salesforce, enhancing their workflow.
Responsive Customer Support: Reviewers consistently mention the helpfulness of Zuora's support team. They appreciate the quick response times and assistance provided whenever needed. This level of support contributes to a positive user experience and demonstrates Zuora's commitment to excellent customer service.
Inaccurate Reporting: Several reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the reporting capabilities of Zuora. They feel that running multiple reports and combining them to get the desired level of detail is time-consuming. Some users also mentioned the need for improvement in distinguishing between multiple lines of business.
Difficult User Interface: Many users find the user interface of Zuora confusing and unintuitive. They have encountered issues such as clicking on hyperlinked subscription numbers leading to invoices instead of subscriptions, limited customization options to improve the poor UI, and weak search and reporting capabilities.
Lack of Integration and Flexibility: Reviewers have highlighted several integration and flexibility-related concerns with Zuora. Users mentioned challenges in integrating Zuora quotes with Salesforce, difficulties in customizing without Apex coding knowledge, limitations in offering different payment plans and billing frequencies, and a lack of seamless integration with popular accounting systems like Quickbooks.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 134)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 11, 2023
Review of Zuora
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Invoice creation
- Amendment tracking
- Salesforce sync
- Reporting
- Product catalog management (e.g. bundling)
- Permission/role management
April 29, 2021
Zuora - managing subscriptions and headaches
- 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.
- Zuora's revenue recognition is no longer in compliance with GAAP ASC606 if you plan on using Zuora to do revenue recognition. They acquired RevPro in which RevPro will be compliant with the new accounting standard. However, RevPro is a separate software and will cost money. To my knowledge, it is not in Zuora's roadmap to configure Zuora's revenue recognition features to be compliant with the new revenue accounting standard.
- Zuora's reporting needs some improvement to help measure churn. Several reports need to be run and manipulated in excel to see which clients canceled their subscriptions, turned their auto-renew off, or removed a product from their subscription. To us, all of that is considered churn and there is no way for Zuora to measure all 3 in a single report.
- There are also many clicks I have to make to accomplish a small task. Of all the software I have used for work, it is easily the one that took the most training. I still don't have it figured out a few months in.
February 23, 2021
Invest in Zuora
- Subscription Management
- Revenue Recognition
- Invoicing
- Multi-year deals
- Very custom payment plans
- Hosted payment pages
January 18, 2021
Zuora Review
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Handles simples subscriptions
- It isn't flexible at all, at the sign of something complex or slightly abnormal it becomes a nightmare. Such a restrictive piece of Software.
- Using Zuora has tripled the amount of time our Sales team spend on creating quotes
- Zuora is damaging the relationship between our customers with it's inflexibility
November 03, 2020
Use at your peril
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Distributed calls our fast
- Finance love its reporting
- Very buggy
- Alerts often only appear after we report the issue to them - no apparent automatic monitoring of systems
- Support is very variable and often just try to get rid of you
- Ridiculously overpriced
- Use customers as testers
- Have secret or hard to find limits
October 25, 2019
Scalable subscription billing solution for SaaS companies
- Integrations - We have a deep integration with Salesforce that allows you to easily update quotes/contacts/billing information in Salesforce and have it reflect in Zuora.
- Ease of use - Very easy to manage and figure out where to navigate to.
- Automation - There are many features/functions in Zuora in which you can automate, which will save a ton of time performing otherwise manual and repetitive tasks.
- The UI could use an update or refresh and layout seems like it can be condensed.
- Areas that are not currently automated take some time to adjust and figure out. Issuing refunds, credits, amendments to subscriptions from a basic user perspective isn't always super easy in the beginning.
- More reporting capabilities from the view of a CSM / account manger. Sortable dashboard.
May 18, 2019
Sage Intacct
- Fast
- Open API
- Plenty of plugins/integrations
- Not easy to use.
- Cannot consume products from CRM or ERP.
- Integration with Salesforce is not seamless.
May 10, 2019
Zuora Review
- Invoices.
- Reports.
- For the capacity that I use Zuora in, I have no complaints.
January 09, 2019
Robust product that works well for global businesses
- Zuora integrates well with our CRM
- Zuora is built to allow customization which is a must for our products.
- Zuora allows us to send email notifications to our customers before their renewal date so they are reminded they are up for renewal.
- While Zuora allows for billing notifications, the ability to segment who those emails go to is limited. We need to able to breakdown notifications by state/province, language, country, and other traits, but right now those breakdowns are limited to just country.
- It's nice that Zuora is robust and has so many features, but that also makes it challenging to train new users.
July 03, 2018
Great Subscription Management Software
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Flexibility with the product catalog. Once you understand the product catalog and its capabilities, the possibilities are endless. You are able to spin up new products quickly and test new ideas with minimal development time.
- API focus. Zuora API focus allows us to step away from the Zuora UI and build our own platform over the top of Zuora reducing ambiguity for our customers and team
- Constant upgrades - Zuora is continually adding to its product and listening to its customers to build a product that is leading the way in the subscription economy
- 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.
May 09, 2018
Great tool for short, simple subscriptions
- Consolidated invoicing
- High-volume, complex subscription management
- 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.
March 07, 2018
Zuora Does A Lot
- Products are easy to use and create with Zuora
- Much customization from email templates to billing to products.
- Recurring billing and reporting.
- They don't have very many out of the box payment plan options so that takes a lot of work to set up.
- Back end functions and making billing/subscription modifications are complicated.
- No list price field for products, at least with how we are using it so we had to build a workaround to have a visible list price.
February 06, 2018
Zuora gets the job done, but you'll pay for it
- Zuora is great for providing structure to subscription management.
- Zuora is integrated with Salesforce.com, which we use as our CRM.
- Zuora is great at tracking changes made to a subscription.
- The user interface is behind the times.
- Making change to a subscription is very painful.
- Finding the information you need can be difficult.
December 14, 2017
Does exactly what it says on the tin!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
- My only con at this point is the speed of the support in the UK - needs to be quicker.
- In the past reporting has been an issue but with the Insights addition, that challenge has now gone away.
December 14, 2017
Zuora -- The Best Billing System Out There!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Quote-to-cash
- Automated billing and payment runs
- Allows information to feed directly from API integration
- Payment gateways, payment method updater, etc.
- Insights are way too expensive. Should not have to spend $250,000/year for dashboard metrics.
- Add-on products are all too expensive.
- The platform itself is too expensive. We nearly did not renew last year solely due to the cost.
August 20, 2017
All in your hands!
- You can manage subscriptions, for instance, really easily and keep your customer updated on any change thanks to the automatic notifications system.
- Any change done on accounts is updated in real time.
- It gives a lot of possible inputs to use in order to look for the required information.
- Probably a nicer graphic layout.
August 14, 2017
Zuora great for global finance team
- ZUORA is brilliant at batch invoicing allowing you to perform an invoice to run for many customers at the one time.
- ZUORA does not handle corrections/CNs so well and this is often a manual task that could improve.
August 10, 2017
Zuora is the best subscription management solution
- Zuora customer support and professional consulting support is really great. They are focused to solve customers problems.
- Very reliable; they meet SLAs. We had quite a few problems in production and Zuora support was on top of the things during short outage times.
- Subscription domain model is well designed. REST API is quite easy to understand because of that.
- Reporting is very UI intensive. There is no way to export a report to some maintainable format.
- Ability to export/import configurations and product catalog. We maintained multiple zuora environments: DEV, QA, TEST, STAGE, PRODUCTION. Each environment required very UI intensive error-prone manual configuration. It caused us many issues.
- It was quite painful to incorporate legacy tax engine that wasn't supported by zuora out of the box.
- Reporting is of great use to determine what products a customer is utilizing.
- Being able to automatically generate invoices and send them out to clients is a main feature we use.
- Zuora allows us to manage and maintain all aspects of our customer and their usage through a single interface.
- While reporting is great, generating the reports you need could be a little easier.
- Invoices can be quite long and confusing based on the services a client is utilizing.
- Hard to read invoices.
July 27, 2017
Zuora in a cloud-based subscription model
- Very good overview on customer-accounts startpage. All relevant information at first sight.
- Convenient search for payments and customer-accounts.
- Stable server availability.
- We have synchronization issues with our database causing delays in payment and subscription statuses.
- Some processes need to be confirmed too often. I don't want to be asked three times if I want to process a refund. Could save some clicks.
- We have one annoying unresolved bug that allows Zuora to create more than one active subscription. This causes double-payments.
July 19, 2017
Zuora is the best of the best
- Bookings and Churn Reporting
- Invoicing
- Subscription tracking by customer
- Reporting capability - user friendly building of reports
- Improving invoicing for usage base recurring revenue
July 18, 2017
Best for enterprise and complex sales processes
- Integrates well with Salesforce CRM.
- Allows high levels of flexibility for different payment schedules.
- zuora is not "fast" and thus not a good solution for transactional sales processes like ours.
- zuora is hard to understand for its average user, typically an accountant, outsourced cfo, etc.
- zuora customer support is slow to respond when instant reply is typically desired.
- zuora reporting is not on par with other start ups in the space and requires considerable learning and customization, leads to poor understanding of data trends.
July 18, 2017
Tha aura of zuora
- Excellent subscription system
- Data quality
- Payment Options - Cash/Credit Balance
- Integration with Salesforce needs to be improved a little bit. The zuora to SFDC sync has issues all the time.
- Few key objects do not get synced to salesforce, example: Invoice Item Adjustment, Credit Balance Adjustment
- Handling installment payments with single invoice. We had to do custom coding for that.
- The sync with Salesforce. The ability for Zuora and Salesforce to sync eliminates manual transfer of data and areas of human error.
- Flexibility of setup. With all the various types of products and different revenue recognition rules, Zuora allows us to set up the rules we need to fit our business model.
- Ease of use. Creating and posting bill runs is simple and straight forward. With a few clicks of a button you are able to create and post invoices for all customers.
- The service team. I have had a great experience working alongside the Zuora consultant team. They have been easy to work with and have the ability to suggest effective solutions to ensure Zuora meets our business requirements.
- The new reporting module is definitely a step in the right direction, but the reporting module could still be better. Mirroring the drag and drop functionality of Salesforce would be great with the ability to create custom dashboards from the data. The 'run detail' vs 'run summary' reporting is a bit confusing. The 'Hide details' functionality in Salesforce would be better. Also, the fact that you can not provide a link directly to a Zuora report is pretty frustrating.
- Ability to bulk import quotes from the SF side that integrates with Zuora. During our Zuora setup we were very surprised that the ability to bulk create Zuora quotes that sync to Zuora was not possible. This caused a real headache for our setup and it would be great if Zuora allowed for this.
May 12, 2017
My job is easier with Zuora!
- Very good with subscription invoicing - works out all amendments prorated according to but not limited to subscription start dates
- Also great that with mid-contract cancellations - credits are automatically worked out and invoiced correctly
- Once default rules are set up everything just runs automatically in the back ground
- Links well with SalesForce
- Reporting - I find both the old and the new reporting clumsy but actually preferred the old
- Lack of Statements - why can I not pull a statement for an account that shows both the invoices and payments on the account?
- The statement that you can pull individually for the invoices or credit balance on an account, just has way too much info on it to send to the customer - it needs to be simplified