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…
Review of Zuora
Zuora - managing subscriptions and headaches
Invest in Zuora
Zuora Review
Use at your peril
Scalable subscription billing solution for SaaS companies
Sage Intacct
Zuora Review
Robust product that works well for global businesses
Great Subscription Management Software
Great tool for short, simple subscriptions
Zuora Does A Lot
Zuora gets the job done, but you'll pay for it
Does exactly what it says on the tin!
Zuora -- The Best Billing System Out There!
Pricing
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…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos
Zuora Advanced Consumption Billing - Micro Demo
Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 2)
Zuora CPQ Micro Demo
Zuora + Workato | Custom automations that fit your business
Zuora Revenue Micro Demo
Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 1)
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
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Reviews and Ratings
(274)Community Insights
- 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
- 1Likelihood to Renew14 ratings
- 9.3Availability2 ratings
- 9.7Performance3 ratings
- 7.6Usability17 ratings
- 1Support Rating13 ratings
- 7Online Training2 ratings
- 9.3In-Person Training2 ratings
- 7.4Implementation Rating9 ratings
- 6.6Configurability3 ratings
- 10Product Scalability2 ratings
- 6Ease of integration3 ratings
- 10Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 10Vendor post-sale2 ratings
Reviews
(126-134 of 134)Using Zuora to manage AppExchange prospects and customers
- I love that I can see exactly who is using our app - named users.
- I love that I can see the timeline of use.
- I love how it rates users.
- I don't see room for improvement it fills my needs.
My insights on Z-insights
- Aggregating data from multiple sources
- Provide digestible trend reports
- Segmenting clients by sector or usage trends
- Ease of connecting with third party data sources
- Customized multi-variable reporting
- Exportable reports
We use it to know how engaged a prospect is with a demo installation of our software. It also gives us a great look into not only the amount of use, but what they're doing with it.
- I use it to know if my prospect is being truthful with me. If she says she's hard at work testing us and Zuora Insights shows little use, I know something is wrong.
- Since Zuora Insights helps us understand who is using it, we can establish if it's a team testing, or just one guy.
- The patterns of usage give me clues to the best time to reach out, when we're fresh on the prospect's mind.
- More contextual help would be welcome. It can be a tricky product to master.
SaaS Sales/Account Mgmt role review
- Identifies which users are actively engaged and using our product compared to average or heavy users of our product.
- Notifies [us] of buying signals, such as heavy use of particular features of our product.
- Displays data in graphs so I can see if a user's engagement is trending up or down.
- So far it's very intuitive.
Loving Zuora
- Easy to use.
- Lots of data.
- Easy to interpret.
- Searching functionality (can be slow to search for clients)
- Easy to read charts and graphs - you can very quickly get the info you need.
- Integration with Salesforce - we have basic info (% of users logged in in the last 30 days, days until expiration, etc.) on the prospect's account and opportunities, allowing us to make more intelligent phone calls quickly.
- The usage intensity that it provides doesn't work super well for our company - seems it gets skewed by large company sizes or a small number of users who use the app very intensely. This means that sometimes a quick glance at the stats can be deceptive.
Churning is bad for you. Start Zuora instead.
- Quick setup, super easy to use.
- Gives great insight at a very granular level (user feeds), but is also very good at the big picture (account groups).
- Visual cues give you instantaneous snapshots of account and user health.
- Ultra-responsive customer success team helping you make the most of the product.
- Combines product data and CRM data, which is awesome, but only as awesome as your CRM data is!
- I want to reduce churn, but don't have enough data on customer engagement
- I'm having a hard time identifying power users and slackers
- I want to push free users to conversion, but need information on what's the best time to reach out
Not a good solution for B2C subscriptions.
- Managing recurring billing schedules.
- Storing credit cards and customer information.
- Reporting is really poor. You can run data dumps. I wouldn't call them reports. Your only option is to kick out a csv with unsummarized data for your subscriptions. There are no dashboards or summary figures. If you want to know how many New, Active or Cancelled subscriptions you had in a given period, you'll need to export a csv and do it yourself in Excel. You can't schedule reports to run, and you can't email reports from the interface.
- No HTML emails to customers. Everything sent to a customer is a text email. You're not even able to put a logo in the email. This triggers all manner of email deliverability flags and users have responded that they don't trust that the emails are from a reputable source.
- No Dunning Management (Delinquent User Notification). You can't set resolutions that automatically occur when a problem happens on a subscription. For example, if a customer's credit card fails three times, you might want to cancel that user's account automatically. This is a custom development job.
- Hard to integrate. No Python support and mostly SOAP API based. They started on a REST API in summer 2013 but it's not fully baked. My developers absolutely hate working with it and I know enough to know that they're not just grousing.
- Zuora does not provide a method for generating coupon or discount codes, or limiting the use of codes to certain products.
- Zuora doesn't provide a way to check system status. Most SAAS platforms have a status.XXX.com page where you can see if they are experiencing difficulties. When Zuora has an outage, which is not uncommon, their only communication channel is a forum on their support portal.
- The data model is excessively complex. Zuora bills this as "ultimate flexibility" , but when your developer has to make 12 API calls to get from a user to the amount they paid on an invoice, it's too much.
- Poor user experience. The interface is slow and needs a major design upgrade.
- Hard to add PayPal as a payment type.
- Zero tools to help recover stale or reissued credit cards. Subscription is all about reducing churn, especially in B2C. Visa and Mastercard allow merchants to update their credit cards on file using APIs , yet Zuora doesn't provide an interface to these programs. Also the retry logic and error handling on credit cards is very basic.
- No HTML emails to customers.
- Zuora doesn't offer an easy way to give customers the ability to manage their own upgrades and downgrades. I have to build something from scratch using their overly complex APIs. Other vendors offer account management widgets that let customers self-serve.
Zuora is a winning choice for your subscription economy
- Salesforce integration is key here with the ability to have sales people build out product quotes with flexible rate plans pushing new subscriptions into Zuora and have those Zuora subscriptions and financials visible within Salesforce to further empower sales.
- Zuora is a solid subscription billing & management platform that is constantly evolving with new releases & fixes - many of which are derived from direct customer feedback. The platform is flexible enough to allow for different kinds of subscription models
- Support, Support & Support. Zuora has grown their support staff and added additional account managers which helps enormously in the first year of operating on Zuora.
- Zuora's API endpoints affords outstanding development opportunity to integrate. We've used it for provisioning internally, mixed reporting & admin controls. It's very flexible.
- Marketing! Zuora does an outstanding job on marketing themselves and their solution. This can be a really helpful thing if you believe in the solution and need to sell the solution internally both upstream and across functional silos.
- What I believe is also a strength is unifying your business so you can focus on your core. If your core business is not subscription management, CPQ (cost-price-quote) and the financial aspects that go with it you can streamline your business down to your core. This is not something Zuora promotes but it's a happy side-effect.
- User adoption and training in my opinion is one area where Zuora can improve. They have a Zuora University program which I think is essential for people that will be users. However, the system changes often and many times users can't remember how to accomplish something. It's a challenging learning curve for finance people that may have to live in this system on a day-to-day basis, but the UI is easy to learn.
- Account management can use a little improvement. We had virtually none when we first started but a lot has changed internally with Zuora since then and we've since been assigned an account manager. I'd like to see more frequent touching from the account manager to check and make sure things are working and not just with IT but finance people, end-users.
- Reporting. The reporting in Zuora is pretty good and in my opinion better in some ways than Salesforce. Having said that, there is definitely room for improvement. They do make frequent releases to the product that helps the UI including reporting, but they seem like small changes to me. I'd like to see more advanced reporting features and a more robust system to accomplish that. For 80%+ of Zuora users, the reports and engine will be fine for you.