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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
YouTube
Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 2)
YouTube
Zuora CPQ Micro Demo
YouTube
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)
YouTube
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
(51-75 of 134)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 07, 2016
Subscription airline loves Zuora!
- Subscription management
- Customer outreach
- Thought leadership
- Order value reporting
- Pricing structure for service
- Capability to manage unique or complex subscriptions products
December 05, 2016
Longtime Telecom User
- Connects to Salesforce.com
- Automates manual tasks
- Keeps most users away from the details of billing
- Hosted/SaaS
- Ability to charge late payment/interest fees
- Detailed SaaS based reports (like Cohorts)
November 30, 2016
A strong product with only a few limitations for those who provide more than cloud services.
- Before implementing Zuora, managing the deferred revenue required us to maintain a spreadsheet and reconcile it monthly against our accounting system. After implementing Zuora, our deferred revenue is now managed by Z-Finance and has greatly decreased the closing process. It has allowed our staff to focus on other areas, rather than spending a couple hours making sure that all deferred revenue has been posted properly.
- Before implementing Zuora, we had to manually create invoices for clients based on the information the sales team generated in an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet was our old way of presenting quotes to clients. However, this would often produce many errors in the calculations, etc. After implementing Zuora, we were able to control the pricing and presentation of quotes in the backend, while the sales team only had to focus on getting the sale. This has allowed us to focus more time on making sure that more opportunities are being won, rather than worrying if the numbers are correct.
- Accepting payments from our customers wasn't too bad when it came to methods other than credit cards. However, anytime a customer would like to make a credit card payment, the process was always time-consuming and required multiple forms. Now with Zuora, I can enter the credit card information pretty quickly and Zuora stores the information safely, allowing the customer to just send us a notification that we can process their payment, rather than having them fill out multiple forms every time.
- I wish there was a more straight-forward way of processing write-offs. I've had to change our method a few times because of how the transactions were affecting our revenues. I've had to create my own way, outside of the knowledge center, that now works for us. However, this took some experience and testing to finally figure out.
- I would like to see Zuora set up the product catalog to allow for physical items that are sold. This way, I don't have to create a "rate plan" for a printer. I realize that Zuora is used mainly for cloud-based and subscription services, however, I feel that there are enough companies that might provide a physical item along with a service/software.
- I wish the invoice and email templates were a little more visual (without the need for only HTML or Text.) Word mailmerge for designing templates is very cumbersome that requires testing for multiple use cases to make sure the generated invoice/PDF will display correctly.
November 30, 2016
A Subscription Billing Platform that will grow with your business
- Zuora is highly flexible in what can be done through the rest API. Our business builds a lot of custom apps that integrate with Zuora, giving us the flexibility of setting up subscriptions how we want without needing to worry about the complex calculations that are done behind the scenes.
- Zuora, as a company, is incredibly receptive to feedback and have developed new features specifically for our business because of the value they saw it could bring to other customers.
- Zuora does a great job at keeping our team in the loop on upcoming releases. Many times we're able to beta features to give our feedback and help them create an overall better product which is key in any partnership.
- Zuora's integration with our financial ERP is lacking a lot of flexibility that our business was looking for (taxation and discounts on same line level, customer field syncing, etc.). Over the past few months, though, they've made an effort to gather our feedback and start building a revamped version.
- Having a separate product rate plan charge for discounts makes it difficult to give a cohesive experience to the end user. As a business we think about discounts as being an attribute of the initial product rate plan charge, not an entirely separate line item.
- Searching in Zuora (for specific customers, invoices, etc.) is very slow and often fails while trying to search.
November 21, 2016
Little complaints, great and easy to use
- Revenue recognition
- Usage based billing
- Reporting on MRR
- Good Avalara integration
- Saved regular used data exports
November 18, 2016
Zuora, the billing and revenue recognition process improvement tool!
- Automates the billing process straight out of Salesforce.
- Automates the revenue recognition process to handle deferred revenue.
- Streamlines the Quote to Cash process for our organization.
- The ability to have a code that ties into Salesforce so that it is easy to tie a payment in Zuora to a particular customer in Salesforce.
- The ability to seamlessly integrate with all known accounting systems like Quickbooks.
- A little better GUI.
November 16, 2016
Zuora - implementation review
- Hands-on implementation and guidance, great training videos/knowledgebase
- Easy plug ins for multiple payment gateways, will manage relationships
- Plays well with other companies (integrations)
- GL coding and mapping not robust, can't have multiple bank accounts, or wire fee/cost accounts
- Hard to delete or undo actions (payments, invoices, subscriptions)
- Journal Entry output file is not configurable
November 16, 2016
Please read this before you purchase Zuora
- Awesome reporting mechanism
- Excellent customer support.
- Trustworthy product. The system is consistently stable and we have never seen any downtime.
- Need the ability to control the flow of removing and updating amendments when doing it from Salesforce. It is pain in the butt to ask our account managers to follow specific steps.
- There is no option for randomly creating a one time invoice for a customer.
- Need to have a call out when we change a service activation date.
November 16, 2016
Zuora Review - Positive Experience
- Pricing changes are UI driven, easy, and can go into effect immediately without operations or development involvement. As a product manager, I could even update our prices on the website in real time because of the way we integrated.
- Sales people (depending on privileges) can update individual subscriptions to accommodate upgrades, discounts, credit notes, or other modifications without involving anyone else.
- The integration and flexibility of zuora to intuitively adopt our multiple subscription and product platform is integral to a seamless order to cash process.
- Zuora makes invoicing quick and easy. This allows us to combine one-time, recurring and usage charges on a single invoice.
- The majority of features needed are not out of the box, this took some time to configure and implement the solution. The API is not very well documented and this caused our development team some hassle when on-boarding the solution.
- Subscription Management Workflows. Once you have a subscription set up and for example, needed to make two changes, you have to do two separate T&C amendments. You cannot simply hit amend and make both changes at once. So what you thought would be only a couple of clicks on the mouse, turns into several clicks.
- When cancelling a subscription the system generates a pro-rated invoice that has caused confusion with our customers, where they think it's a credit note.
November 16, 2016
Summary of the thoughts
- Easy to use, no need for special training
- It works for us, because it covers all (or almost all) our needs
- Very trustful source of information
- Zuora uses only a few ways of searching for information, I wish there will be more ways one day. Hard to find necessary information.
- I don't feel any support as a user.
- Limited ability for providing information.
November 16, 2016
Zuora through the eyes of a billing dev
- Protection and privacy of sensitive financial information.
- Powerful APIs for integrating with existing billing systems.
- The latest hosted payment page is much more dynamic, has greater language support, and looks better than the previous one we were using.
- The web UI is a little dated and cumbersome (although it looks like this is something Zuora is working on currently).
- REST API (also under development, to my understanding).
November 08, 2016
First Impressions of Zuora
- It does allow feature add on subscriptions.
- It does allow for Base Plan amendments for individual accounts, which is good for customized plans and MRR forecasting.
- The ability to add coupon-like features. Granted the solution is available, but it is not able to detect changes in subscription for which the discount is attached to.
- The ability to suspend accounts.
- Perhaps it is our configuration, but Zuora attempts further charge on previously failed payments even though the subscription has been cancelled.
November 07, 2016
Easy Peasy Payment Processing
- User friendly and straight forward.
- The reporting feature is a life saver when pulling a report to calculate commissions and account statements.
- Flexible payment options for customers to make it easier for us to receive payment.
- One nuance is that when processing payments it defaults to select all invoices on a customers account with no deselect all option. Therefore if a customer has 100+ invoices on their account and only wishes to pay a few, I have to deselect each individually which is very time consuming. Otherwise, I have no complaints and would highly recommend it.
- When cancelling a subscription the system generates a negative (pro-rated) invoice that can be confusing to customers. They feel they have a credit, but really they do not.
November 04, 2016
Zuora Subscription Based Billing
- The way the system is structured allows our business to bill just about any way with minimal back-end support
- The quickness by which Zuora can process invoices is huge for our company as we bill 10s of thousands of customers monthly within one day.
- The Zuora support team sometimes takes more than one iteration to understand what the problem that needs to be addressed is
- The revenue recognition software could use a little polishing to ensure that the intricacies are included
November 02, 2016
Zuora is a great solution for us !
- It's really easy to use Zuora and to navigate using the UI to manage accounts, invoices, payments, bill runs, etc.
- Zuora offers us a great flexibility to adapt it to our industry and also an amazing scalability while we increase the size of our business.
- There is a lot of information on the internet. For example documents, demos, forums, etc.
- When working with Bill Runs you lose the previous configuration of Bill Runs if you make a change. You can't figure out all the information related to past Bill Runs.
- You can't "reactivate" a subscription, you have to create a new subscription.
- Bad Support! Most of my support requests I end up figuring out on my own and they just waste a couple days of your time by asking asinine questions.
- You can't refund a partial amount of the payment consistently.
- Even though it deals with multiple currencies, it doesn't have a currency conversion feature.
November 01, 2016
Zuora - a flexible billing platform for an ever-changing business
- Zuora makes it easy to set up various billing plans
- Zuora is powerful enough to meet the demands of most billing models and methods
- Zuora connects with Salesforce so sales reps never need to log into Zuora ever
- Zuora has good documentation, allowing the technical team to execute
- Zuora's basic email support can be very generic and lacking overall
- The REST API and SOAP API are not comparable, making some development needs very challenging to meet
- Zuora, like any complex software, requires close oversight and ownership, as there are tons of settings and things to configure
November 01, 2016
Catchy Title
- Quotes are pretty easy to create, but not great
- It manages subscriptions, okay
- Reporting. Not being able to see accurate MRR number is crazy.
- UX of the product is very clunky.
- Some times the system is too rigid and the only solution is to re-open a closed account period and reverse payments.
October 12, 2016
Zuora Review
- Flexible product catalog - allows us to experiment with various pricing and packaging models.
- Payment gateway agnostic - allowed us to port from our current system, while creating opportunities for alternative payment methods.
- Multiple currencies - gives us the ability to expand internationally with support for local currencies.
- API callbacks - allowed us to hook into existing transactional programs (CRM, ESP).
- API is currently a bit of a mixed bag - between very low level SOAP calls and very high level REST calls. Ton of room for improvement here, including streamlining refund process / closing out unpaid invoices / other use-cased based scenarios (all require many steps.)
- Learning curve - there's a lot to learn & master, some of which may require changing departmental processes.
- Documentation is bit of a mixed bag - there's lots out there, but sometimes found in Community, sometimes found in Knowledge Center or the self-paced training materials. Would be great to reduce the time needed to arrive at an answer to a problem.
July 18, 2016
Zuora Review
- I like how simple it is to alter a customer's billing account.
- I love being able to see all the past amendments to a customer's account, which enables me to know what kind of billing history the customer might have.
- Neat and organized.
- I do wish that you could invoice a customer for multiple things without having to create a new amendment for each item.
- Sometimes Zuora is a little slow, but that is likely a server issue and not an actual issue with Zuora as a system.
- I do feel that sometimes there are too many button presses needed for a simple task.
July 11, 2016
Automation for a SaaS-y business
- Payment processing automation - It allows us to process payments and invoices effectively and efficiently to our customer base on a monthly basis.
- The integration with Salesforce.com works well - We use Salesforce.com company wide between all departments and it allows us to have the quoting from our sales team flow seamlessly into the Zuora subscription creation.
- There are some basic billing features that would be helpful - for example having the ability to run a customer statement for an account showing invoices and payments. We receive this request frequently and wish there was a streamlined option for this.
- While the reporting is continuing to improve, the report building feature is a bit clunky and cumbersome to build recurring reporting.
July 08, 2016
Zuora- Dependable and Adaptable products
- Zuora offers many built-in customer notifications. These are a great tool to reach out to customers and notify them of their account status.
- We have customers who need invoices billed separately to their corporate account. Zuora enables us to set up accounts at the broker dealer level and have these accounts assigned to a corporate parent account for invoicing.
- It is a great way to track individual accounts, yet offer our customers the flexibility of one invoice going to the corporate office.
- Zuora sends informative updates about any new releases or changes to the product. It is beneficial to know how the product is continually adapting to our changing environment.
- Customers constantly want a statement that lists their balance with recent transactions. The version of Zuora we are using doesn't allow us to easily provide customers with account detail. Currently, we have to download information into Excel and create our own statement to sent to the customer.
- I have a hard time getting information out of Zuora sometimes. The reporting feature needs more work.
- Amending subscriptions in Zuora is complicated.
- We have old subscriptions in our tenant that we are unable to cancel due to our accounting periods being closed. We need the ability to cancel subs that aren't renewing even if the accounting period is closed.
July 08, 2016
Zuora - Not for Everybody
- Integration with Salesforce
- API is fairly easy to use
- Please stop doing client driven development. New mystery features seem to crop up all the time that are obviously not for mass use. The release cycle also seems a bit chaotic, new features get added all the time and makes it difficult to stay on top of the platform.
- Please test your releases better. Every new Salesforce release seems to bring a new set of seemingly glaringly obvious bugs.
- The knowledge center can be a lot easier to navigate. I find it easier to google for the topic and have it lead me to the knowledge article I am looking for rather than using your UI.
- There is a real lack of enterprise level support (last time I checked). There really is no easy way to segment the system by profile/division etc. People still need global access to do simple things like creating a bill run.
- There needs to be WAY better documentation on your payment processor integration. There are a number of special flags that need to be set, and data is being grabbed from all over the place making customizations a long and arduous process.
- Why can I only have a single Accounting Code per payment type (especially when I cannot have multiple of the same type - e.g. Credit Cards).
- The product catalog UI can really use a re-haul (plus the naming system is confusing). Any product with 20+ rate plans becomes a huge chore to manage.
- The Multi-Currency editing is awful as well, you can only set one charge at a time instead of making several changes at once and then saving
- More debugging tools on the platform would be extremely helpful. The product itself has so many moving parts it's sometimes impossible to tell WHY something is happening.
July 08, 2016
All the Nopes
- Salesforce integration was decent
- REST and SOAP API was good
- Most of the support staff was responsive when tickets were submitted
- Development of the platform and other products seemed to be driven by customer demands rather than core business use cases. This ended up adding a lot of bloat unneeded complexity to the core platform as well as the Zuora to NetSuite integration
- The Zuora to NetSuite integration is pretty awful and should definitely be rebuilt
- Stick with a consistent UI instead of changing it (5.100 -> 6.0 -> 7.0)
- Better use of standard salesforce rather than janky customizations all over the place. A good example would be the use of Product2 to support forecasting, but custom objects still hang off of that and are being used to support a product catalog.
- Credit Card integration was pretty bad in terms of being able to determine errors from the processor or from Zuora
July 08, 2016
Zuora and its ease of use
- Reporting and revenue Recogntion
- Subscription creation, manipulation as well as Billing
- Easy integration with various other IT systems
- Reporting could be enhanced but that is coming from what I have heard
- Integration between some legacy billing platforms
July 08, 2016
The whats and what not's.
- Zuora is user friendly.
- Zuora provides constant reporting options.
- Zuora has a variety of templates.
- Zuora does not have the abitlity to provide account statements.