Zuora, powerful platform and API allows you to roll your own on some missing features
March 18, 2016

Zuora, powerful platform and API allows you to roll your own on some missing features

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zuora

Zuora is being used accross the organization for virtually all of our subscription management and billing needs. As a SAAS based company it's primay purpose is to manage the subscription lifecycle of our customers.

Pros

  • It keeps a record of material changes to subscriptions in versions. These can be reported and and researched as needed.
  • It is cloud based which minimizes administrative overheard of the system
  • The billing rules are flexible

Cons

  • Zuora rates subscriptions based on time, not usage. If you sell value to your customers in usage (not time) this could be an issue when customer upgrade mid-term.
  • Usage is marked as processed through the date of the last run invoice against that subscription and charge, even if zuora didn't rate a charge (invoice) against it.
  • Being cloud based it means that any data modifications of any size have to be done against cloud based API's, orders of magnitude slower than equivalent on prem/sql based solutions.
Zuora is most appropriate when you are your services based on time, not consumption of usage. It also is very light when it comes to maintenance of the product catalog. It does not have built-in product selection rules, dependencies, requirements, "similar" product suggestions etc. All of that logic, if needed would have to be built on top of Zuora.
Zuora's API is flexible, but will require professional services or in house development staff to become familiar to leverage anything that isnt available "out of the box".

Zuora Implementation

Implementation ended up taking far longer that expected and in some ways we are still cleaning up data and learning about aspects of the system that inform how rate plans are modeled.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • As with any migration garbage in/garbage out. Data quality was an issue from legacy systems. Only Zuora can actually "import" data which increased turnaround time and overall implementation hassle.
  • A more in depth understanding of how zuora rates products and services along with a more in depth analysis of our complex business needs would have been helpful. We didn't know what we didn't know at the beginning.

Zuora Support

Questions are answered quickly and first level support is responsive.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes
Yes - During implementation we reported several behaviors that were inconsistent accross the api. These were eventually addressed or worked around.

Using Zuora

The UI needs a refresh, most incidences of lists of data don't provide adequate filtering or persistance of UI settings
ProsCons
Like to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Lots to learn
  • Billing runs
  • Account management
  • Reporting
  • Product catalog, no filtering, large numbers of rate plans take a long time to render, edit rate plans is time consuming
  • User management is painful, no filtering, sorting doesn't persist, no ability to "delete" a user so all your users are visible forever

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