ChargeBee is an all in one subscription billing solution designed to handle all the complexity of recurring billing. The product integrates with a range of other SaaS applications including SalesForce, accounting, and order fulfillment systems. Some key features include: Managed Subscription Billing, Flexible Billing Support and Automated Notifications.
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Zuora
Score 8.1 out of 10
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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.
N/A
Pricing
Chargebee
Zuora
Editions & Modules
Scale
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Chargebee is also one of the best platform in order to provide proper billing management to the customers by providing their configuration needs to be corrected in order to deploy and made the connection relevant to the specific position which is one of the best usecase.It also provides support in order to rectifying issues.
If your company processes a large volume of transactions, Zuora is well-suited for you. In addition, if you need to make changes to subscriptions to your customers frequently or track usage in order to bill clients, Zuora has the capability to do so. If your company goes through any kind of audits, Zuora's audit log may come in handy. Zuora does cost quite a bit so if your company doesn't process a large volume of transactions or make many changes to subscriptions, it may not be worth the investment.
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
[I feel] customer service never actually fixes any problems. They make you gather information they easily could, write up a big report of the problem, and then tell you why it's not working (usually not even correct). [In my experience] they never actually solve a problem. Not to mention, [in my experience] you can never speak with anyone immediately and coms turnaround is usually over 24 hours.
So far, I can not get my customers to checkout online, even after hiring professional developers to help.
[I believe] QBO sync is a mess.
My account is set up to send payment tokens to Authorize.Net, and no matter how much I disable every possible security feature, I still have 100's of declined cards, that work perfectly well.
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.
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.
It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Chargebee is a class apart from Zoho Books - better in all aspects - better interface, more functionalities, integrations that actually work, responsive support, customisable automated reporting, more customizability. The only difference is pricing - Zoho comes at about 10% of what Chargebee costs. So for startups looking to graduate from Google Sheets and on a budget - Zoho will serve your purposes - but eventually will have to move to something like a Chargebee.
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.
Chargebee has allowed us to focus on the most important part of our business: the product, instead of cumbersome development to manage subscriptions. The time ROI that it saved allowing us to get our product to market was invaluable.
Chargebee also made sense financially. Paying the subscription was far cheaper than developing something similar (or even far inferior) ourselves
Overall it's saved us quite a bit of time, money, and allows employees to easily manage subscriptions which is extremely important to us.
Positive impact: we're able to invoice our customers timely and correctly.
Positive impact: recurring payments are simple and accurate.
Negative impact: Zuora and the Customer Management System that my organization use are no longer integrated because of some issues in the past with double billing and things of that nature.
