Invest in Zuora
Pros
- Subscription Management
- Revenue Recognition
- Invoicing
Cons
- Multi-year deals
- Very custom payment plans
- Hosted payment pages
Alternatives Considered
SaaSOptics, Recurly, NetSuite ERP and FinancialForce Accounting
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 (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
Categories & Use Cases
Review of Zuora
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Zuora for billing (invoicing), creation and tracking of subscriptions, cancellations and sync of data over to our CRM (Salesforce) as well as to Netsuite for our financials.
Pros
- Invoice creation
- Amendment tracking
Cons
- Salesforce sync
- Reporting
- Product catalog management (e.g. bundling)
- Permission/role management
Most Important Features
- Salesforce Sync
- Invoice Generation
Return on Investment
- Poor support has slowed down our implementation of features and resolution of issues
- Lack of flexibility has led to some complex and unwieldy workaround solutions
- No useful built in AR reporting so we had to come up with our own solution
- Challenges with finance due to unreliability of Salesforce sync
Alternatives Considered
Salesforce CPQ
Other Software Used
Zendesk Explore, Zapier
Zuora Review
Pros
- Invoices.
- Reports.
Cons
- For the capacity that I use Zuora in, I have no complaints.
Great Subscription Management Software
Pros
- 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
Cons
- 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.
Great tool for short, simple subscriptions
Pros
- Consolidated invoicing
- High-volume, complex subscription management
Cons
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
NetSuite and Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick)
