Zuora

Great SaaS Billing System

Comments: Overall, we've enjoyed our transition to Zuora and it's saved our billing team so much time.

Pros:

Zuora is a great customizable billing system our SaaS company has used efficiently. It has powerful integrations with Salesforce and our other apps so all of our data is integrated together.

Cons:

There seem to be many work-arounds we've had to create for scenarios we would expect to be fairly straightforward, such as prorations.

Zuora- a must try accounting tool for any mid-cap organization

Comments: Overall its a good and professional accounting tool for small-mid cap organization

Pros:

a. Excellent and simple layout without any jazzy/ unnecessary application on the dashboard b. Well designed subcategories for billing, accounting payments which make the operation flow smooth c. Very secure and safe tool, offer single sign in option

Cons:

1. Automation of the reports or dashboard is a big miss 2. No effective AI in inbuilt to reduce the manual work 3. Integration with other tools like payment gateway sometimes gets broken

Over hyped Subscription management and Billing solution

Pros:

API driven Easy to use Simple to navigate and set upEasy to use repetitive billing

Cons:

Cannot handle even the basic multi currency properlyToo flat and simple product catalog modelNon customizable and extensible Rigid

Zoura a great billing system

Comments: So far liking it as it gets the work done

Pros:

It is a traditional billing system, but it is still a very clear, user-friendly UI, with easy creation of invoices. The Zuora team also provides outstanding technical and customer support throughout.

Cons:

To be honest, there is nothing to dislike about Zuora. However, I would still suggest having more flexibility for users to make customizations.

An excellent application to automate billings.

Comments: In the company we use Zuora together with our CRM software, the first one provides the second with information regarding billing, such as the renewal dates and from this point our renewal team ensures that our clients in general have a hassle-free renovation experience. In general terms, Zuora's job is to automate billing, update our CRM with information regarding bills, and send the relevant billing notifications to emails.

Pros:

Zuora's notifications are undoubtedly one of the best qualities it has, since it allows us to send them via email to all customers who require it, before their renewal date. In addition to this, it has a very good customization capacity, an aspect that becomes crucial when redirecting the original software matrices according to the specific needs of our company. On the other hand, the integration of the software with others in the market is very good, such is the case of our CRM that joins perfectly with Zuora.

Cons:

The learning curve within Zuora is very slow, due to the robustness of the software and the different characteristics and potentialities that it possesses, taking this into account, it is necessary to focus on training new users because this point tends to be a challenge. Another fundamental detail of Zuora is its low segmentation with respect to who the emails with the information regarding the billing notification are addressed to, so we can only select the country where they will be sent.

Great product, terrible data and reports

Comments: Subscription management for b2b customers

Pros:

The most customizable in the industry. Great integrations with salesforce.

Cons:

Data nightmare. Nothing on the reports and data export side is documented. The company is of little help. The team provided by Zuora for the integration was very hard to work with.

Getting Better

Comments: For the first 2+ years, my billing team experienced lot of frustration because it seemed like Zuora had plenty of limitations. Come to find out, they do have limitations, but they are continuously improving and if you have the time and resources you can customize and get a lot out of the billing system.

Pros:

The Zuora billing system has grown on me. I attended Zuora's annual conference in 2019 (I highly recommend going) and learned a lot about existing and upcoming features. Zuora's representatives are dedicated to helping my company customize the billing system and recommending best business practices. Zuora is alway improving and adding functionality, so I do expect it to continue to get better and to meet more of my company's billing needs. They also offer "Zuora University" which is a series of online interactive videos that provide a lot of good information.

Cons:

Zuora was not easy to use at first and the implementation process was rough. Zuora is not particularly intuitive so it took a lot of trial and error, reading through their help articles, and requesting help from their support team. You have to invest a LOT of time and resources to get the full benefits of the system. My company has also found that we have to purchase additional features in order to improve upon our experience.

I was a developer/maintainer/admin on this for a number of years at my last company

Pros:

as long as you stay within what the product does out of the box it functions very well for a billing platform. It functions best in a transnational environment but was improving for service oriented billing. It does a good job with making history and audit trails available. Pushing usage data is surprising well handled as is issuing refunds and credits. They also take care of all credit card handling making it one less iso hurdle to clear for a company.

Cons:

Customizing this is not an easy task, the API's and the object model behind the scense is not easy to deal with and still kinda buggy. Depending on your charge model, it may be a real pain to implement within the system, for example they allow for tiered pricing but flexibility for setting up plateaued prices and such requires a LOT of initial setup. Recognizing split revenue is also a hassle when outputing to finance software (think a support charge attached to a licensed monthy cloud service). To their credit when I left the position where I was working with them they were getting better so it's possible they are in the process of closing some of these gaps. One last thing is that there is no production matching sandbox, they can refresh a sandbox for a certain snapshot in time (for a price) but in an enterprise environment that is stale moments later plus their sandboxes for some reason have slight implementation differences that come to light when leveraging the API heavily.

big upgrade from previous billing system

Pros:

We are a growing startup and work off of reoccurring monthly payments. It was clear that our previous provider would not be able to handle the amount and frequency of payments we had and we were referred to Zuora. The transition has been great. Not only can Zuora handle the amount of payments we are processing, but bring additional features and functionality that we had not even thought of. From my experience, Zuora = Salesforce of payment systems.

Cons:

It is a bit complex. We needed to have someone become an admin for our Zuora account to make sure that it is integrated with our other systems. If it was a bit easier to set up/maintain, it would get a 5 star.

Billing application for subscription based companies

Pros:

By this app, it is possible to mange several types of billing methods which include Mobile, Online, Recurring and Subscription Payments as well as Invoicing.

Cons:

The set up for the integration could not be easy and require more time than expected.

Pricey, but good for the right size of company

Comments: We had a devil of a time implementing it, and there is an appetite to replace if possible. It is so big, and challenging. It feels like we should retain a developer just to help the experience between our systems and Zuora. With a better, more thoughtful integration on the front side, I am sure that much of it could be resolved before ever being a problem. It did solve some specific pains, and it does the job (however expensively).

Pros:

The software has a lot to like. The UI is quite robust (if a little hard to use at times). The rules are easy to follow, and it does it's core business well. We were able to integrate it, and we spend most of our days in this software from a customer team side, as it is our source of truth for billing and products.

Cons:

The launch was rough. This was 4 years ago, but there was a hefty price tag for professional services, and there was a severe mismatch of alignment on what the software would do out of the box versus what we needed to program on our own side. It ended up being fine, but we spent a lot of dev resources to keep it functioning. That was certainly not ideal, but very likely it was due to us not asking the right questions. The other con is that it is a pricey software, and becoming a giant organization. Getting support is a challenge as it seems to be entirely disconnected from every other part of the organization. It is the most enterprise software buying/negotiating/"you have to get a consultant to build out this part of that" experience that we have had outside of SalesForce. New features that come out are good, but siloed and very pricey. Granted, they are a public company and have to deliver value to shareholders.

Needs more power

Comments: Although I have learned a lot about Zuora functionality, I still lack confidence in being fully capable using the software. This stems from Zuora's lackluster knowledge base as well as not so good customer support. I feel like there are too many limitations, most of them in place to make you upgrade.

Pros:

Good to use for subscription services. The software allows for some basic billing functions and AR reporting.

Cons:

There is a lot of functionality that is left to be desired. Out of the box reporting and data manipulation is very rigid and makes it hard to run recurring reports. If you have the money you can buy more functions but a lot of it should be included if you ask me. Invoices are messy and are limited on what and how the information can be represented. Customer service tries to hard to close the ticket quickly instead of being more thorough. Although works decently, still needs more work.

It’s so slow, it has delayed my sales process by A LOT

Comments: Very, very slow and laggy. When our management asks our sales teams what’s the one thing they could help us with in order to sell more, we all say “FIX ZUORA”. I honestly think I’d be better off creating a quote template in a Google doc.

Pros:

That it’s in English? Not many I can think of.

Cons:

It’s so PAINFULLY slow. I can’t count the amount of times I was on the phone with the prospect trying to build them a quote and it would just stop working. It may be good for a 1-line item business with no price customization, but as soon as you enter more than 2-3 products and, God forbid, change the price or something, forget it. It’ll die on you. To generate a PDF takes 30minutes. Can you afford to keep the customer with a credit card on the phone for 30 minutes? Yeah, a lot of them might just say “call me back when it’s working” - and good luck chasing them.

Zuora Review

Comments: Been great so far, great tool for any SaaS company

Pros:

Excellent for any subscription business. The subscription object model by Zuora is solid and you can slice and dice the subscription offerings to provide lots of options for your customers. Very easy to integrate to your other systems using their APIs. Salesforce Zuora connector is awesome. Very easy to set up credit card processing through on of the partners.

Cons:

Reporting is moderate at best, it can be improved. I would not recommend zuora to customers who sell their products through a reseller.

The best subscription billing

Comments: Zuora staff were great to work with. GREAT support and always ready answer questions. They helped us get everything moved and confirmed that it could handle all of our crazy use cases.

Pros:

We moved from an archaic system to Zuora and it was amazing!!! Out of the box it handled so much of our data that was hidden behind a black box. Anyone could login and see where we were or run a report and get churn numbers or ARR, MRR, and other great reports. We got it connected quickly and it worked without too much hassle. It just works!

Cons:

There are SO many features we didn't use. We didn't need them but I saw them in the tool and made the UI a little clunky to figure out where you needed to be in the tool.

A must for subscription-model businesses

Pros:

Z-billing offers a lot of ways to amend a customer's subscriptions based on their needs, such as turning off auto-renew, adding and removing products to the subscription, and change the price . Zuora also integrates with SalesForce so quotes can be made in SalesForce and will automatically create subscription within Zuora. They have an incredible interactive learning center that will show you step-by-step on how to create, amend, and cancel subscriptions.

Cons:

Because of its robustness, it does take time to learn all the functionality of the software.

Not Customizable

Comments: Good reporting and tracking overall, too difficult to use due to minimal customization option unless you had professional help.

Pros:

Zuora is great for simple transactions and smaller teams that do not deal with complicated deals. It is also nice the integration with Salesforce.

Cons:

The customization is so limited you needed additional support in order to make any sort of a change. The UI is a little outdated and not user friendly.

My experience with Zuora

Pros:

- Amazing tool to automate invoice generation, billing management and tracking of invoice payment- Easy to integrate with CRM tools like Salesforce

Cons:

- Sometimes it becomes buggy and throws intermittent errors when sending approved quotes from salesforce to zuora but overall great experience

Zuora billing

Comments: Personally, it's our only software we use at the moment for billing. I believe other functions would be extremely helpful once they become available such as the workflow.

Pros:

Our company uses this software daily. We use it to submit invoices, to email out notifications, to set up accounts, etc.

Cons:

The things I like least about this software is that it offers much more functions for our day to day process but it cost extra. Support is extremely hard to get in contact with, it would be really nice to have some sort of a chat option. Some of the settings are not accurate.

Robust functionality for subscription-based companies of all sizes

Comments: I streamlined the money we have coming in, viewed more efficiently, and could view data analytics on the projects I was working on.

Pros:

I loved how almost everything I and my company wanted to monitor, such as the money we had coming in and the success of certain products within our catalog, were all possible through Zuora. I strongly believe that for businesses that are attempting to scale up or find a more efficient way of managing the money they have coming in, Zuora is the best tool for this.

Cons:

I dislike the complexity of Zuora. Many of the features are designed for extremely large companies, so there is a huge learning curve with the software. In addition, it requires many clicks to finally complete an action that I would like, only because there are many layers of complexity.

Customer Service needs improvement

Pros:

I am not sure I can name a pro of this software. We had a pretty bad implementation and it has not seemed to improved since then.

Cons:

Customer service is lacking and professional services hours are extremely expensive. There are no SLA's in place for the support team to get back with you. There integration from Zuora to SF is awful and half of the time the data does not appear.

Solid billing software

Comments: Simplified our recurring billing process, enhance our ability to report on billing/subscriptions

Pros:

Interface is straighforward, handles the majority of our use cases, reporting capabilities are pretty powerful

Cons:

Building reporting can be a bit complex & it can be pretty slow to pull certain reports. Inability to link between multiple data sources in reporting which can be frustrating

A previous Billing manager - Used Zuora

Pros:

The #1 thing you want from a billing software is reliability - since you're dealing with customers money. Overall - Zuora is very reliable and had very few hiccups.

Cons:

When starting out with Zuora, had a few learning curves to hurdle over (just like any new software/system). Making updates to subscriptions can be a bit cumbersome (depending on the size of the update).

Powerful and flexible subscription management platform

Comments: Zuora was valuable to us because it provided a turnkey solution to set up a subscription business. It requires a properly-sized initial setup and learning phase, so it is important to very clearly define the project scope (eventually with the help of third-party integrators)

Pros:

Zuora allowed us to set up a complete subscription service, with the ability to manage and configure most aspects of the subscription order-to-cash process (rate plans, payment gateways, charging and invoicing, reporting).

Cons:

The setup and license costs are a barrier to entry: the investment makes sense for concrete, sizeable business cases - less so for small-scale or exploratory attempts.

It's good in an overall point of view

Pros:

It's easy to create reports. Data Source contains most of the objects to create complex reports. When a request is sent to the support team, it is responded in short time. There is plenty of information in the community website.

Cons:

I have to create amendments as many as product I need to add or remove. I have to wait 1 min for a bill run to create an invoice. The UI could be more modern. The search engine needs improvement. It takes at least 2 minutes to find a paymet using the payment number.