Zuora

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Zuora

Vorteile

Nothing, none, Nothing, none,Nothing, none, the acquired products by Zuora are extremely terrible, particularly Leeyo Revenue, Revpro

Nachteile

Not an agile solution for dynamic needs, potential service disruptions during upgrades, challenging to administer the applications, does not prioritize what customers need and innovates something that is not required by customers, rigidity in features, extremely high cost of ownership, implementation cycle is minimum 1 year, buggy applications, requiring data fixes almost every day, the acquired products are terrible which are build for consultancy and not built as products, poor documentation and requires enormous time in training, particularly Leeyo Revpro, Revenue

Vorteile

Customizable, provides ability to connect to other 3rd party enterprise applications, high availability with multiple geographical locations for its servers.

Nachteile

Doesn't provide an ability to query its data servers, which creates excessive reliability on Zuora reporting functions. Reports are good, however creating custom queries on all enterprise data within Zuora could provide more options to use that data.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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!

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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).

Vorteile

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).

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

My first job out of college was a start-up technology company. They had just purchased Zuora and it was my job to implement it. It was a seamless and great experience. The system is intuitive and easy to use despite our implementation specialist (who is no longer there). I was able to teach myself a good amount and use the product daily.

Nachteile

The reports provided were not exactly what I needed so I was left to create many manual reports. I still obtained the information I needed, but it too longer.

Vorteile

Zuora can do pretty much anything. It has a lot of capabilities when it comes to billing, invoicing, dealing with international currencies, etc. But you definitely have to think in advance about how you *want* to do billing, e.g. is it a per transaction model, a per month model, a per minute model, what happens if there are overages etc. Zuora will let you get as complicated as you want. And sometimes that's too complicated.

Nachteile

Implementation is non-trivial. It's not like buying an off-the-shelf solution that's plug and play. You have to customize it and you'll need an implementation team. Even if you use Zuora to do the implementation, you need an internal IT-savvy person to lead the project, make decisions and make sure it all makes sense. Zuora can do anything, but you have to decide what it should do in company.

Vorteile

Not many. Barely got the job done for our needs.

Nachteile

Didn't scale with out tech stack. So many outdated features. Implementation was extremely pricey.

Vorteile

Zuora offers a robust and flexible platform, which can meet anyone's needs, from a small mom & pop shopping website to a big corporation, which is trading publicly. They provide outstanding technical and customer support and they will hold your hand until you're finally happy. And once everything is setup, you will not need to think about Zuora setup, it's just doing its work, collecting money, extending subscriptions, calculating MRR, dealing with taxes, sending you reports, etc.

Nachteile

Learning curve might look too steep, but it depends on your experience with subscription based services.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

Great looking platform that manages all clients and deals well. Also has in-depth reporting to make sure everything is controlled.

Nachteile

Can be overwhelming. THere are lots of reports and features that can be hard to use and figure out. Alos the speed of the reporting is a little laggy due to the memory space available.

Vorteile

Ho provato ad usare Zuora per la gestione delle fatture di una piccola azienda e devo dire che pur non essendo io nel ramo finanziario mi è sembrata semplice e intuitiva.

Nachteile

A volte i tempi di caricamento sono stati abbastanza lenti.

Vorteile

I like the seamless experience in updating the billing plans when I either make changes to the prices or add/take away features from my subscription

Nachteile

I don't like the limited data verification in the software. For example, there is no email address validation in API when creating Contacts

Vorteile

The ability to pull customer and data reports is really nice. It's great that you can use the tool with other softwares, as well.

Nachteile

Zuora lacks customization for individual accounts and isn't completely dummy proof so agents can easily make mistakes.

Vorteile

Supports lots of billing models and different pricing structures, billing periodicity, frequency, etc. Has native integrations with Salesforce.com and different payment gateways. User friendly system, well designed for subscription billing. Supports multiply features.

Nachteile

Expensive pricing structure. Long implementation time.

Vorteile

What sets Zuora apart is it's ability for revenue recognition and for the more financially integrated pieces required for accounting.

Nachteile

The tool however can be confusing to use at times and support is not easily accessible. Zuora really needs improvements to their UX to make it more user friendly.

Vorteile

Zuora is the first billing system that has actually got the job done for us. It fully encompasses our needs.

Nachteile

While Zuora does meet our needs, it comes at a steep price. Despite pricing, the benefits of having a reliable billing system are worth it.

Vorteile

Seamless integration with Salesforce, making it convenient to work out of a single application rather than multiple ones.

Nachteile

Sometimes can be confusing with how it sends to Z billing but for the most part I don't have much to complain about.

Vorteile

It's a great tool for billing on a subscription service. Sometimes the system can be too complicated with the way it can be setup.

Nachteile

Reporting needs some work, especially out of the box it's not the easiest to run.

Vorteile

Sold product. Covers a lot of use cases with some good custom-ability features. Definitely a big time saver when fully setup.

Nachteile

Analytics are lacking, with some questions on how accurate/recent the numbers are. People were nice but never really went above and beyond.

Vorteile

Should work for subscription needs but we are still new to the software and just finished implementation.

Nachteile

Implementation team very difficult to understand - language barriers. Move quickly to "train" before setup is done so it's hard to understand. Push for meetings but should focus more on meetings after setup is complete to train.

Vorteile

This platform has integrated billing engine, analytics & insight, marketing automation and pricing tool for SaaS business.

Nachteile

Free trial period is not enough to understand tools' features. Because it needs more time to integrate.