Zuora

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Zuora

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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).

Avantages

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).

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.