Chargebee vs. Zuora

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Chargebee
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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
N/A
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
ChargebeeZuora
Editions & Modules
Scale
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ChargebeeZuora
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsNo transaction based fees. No setup cost.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ChargebeeZuora
Considered Both Products
Chargebee
Chose Chargebee
Pabbly, FastSpring, Braintree and a PayPal service
Chose Chargebee
Chargebee is much better in terms of clean intuitive product features, inbuilt analytics, and implementation support. Zoho has so many products and their focus is not their billing product. But they give free trials and you need to pay per licence only if you scale. overall, I …
Chose Chargebee
Yes, it is one of the payments gateways but they have so many features like recurring subscriptions, invoicing, and all at very very affordable prices and with great support. I wish chargebee look at the pricing at least for developing countries like India.
Chose Chargebee
We looked at Stripe for a while, just based off of previous knowledge and awareness of the system. Chargebee's design and interface stood out against other SaaS platforms and the integration you have while using it is a must have. Maximizing revenue was a focal point and the …
Chose Chargebee
One of the easiest and cheapest way in order to work on the separate billing system which includes sales in the production also maintains in order to collect payments from different payment gateway which is one of the easiest task in the beginning for the procedure and provide …
Chose Chargebee
Chargebee was our best option with Shopify being used for orders. I miss Chargify, but that only works well with Wordpress.

Recharge was problematic in the past, but they may be better now. Chargebee allows us to make our own bulk edits to subs, while Recharge required …
Chose Chargebee
Chargebee stands out among other service providers because of its user-friendly interface and accessibility. The documentation is also very extensive and gives developers a lot of options. It connects all of our client billing information into our database, which our sales …
Chose Chargebee
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 …
Chose Chargebee
The major reason to go with chargebee is its costing as compared to its competitors it is much useful and value for money.Also it has many features that is very practical and efficient to use it.I recommend to the people who involves low costing as well as futuristic features.
Chose Chargebee
I was using just Authorize.Net for recurring billing. Chargebee is better for automatic emails, but that's it. Wish I would not have made this change.
Chose Chargebee
We evaluated Chargebee vs. Zuora and Stripe. Zuora has a lot of enterprise-level companies, so from an optics perspective is "safer", but we found their integration to be more difficult, their cost to be more expensive, their UI to be more complicated, and their APIs to be …
Chose Chargebee
I believe that for monthly subscription payments, Chargebee is easier to navigate and use than SaaSoptics. That said, I believe it lacks some of the advanced functionality. While I’m not fully sure if that is the case, I think that maybe due to its goals being different. The …
Chose Chargebee
I considered using WooCommerce, cart66, Sam cart, Shopify, big commerce, and a few others I can't recall at the moment. Each one of those options had either limiting abilities to create flexible plans or required expensive add-ons that would make it the timeline to …
Chose Chargebee
It was too troublesome to use Stripe. Connecting Stripe to Chargebee was so much easier and the invoices were exactly how I wanted them to be. It was just easier to organize all your plans in Chargebee, and I loved the numerous type of emails you could send out to …
Chose Chargebee
A strong balance between flexibility and simplicity -- Chargebee has proved to be a product that is well liked across the organization, and from a technical standpoint does not present too many hiccups for our developers. We also feel the pricepoint is good in a market which …
Chose Chargebee
I've used them all and most of them are either: Too expensive (charging high %) Awful products (not enough features or bad UI/UX)
Chose Chargebee
Chargebee's price per feature set beat out Recurly, it's the closest competitor that we evaluated. Its automated subscription billing was a core feature over Xero (our accounting and invoicing system, which we still use in tandem with Chargebee). Stripe's new features that just …
Chose Chargebee
Launch plan, Support, API's - everything was amazing for Chargebee. So much that we never really evaluated Chargify.
Chose Chargebee
Honestly I didn't look into recurly much, nor have I used them because it was a lot more expensive (for an early stage startup like ours was when we started using it). At least as far as I recall, they could have changed their pricing structure but they don't list their pricing …
Zuora
Chose Zuora
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 …
Chose Zuora
I personally have not used other billing products and don't have anything to compare Zuora to. I have only heard from co-workers that our previous solution did not meet our needs and that is why we moved to Zuora.
Chose Zuora
Other software may just set up payment schedules, but do not really give the options to upsell or change subscription plans like Zuora. The system also does need automatically matched payments to the invoice like Zuora. This freed up human capital for us to work on other tasks.
Chose Zuora
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to …
Chose Zuora
Again it is still too early to tell as we have only just started using Zuora. We hope it will blow us away.
Chose Zuora
We are currently considering switching to Salesforce CPQ, due to the high cost of Zuora and level of customization it has required. Zuora meets all of our needs, it just comes with a hefty price tag.
Chose Zuora
I don't know of the current capabilities of the nearest competitors to Zuora as it's been in our business 5 years now. At the time we looked there was no realistic competition and Zuora was a no-brainer! As it's always done what we needed we have not had the need to look …
Chose Zuora
We had attempted to move away from Zuora last year due to the high cost, but were unable to because: Intacct did not support our payment gateway or have SalesForce quoting Recurly does not have usage tiers in their SalesForce quoting QuickBooks does not have the bells and …
Chose Zuora
Zuora allows various finance staff to perform the invoicing function. As everything is set up in a standard way it is easy to teach staff how to use. The process allows staff to get on with month end invoicing very quickly. Also when customers have enquiries it is very easy to …
Chose Zuora
As a hosting organization, Zuora does not easily talk to outside systems.
Chose Zuora
I especially like the invoices and that refunds are added to them after issuing. Also the clear design is a plus. For us it is very important to locate payments and accounts quickly and this works fine.
Chose Zuora
I find Zuora really good for our purpose, but I won't be really able to compare it properly to other systems.

For sure it is really good for us since we can get all the necessary information and perform all our tasks in an efficient platform. It's great in the case of renewals, …
Chose Zuora
Zuora has been a great tool and we are very happy across all departments.
Chose Zuora
More customization is offered by Zuora, such as for permitting multiple sales channels and sales processes. Zuora is too expensive and in hindsight not worth the benefit realized after we are implemented now.
Chose Zuora
Brightpearl is an amazing omnichannel retail management solution with live accounting, however, it is not the best fit for a subscription based business and does not track recurring revenue the way that Zuora does. Again I will reiterate that the automated invoicing and …
Chose Zuora
We haven't evaluated other products.
Chose Zuora
As previously noted the automated billing, recurring billing - touchless approach has been extremely helpful and cremated scalability for our high volume business.
Chose Zuora
It's not the greatest for accounting close since it's not our main system. It helps give us an idea of our overall A/R and products, and pricing.
Chose Zuora
I think once we finally have everything finished it will be vastly superior to our old system. There is so much more that it can handle doing and it is far more organized (especially with financial tracking) than our old system. Again, there have been a lot of growing pains …
Chose Zuora
Zuora is great for recurring payments and automated billing. For usage based subscriptions, it was not as strong as NetSuite as a solution. For accounting close, Zuora offers great reporting, though we are still learning how to best utilize the customization options for our …
Best Alternatives
ChargebeeZuora
Small Businesses
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Score 7.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
Sage Intacct
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Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
ChargebeeZuora
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
6.6
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ChargebeeZuora
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
  • Reliable: We've had virtually no issues since launch.
  • Care about customers: Chargebee's account managers/support team have always been very helpful/responsive.
  • Feature-rich: Chargebee has a ton of features that help us do what we want and they are consistently adding new features every quarter.
Read full review
  • 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
Read full review
Cons
  • [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.
Read full review
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Usability
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.
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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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Performance
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
Chargebee is simple to use, and we have had little need for support.
Read full review
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
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
It was reliable.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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.
Read full review
  • 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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Chargebee Screenshots

Screenshot of Chargebee's metrics and reportingScreenshot of the Recurring Business Command CentreScreenshot of customer subscription nanagement organized onto a single page, where users can change plans, edit card details, add add-ons, apply credits, apply ad hoc charges and delay billing dateScreenshot of the customizable hosted checkout page