Stripe Billing subscription management software is used to bill and manage customers in various ways, from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing and sales-negotiated contracts. It is used to automate revenue management workflows, and accept payments globally.
$620
per month 1 year contract
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.
If you have a small to medium sized business Stripe is most likely the perfect solution for you. It will automate almost all of your billing, freeing up your time to be used elsewhere. If you have a large business I would recommend getting in touch with the Stripe customer support team first to ensure it will be a good fit for you.
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.
Laravel integration. Our product is written in Laravel, which supports Stripe out of the box.
Customer service. When I had questions during my integration, customer support was easily accessible, friendly and helpful.
Modern UI creates a quick, seamless purchase process for the customer.
The ability to generate one-off custom invoices (not associated with a specific product) allows us to bill for custom development services through the same payment processor.
The backend dashboard is well laid out and provides lots of great information.
Test mode makes testing purchases quick and painless.
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
It's pretty code-intensive to set up. You have to be a developer to get it on your site -- I feel like it should be more turnkey.
Better reporting and analytics -- why should i have to subscribe to yet another sass platform like Baremetrics to get better metrics -- feel like these should be onboard at Stripe. If a competitor came along with better metrics, we would switch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have had no problems with Stripe support, they are prompt and it does not crash like other platforms or software. They are also great about notifying if maintenance is needed. Since the interface is so easy to use, I haven’t had to contact support that much, versus other platforms, it can be hard to be aware of certain features.
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
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.
Our firm switched to Stripe because it came highly recommended by our developer. Apparently Stripe APIs are easily integrated into websites to provide all sorts of billing technology. And we are fond of their ability to attempt to collect payments from individual subscribers multiple times. However, Chase Paymentech did offer personal customer service that was quite stellar. As our company grows there is simply no way we can function without the ability to talk to someone in the case of an emergency
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.
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.
