WooCommerce Subscriptions vs. Zuora

WooCommerce Subscriptions is a solid option for WordPress based eCommerce sites, particularly if you are already using WooCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It works for simple subscriptions, allows for customization in terms of email notifications, pricing, coupons, etc. It obviously would not be a good fit for non-WordPress websites, and it may be too much if all you need are very simple subscription plans.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Ease of ability for customers to purchase a product and choose their re-occurring timelines.
• Well laid out admin UI to manage orders
• Fair amount of customizable options within the plugin to suit varying needs
• Updating the plugin is quick and painless

Incentivized

• 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

• Better syncing to ActiveCampaign for renewal reminders
• Make it easier for clients to update their credit cards and have it automatically apply to all subscriptions

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We are very likely to renew our Woo Commerce subscriptions add on. We are dedicated to WordPress and plan to grow our business significantly. Woo Commerce subscriptions enables us to manage and extend our subscription revenue easily. We did not have this a few years ago and we have seen the uplift in revenue from using it!

Incentivized

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 like almost everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions EXCEPT one of the main reasons we started using it has never worked out. When we started this subscription box company, I discovered that it was difficult to track how many of each unique product we needed to order to fulfill subscriptions. In my naivete, I thought it was a simple task . 4 years later, I have recently developed my own custom solution (after learning 5 different programming languages) and I now use the WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions API to get the data I need from the store en masse. Basically, I offer multiple selections that customers can make as part of their subscriptions. WooCommerce does not offer totals or reports for anything up that is not tracked using a 'variation ID' which you have to manually generate. My products have 80 or so variations per product sometimes and the WooCommerce system was actually a little buggy when I tried setting them all up at once so I gave up. Now I know that without that info, the selections in orders are treated as metadata and handled almost as if they are not relevant to the order

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The ticketing system of WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions is not state of the art. I wish it were an intercom type of support, But I honestly very rarely need support so it's partially a non-issue. Documentation is also very good so it preemptively addresses things that you might typically need support on. One thing I hate about WooCommerce plugins' support MO is that you're always asked to reset to the standard WP theme and deactivate all plugins, which is near impossible to do in a production environment. So their preliminary steps for offering support are highly onerous.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

Incentivized

It was reliable.

Incentivized

It was a smooth and easy implementation for us. Downloaded the add-on and made a few integrations to salesforce and shipstation and we were up and running within a day

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high fees that Cratejoy charges per transaction in their marketplace and you would be setting yourself up for growth in the future as you continue to develop your own store.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• We were able to create a low-price recurring revenue offer
• Additional recurring revenue totalled 5 figures a year from a fairly simple membership subscription in our case
• Our admin team already know how to use WooCommerce Subscriptions so adding this in didn't require any extra resources

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized