Launching, running, and growing a subscription commerce business is a formidable challenge. You have plenty of plates to keep spinning, from building brand awareness to delivering a service that keeps subscribers loyal. And one of the most important parts of operating a successful subscription commerce business is finding the right billing platform.

There are plenty of platforms available, with various plans and features to choose from. From leaders such as Zuora, Stripe Billing, Recurly, Chargebee, BillingPlatform, Vindicia, to more geographically-focussed or industry-focussed such as Plenigo, Billwerk+, Qiota, Poole, Aptitude Software and more, it can be daunting to pick the right parter.

We want to make it easier for you. That’s why we’re putting together a few blog posts covering some of the most popular billing platforms on the market. We’ll explore their features, pros and cons, and other essential details to help you make an informed choice.

In this post, we’ll look at Zuora. What is Zuora? Why might Zuora billing work for you? Read on to find out.

What is Zuora?

Zuora is an enterprise software company helping businesses launch and manage subscription-based services. The company was founded by K.V. Rao, Cheng Zuo, and Tien Tzuo in 2007.

Zuora’s story began with Zuora Billing, a cloud-based billing platform designed to eliminate the need for businesses to create their own standalone billing platforms. Following remarkable early success, Zuora grew its portfolio with additional products — Zuora Revenue, Zuora Collect, Zuora CPQ, and Zuora Central Platform. They purchased Zephr in 2022, an identity and paywall company.

In the years since its debut, Zuora has helped some of the biggest companies in the world, including General Motors and Zoom. They’ve also set up several offices globally, with teams in North America, UK & Europe, Japan, Australia, and more.

What are Zuora’s main features?

Zuora has built an extensive product portfolio to help subscription commerce businesses succeed. Let’s look at the top three:

Zuora Billing

With Zuora Billing, online businesses can set up subscription billing options to suit diverse target audiences, use flexible pricing strategies, create branded invoices automatically, and take advantage of convenient, automated billing.

There are more than 50 pricing models to choose from, including usage charges and one-time fees. You can update your pricing across every sales channel via a user-friendly interface and central product catalogue. A recent big push of Zuora has been Zuora Consumption, helping companies power more usage-based pricing.

Zuora Billing also makes it easy to centralise complex billing operations, and automation reduces manual input. Complex is a key word here: Zuora Billing focusses on the largest companies in the world, and it shows in its ability to handle high-volume, complex invoicing requirements. That frees up time for you and your team to focus on running your business, but it will require some setup.

Zuora Billing also includes integrations with many payment gateways, for credit cards, ACH, Direct Debit, Apple Pay and more. Those reduces any integration work and facilitates refunds and disputes reconciliation.

One thing to note is that Zuora Billing doesn't include native capabilities for a front-end web shops and self-service portals, powering pricing pages, checkout, self-service portals. For that, you'll need to look for a partner, such as Limio, or you'll need to build it yourself and integrate it with Zuora's API (we've written a guide on how to integrate Zuora with your website here).

It's Zuora's flagship product and it's been recognised a leader by Forrester.

Zuora Revenue

Zuora Revenue is ranked as the number-one Automated Revenue Management product in the 2022 MGI 360 Market Ratings Report (MRR) and Buyer’s Guide. Subscription commerce businesses can use Zuora Revenue to track and analyse revenue in real time.

Innovative, cutting-edge grouping logic aggregates various data types (invoices, orders, etc.) to simplify in-depth analysis. Decision makers can study historical transaction data to gain up-to-the-minute insights, while dozens of pre-built reports eliminate the need for manual revenue reporting.

Zuora Collect

Subscription businesses can rely on Zuora Collect to access payments from subscribers worldwide and recover as many as 20% more failed payments (thanks to the Smart Retry feature.) This can help companies understand which metrics impact cash flow with real-time performance tracking.

With Zuora Collect, you can access more than 35 payment gateways, and the Universal Payment Connector lets you connect to payment providers anywhere in the world. The Payment Method Updater allows you to proactively update subscribers’ credit or debit card details, and subscribers can pay through various methods with the Advanced Payments Manager.

Zephr

One of the latest addition to the Zuora product portfolio via an acquisition. Zephr is essentially a dynamic paywall and identity management platform designed to help businesses better manage their subscriber experiences. At its core, Zephr allows companies to create customized paywalls that control how and when content is accessed by users. This is particularly useful for businesses with subscription models, as it enables them to tailor the access to their content based on various user actions or attributes.

A key feature of Zephr is its powerful rules builder, which allows for dynamic and flexible control over the user experience. This tool enables businesses to design and implement a wide range of scenarios for content access without needing extensive technical expertise. For example, you can set up rules that offer different content or subscription options based on user behavior, location, or even the device they are using. This level of customization helps businesses to create more personalized experiences for their users, potentially leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

How does Zuora pricing work?

Zuora’s pricing is fully customised based on your subscription. That means you will not find any pricing information on their website — you need to contact Zuora instead. Their sales representatives will discuss their subscription plans and give you a quote. Zuora Billing pricing will usually be dimensioned based on your volume, such as number of subscriber or amount of invoiced revenue. Other products will be based on the relevant metrics for that product such as number of users or logins.

Who are some of Zuora’s customers?

Zuora has acquired many customers over the years, including some major companies. Let’s look at four diverse brands and find out how they use Zuora:

Zoom

Zoom has evolved into a leading cloud-based video conferencing service since its launch in 2013 and became particularly popular during the pandemic. However, as Zoom grew, the company realised its then-current billing system was inadequate for customers’ requirements. They needed more robust support for customisation, reporting, and more.

As a result, Zoom started using Zuora to transform its billing processes — and hasn’t looked back since. Zuora supports Zoom with flexible pricing and packaging, customer insights, a wide range of payment options for self-service customers, and more.

Learn more about Zoom’s subscription model in our deep dive.

Penske Media Corporation (PMC)

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) is a major digital media and information company with a portfolio of several massive brands, including powerhouse publications like Variety and Rolling Stone. However, for some time, PMC depended on legacy third-party partners for billing and customer support, so accessing customer data took more work than it should have.

PMC wanted to transform its subscription platform and chose Zuora to help them do just that. Migrating data from the legacy system to Zuora was a lengthy process. Still, it empowered the company with a new, flexible billing system that opens the door to offer monthly subscription plans (instead of traditional annual plans.) Zuora also enables PMC to view subscriber data in real-time, allowing them to make informed decisions.

The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times is a daily newspaper founded in 1896. After realising that catering to digital subscribers would be a major source of revenue (rather than advertising), The Seattle Times needed to overhaul its legacy payment system. Their existing system was designed around print subscriptions and led to failed digital subscription payments, exacerbating churn.

As a result, The Seattle Times started using Zuora to provide and manage digital subscriptions. It soon migrated all digital-only and print subscribers to Zuora.

Today, The Seattle Times’ readers can subscribe faster than ever and expect a smooth billing process.

Fender

Fender is one of the most well-known guitar manufacturers in the world, creating the iconic Fender Stratocaster (or Strat) and various music accessories.

In 2015, the company discovered that 90% of its customers stopped playing guitar within three months of starting. But those who kept playing for a year or more became lifelong musicians, investing in many guitars and accessories along the way.

Fender wanted to help customers develop a passion for their products, so they launched a subscription service teaching novices how to play. To get the service up and running from scratch, they partnered with Zuora to create Fender Play.

Zuora helps Fender understand pricing for their subscription service, value prop positioning, and other essential aspects of billing. This relationship has been instrumental (pardon the pun) in building Fender Play into a success, with more than a million subscribers to date.

What do people like about Zuora?

Zuora has earned strong ratings on review sites such as G2, TrustRadius, GetApp, and Capterra. Reviewers mention the following highlights when praising Zuora.

• Makes powerful billing straightforward
• User-friendly interface, approachable for newcomers
• Good integrations, especially in the enterprise
• Access to valuable subscriber data
• High-quality support and community
• Regular functionality updates
• Highly customisable to suit varied business needs
• Lots of features to explore
• Robust notifications (e.g. reminding subscribers of renewal dates)

Zuora’s impressive ratings demonstrate how effectively the platform helps subscription businesses improve their billing processes.

What do people think Zuora could improve?

As with any product, some users feel that Zuora could be improved in certain ways. Here are some suggestions from users:

• The sheer variety of features available can be overwhelming for some users
• Some users have found that customisation could be made easier
• The platform can seem complicated
• Reporting features could be improved for ease of use
• Certain subscription processes could be streamlined, with fewer steps to complete
• Exploring the wealth of resources to get comfortable with the platform can be time-consuming
• It lacks a front-end for online commerce (psst Limio can help with that)

Zuora does receive updates and changes regularly to ensure that it aligns with businesses’ needs. As a result, many of the issues flagged by reviewers may have been addressed over time. The company’s customer support has been praised, so reach out to its team if you have concerns before you sign up.

Making your decision

Zuora is one of the top billing platforms available and offers subscription businesses an effective, customisable way to manage billing and payments. It is more targetted at the enterprise or mid-market, so you should start considering Zuora if you are reaching larger amount of recurring revenues.

That said, Zuora doesn't do everything. For example, you will need to consider a platform to sell subscriptions online and support your subscribers via self-service. Luckily, Limio, a startup based in London, is one of Zuora’s technology partners that offers integrated ecommerce with Zuora.

Limio makes integration with Zuora easy when setting up your own subscription shops and self-service portals, helping you go faster-to-market without having to build custom websites and integrate with Zuora via middleware. You can take advantage of Zuora’s pricing flexibility, accept payments in as many as 200 currencies, and process payments through multiple methods (including Apple Pay and PayPal) with Limio's Modular Checkout. Limio supports every Zuora pricing model, too, from one-time to recurring plans. This means that you can sell subscriptions, digital or physical, one-off products, usage-based products, bundles, events and more, without any extra work.