Everything you need to know about Zuora
Launching, running, and growing a subscription 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.
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 has been named by ISG Research Leader with the Highest Rating across several subscription categories.
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.
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 such as Zephr will be based on the relevant metrics for that product such as number of users or logins. In all cases, Zuora is recognised as a premium option in the space, so expect to have a pricing on the higher end relative to competitors.
Who are some of Zuora’s customers?
Zuora has acquired many customers over the years, including some major companies across media, software and enterprises. Let’s look at 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.
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.
DocuSign
DocuSign is the pioneer and global standard for electronic signatures and Digital Transaction Management, enabling fast and secure agreement workflows globally. In the mid‑2010s, DocuSign faced a significant challenge scaling its billing infrastructure — its customer base had leapt from around 100 000 in 2016 to over 300 000, with more than 200 million users in its Global Trust Network and some 130 000 new users signing up each day.
To sustain this explosive growth and broaden its service offering, DocuSign partnered with Zuora to implement an enterprise‑grade subscription management platform. Zuora’s solution delivered flexible pricing plans, new offers and customer‑centric programmes for businesses of all sizes while seamlessly integrating with Salesforce — already core to DocuSign’s ecosystem.
This platform enabled DocuSign to support everything from freemium trials through structured annual billing relationships, while also streamlining the integration of acquired services and facilitating upselling and cross‑selling into new markets. Zuora brought together consolidated reporting on monthly accounts, retention and growth, centralising rich data insights.
With support for global expansion — including multiple currencies, exchanges and localised pricing in 43 languages — Zuora empowered DocuSign to launch promotions and payment options tailored to diverse regions quickly and efficiently.
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.
- Powerful billing platform, widely recognised as a leader in subscription management
- User-friendly and customisable interface, approachable for newcomers
- Strong integrations with Salesforce, accounting systems and global payment gateways
- Real-time subscriber and revenue insights, with robust analytics and dashboards
- Responsive support and active community
- Continuous functionality updates, with frequent enhancements across billing, payments and analytics
- Highly customisable platform, adaptable to complex business needs
- Extensive feature set, covering billing, revenue recognition, CPQ, analytics and more
- Robust notifications and dunning workflows, including renewal reminders and automated collections
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:
- Overwhelming feature set that can feel excessive for smaller companies
- Customisation could be easier, with some users finding it complex to tailor to specific needs
- Complicated to operate, requiring training and familiarity to use effectively
- Reporting limitations, with features that could be improved for ease of use
- Cumbersome subscription workflows, with too many steps in certain processes
- Time-consuming onboarding, as exploring the wealth of resources to gain competence takes effort
- No native front-end for online commerce, requiring a custom-built with API integrations
- Clunky legacy CPQ workflows, featuring slow, error-prone quoting and bloated product catalogues
- Basic CPQ functionality, trailing behind market leaders and necessitating a transition to CPQ X for better performance
- No native reseller portal, requiring a custom-built with API integrations
- Lack of unified quoting across channels
Zuora receives regular quarterly updates and enhancements, with detailed release notes and minimal service disruption, ensuring the platform stays aligned with evolving business needs. Many issues flagged in past reviews may already have been addressed as part of this continuous improvement cycle. Customer support is often praised for being responsive and helpful, though experiences can vary depending on the complexity of the issue. Prospective customers are encouraged to engage with Zuora’s support team early to clarify needs and ensure a smooth onboarding.
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 targeted 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 across all your channels. Luckily, Limio, a startup based in London, is one of Zuora’s technology partners that offers integrated commerce with Zuora.
Limio makes integration with Zuora seamless across every channel. Whether you are setting up subscription shops, partner portals or self-service customer experiences, Limio helps you go faster to market without the need to build custom websites or rely on middleware. With Limio’s Omnichannel Commerce Platform, you can manage direct, online and partner-assisted sales from a single place while taking full advantage of Zuora’s pricing flexibility. Limio’s Modular Checkout supports payments in over 200 currencies and across multiple methods, including Apple Pay and PayPal. Every Zuora pricing model is supported, from one-time to recurring, usage-based, bundles, digital and physical products, and even events.
With Limio for Salesforce, our omnichannel CPQ, sales teams can quote and sell seamlessly alongside digital and partner channels, ensuring consistency across every customer journey. Together, Limio Commerce and Limio for Salesforce enable you to sell subscriptions and products through any channel — web, sales-assisted or reseller — without extra work.
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