Zuora: Enterprise Monetization at Scale

I am a solution architect working with multiple clients, and most of them are using Zuora . I have been working in my current field overall, in my current area of expertise for three years.

Automated invoicing is great and makes the process easier than it was five years ago. Zuora  requires continuous improvement to enhance the efficiency of the workflow, and it is necessary to have someone in charge for that part.

I believe the pricing is quite high for some companies using Zuora. Although it is great, the pricing is expensive.

Scalability can be difficult if you only have one tenant, but if you are enabled for multi-tenant, it is great.

You need a team for deployment because, as someone with a tech background, it is difficult sometimes to coordinate because you need a finance team to set up the rules for the finance part. For the tech side, I believe one person is enough, but for the finance portion, you need the financial team for the company.

I have been using Zuora since 2019 for everything.

I think the stability is good with Zuora. I have not encountered any issues in the last year, at least. I think it is continuously working.

Scalability can be difficult if you only have one tenant, but if you are enabled for multi-tenant, it is great.

I think the support is great with Zuora. They have a very strong team of people working on support. Every time you encounter an issue, they are willing to help.

Zuora support is great. They are actively working on resolving the issues that you may encounter.

I have not worked with solutions quite similar to Zuora. I have experience with CRM  systems such as Salesforce , but I do not think they are comparable to Zuora.

If you have a team working with you from Zuora, the initial deployment is easy. If you are alone, it is somewhat difficult sometimes.

You need a team for deployment because, as someone with a tech background, it is difficult sometimes to coordinate because you need a finance team to set up the rules for the finance part. For the tech side, I believe one person is enough, but for the finance portion, you need the financial team for the company.

I have tried integrating Zuora with Microsoft Dynamics  and Salesforce .

With Salesforce, the integration is very easy. With Dynamics, it is sometimes difficult because they do not have the connectors properly configured for Dynamics.

I have not used the Subscription Analytics feature that much, so I would not be able to say much about that.

I think the stability is good with Zuora. I have not encountered any issues in the last year, at least. I think it is continuously working.

I give this review an overall rating of 9.

Businesses that want to run in a subscription-based model can be handled in Zuora . For example, international Netflix operates on a subscription basis where access is granted based on the subscription level. That kind of project can be handled in Zuora . Additionally, anything where you are selling products on a contract basis can also be managed through this platform.

The subscription-based model is very effective, and we can do automation using workflows. Recently, we got some new features called product features and mediation engine and consumption-based price model which will be very helpful for businesses. Based on consumption, we can build customized solutions.

Automation is particularly valuable in scenarios where subscriptions are getting canceled or there are issues with the subscription. In these cases, invoices will be generated and posted without any manual interaction. There are some edge cases where we have to do reverse engineering to handle them properly.

There is not much change required in the product itself, but I feel some of the documentation for developers needs improvement. Not everything that is being developed in Zuora is available in the documentation. Clear documentation is needed that explains what will happen if you go one route versus another. Comparing to the last two years, Zuora is very well designed now and well updated. On each release, they are bringing something new which is very helpful.

Currently, 80% to 85% of everything is working well for me. The remaining 15% relates to new features that were released recently, for which we do not have hands-on experience. If we had that hands-on training, we could understand how these features will be useful. The documentation that has been provided exists, but it is not particularly useful. They simply simplify the documentation to say this is the step where you have to go and configure, but we need to understand the use of it, when we would use those configurations, and when we would develop with them.

I have been using Zuora for almost four years.

Throughout my four years of experience, I have never encountered stability issues. This is because none of our customers have had that much interest in exploring those particular features.

Zuora is pretty good in terms of scalability. We use Salesforce  for CRM  and SAP for ERP , but there is no direct connectivity between Zuora and SAP. We have used some workflow tasks to send data into SAP. Revenue processing is much easier now. They have introduced OTR, Order  to Revenue, where everything happens in real time. Data is sent into the revenue system within a fraction of seconds.

I would rate the technical support at 8 or 9. They provide solutions based on the priority level assigned. There is no issue with getting answers, though they will review issues based on the priority assigned.

Apart from Zuora, I have never heard of any other billing system that I have explored in depth. I know Oracle billing system and some other billing systems exist, but I have never gone through them. Currently, I feel Zuora is in a very good position, and I do not think there is a better alternative.

For end-users, Zuora is very friendly. You can use the tool in the same way you would use an app on your mobile phone. You do need to have knowledge of how it works. If you are using any particular app on your mobile, you will go through each element first, and in the same way, you will become habituated to Zuora and it will become very easy. There are not multiple complicated things to go through. For a business user, it will not be much of a headache. If you go through three to four demos with your trainer, you will be able to understand it.

Instead of having multiple technologies to gather data, we could get analytics within Zuora itself rather than using other technology. However, if we connect with other third-party systems, there may be more flexibility to get that analytics. In Zuora, there are some limited things that can be done for analytics.

Regarding deployment models, my understanding is based on current usage. As per the current market, my rating for Zuora is around 9.5. Considering the things that are going on in the market right now and whatever they will develop, it is pretty good. I could rate it a 10 based on the trajectory. I cannot answer questions about pricing because I never went into the purchasing process and do not know how much they charge. My overall review rating for Zuora is 10 out of 10.

Zuora  Billing and Zuora  Revenue serve as our main use case for subscription management, invoicing, and billing of the automation, proration calculations, and all the revenue recognition part.

A specific example of how I use Zuora for subscription management or billing automation in my day-to-day work involves complex billing scenarios such as subscription start date changes, subscription term dates, customers on subscription, charges, annual renewals, prorated support charges, charges transfer between customer accounts, reversing of the invoicing and rebuilding, then integration issues with external systems with Zuora. Zuora acts as our main billing engine and is integrated with our internal financial systems and downstream revenue tools.

We use Zuora for our billing requirements, revenue requirements, and whatever comes for order to cash. For this full cycle, whatever things are involved in order to revenue, we use Zuora for order booking and subscription management for our products.

The best features Zuora offers in my experience include flexible subscription lifecycle management and the ability to handle complex billing cycles, amendments, upgrades, and downgrades. Zuora's UI clearly helps with billing periods, charges, and changes to work on this flexibility. Additionally, automated invoicing and proration for charges dynamically calculates prorated charges for any of the term changes or any of the billing lifecycle changes. Automated bill runs significantly reduce manual efforts, which we used to do in our earlier project in this organization itself.

The automated invoicing and proration features have saved our team a lot of time. Earlier, we used to have manual billing for each and every account, but now there are bill runs in place which will pick up the charges according to their dates and it will do a bill run. This significantly reduced a lot of time and manual efforts.

Zuora Revenue supports really good revenue automation features, with well-structured revenue rules according to ASC 606. It integrates nicely with billing for revenue recognition alignment and our other downstream financial systems. Zuora Revenue is also a win-win.

Based on my hands-on experience, there are areas where Zuora could improve, specifically invoicing reversal restrictions. Zuora has limitations when an invoice is already split, making it challenging to reverse such invoices. We spend a lot of time doing research with Zuora support and team members to resolve these issues. Integration consistency issues caused by metadata and version mismatches have been observed with Zuora billing. I also find Zuora's UI slightly dated and feel some important fields are too deeply nested. Additionally, the revenue model complexity requires careful handling because any changes in billing affect revenue. Finally, support documentation sometimes lacks clarity, especially around amendments and invoicing reversals.

We experience some downtime with Zuora quarterly, which also affects latency. On the positive side, since Zuora introduced one-ID, managing user roles has become easier.

I have been using Zuora for almost three years now, and I am working on Zuora platform.

Zuora is stable, but we have observed some latency issues quarterly. Moreover, there are limitations on charges; for example, adding multiple charges to one subscription can become very difficult, leading to lengthy load times for orders and charges, which is quite painful for us.

Zuora is capable of supporting our organization's growth and increasing needs.

Customer support is responsive but tends to be high level. They respond quickly, but the quality of resolution depends heavily on the assigned engineer. For uncommon issues, responses can be generic, and at times, there are no solutions due to Zuora product restrictions.

We used a different tool earlier, and the reason for switching to Zuora is to achieve subscription management efficiency for our order to cash module internally. Zuora enables us to manage subscriptions effectively, making it the primary reason we adopted it.

Zuora has positively impacted our organization by significantly reducing manual efforts, and we just need to keep our data healthy and that is all. Zuora will handle other things. It is a really good practice to have Zuora billing for the order to cash module in any organization.

Setting up pricing, products, and charges in Zuora is really easy.

I observe a significant reduction in manual billing work and fewer billing errors since implementing Zuora. Previously, we experienced many billing errors with our ERP  system, but as we stabilize on this platform, we are observing fewer billing errors, apart from using reversal charges. We also have faster monthly close cycles and better revenue visibility than we used to have.

My advice for others looking into using Zuora is that it is a tool that adapts well to other systems, allowing integration with numerous systems. If anyone wants to implement a proper order to cash module and transform their organization with subscription management, Zuora is the best choice.

Zuora is excellent, and there is just a little space for improvement. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Zuora  is as an administrator, where I provide user access and remove access from users who have left the company.

A quick specific example of a task I have done recently in Zuora  involves going to Zuora, accessing the repository, providing access to the user, and adding their email ID. There is a new Zuora update, which is the latest one, and that is the only change in Zuora login now.

The best features Zuora offers are that it is user-friendly and not complicated. You simply go to login, go to the users, and add or remove users without much complexity.

The simplicity of Zuora helps me in my daily work as it mostly does not take more than five minutes to add or remove any user, which saves us time to focus on other work.

Zuora has positively impacted my organization as it is primarily used for financial records, including billings and other business needs for the business team. The specific outcomes and improvements my organization has seen with Zuora include that the reports are on time, it is online integrated, and it gets updated nearly every hour through auto-updates from the bank reconciliation and accounts with account details of the company.

It would be beneficial to have an improved dashboard.

I have been working with Zuora for nearly three years.

Zuora is stable.

Zuora's scalability is good as it is easy to use and can handle growing needs easily.

I do not interact with customer support for Zuora. We raise support tickets instead.

Before Zuora, we used Oracle.

I have seen a return on investment with Zuora as it saved time.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing are managed by the company management, not by me.

Before choosing Zuora, we evaluated other options including SFDC  Billing and RevMart.

Zuora is up to mark as of now and is good for user-friendliness and for the business as it gets updated every hour.

My advice for others looking into using Zuora is that it is a good tool for business use to get real-time data for the financials.

My company is a partner of this vendor.

I have provided all the information and found this interview to be comprehensive with no changes needed for the future. I would rate this review a 9.

I have been using Zuora  since the time I joined Motive, which is May 2021.

Initially, I was using Zuora  for looking at customer accounts, for account merges, and similar tasks, but since 2023, I have transitioned to the Zuora admin role. Since that time, I am using Zuora for managing users within the system. Along with that, I use Zuora for initiating refreshes for the sandboxes. I also use Zuora for SOX audit review documentation creation as I am the Zuora admin.

A specific task I do in Zuora as an admin that stands out in my daily workflow is creating user accounts. For example, when a new user is onboarded in our company and they have to use Zuora for their daily job responsibilities, I create their profiles in Zuora One ID and send them an invitation.

I am still using Zuora for account merges and looking at customer accounts and their information; however, my main use case remains user management in Zuora, creating reports for SOX audit reviews and other documentation, along with reviewing the audit trails.

In my experience, the best features that Zuora offers are that all payments and billing are reconciled regularly and in a timely manner, and Zuora One ID is really good when it comes to managing users. Previously, it was difficult to manage user profiles, but with One ID, things have become simpler and it is now easy to manage users.

Zuora is our main billing platform, so it is driving our customers' payments and subscriptions, positively impacting our environment. While there are sometimes issues or outages, Zuora support has become really effective and they help us all the time. Zuora is always there for us and has positively impacted us when managing customers across the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, and beyond.

From my perspective as a Zuora admin, when it comes to time saved, my user management section using Zuora One ID clearly shows that time is saved. Additionally, customers' subscriptions are managed timely and they are charged as per their subscription and billing dates, making everything smooth for our organization.

There have been some bugs which Zuora support has been unable to fix until now. For example, when we initiate sandbox refreshes, access of users who are only in the sandboxes gets wiped off, forcing me to recreate their accounts from scratch, although their entries exist in Zuora One ID, creating confusion and manual work. It has been a year and a half since this issue arose, and I believe it should have been fixed by now, as it is a significant problem when kicking off sandbox refreshes.

Additionally, we faced issues with new payment method types rolled out in Q1 2025 that created confusion as they reflected under users' names, which should not happen.

I have been using Zuora since the time I joined Motive, which is May 2021.

Zuora is stable and good in my experience.

Zuora is handling everything perfectly, especially as we recently expanded into the Mexico market and the UK Europe market. Zuora has managed this expansion very well.

Customer support is really good, as they reply right away and assign the engineers immediately. However, certain issues, such as the user access removal during sandbox refresh, are still unresolved, indicating that support can be helpless when code changes are required.

Zuora has been our one and only solution since I joined.

While I do not have access to metrics regarding return on investment, I can see that a lot of time was saved thanks to Zuora, and using Zuora's features for managing subscriptions and customer accounts has helped us save employee costs.

I was not involved in the procurement of Zuora, so I am not familiar with the options that were considered.

Zuora is near perfect, but it has to first fix the two issues I mentioned—specifically the sandbox refreshes issue that has been plaguing us for more than a year, and this contributes significantly to my rating of nine out of ten.

I was not involved in the pricing cost and licensing and I am not part of the procurement team, as I mentioned earlier, I am a Zuora admin.

Zuora is perfect for managing customer accounts, payments, and billing. Everything happens on time, and their customer support is good, so I would definitely recommend Zuora.