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My experience with Zuora is that it's a feature-complete payments subscription that's an unholy pain to work with. We chose them over Stripe before Stripe has A

My experience with Zuora is that it's a feature-complete payments subscription that's an unholy pain to work with. We chose them over Stripe before Stripe has ACH. My favorite part is that 25% of their revenue is professional services, and their professional services are sold essentially at-cost. You're going to need somebody to help you get set up, but at least the pricing on that extra headcount is fair :) They're after large customers, and this is what they get. "As a substantial portion of our sales efforts are increasingly targeted at large enterprise customers, our sales cycle may become increasingly lengthy and more expensive, we may encounter still greater pricing pressure and deployment and customization challenges, and we may have to delay revenue recognition for more complicated transactions, all of which could adversely impact our business and operating results."

xfour 9y ago
This so much. Worst company I've ever had the misfortune to interact with, integrating with them is a disaster, don't waste your time. As a developer or CTO somehow they seem to get the ear of someone in business management or finance or accounting who believe their reporting lies, and they may attempt to cause this company to be forced upon you. Do not acquiesce, they are terrible, just so terrible. And if you let them in you're stuck with them and their professional services etc. We ended up just hiring one of their now former employees full time just to make sense of it. Bottom line if you're a big enough company for Zuora, you're big enough to negotiate a deal with stripe for reasonable pricing. Heed this warning!
FunnyLookinHat 9y ago
Yup. Literally the worst. I've implemented 4 different payment providers and they're in last place, far behind any of the others.
- abakker 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, who were the other? Aria? Stripe? PayPal nee Braintree?
  - FunnyLookinHat 9y ago
    (In order of ease of implementation) Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net TBH though - Authorize.net was a pretty good experience overall (esp. considering when I had to implement it years ago). I'd still take their 10-year-old API over Zuora's nowadays. The docs were a bit rough, but nothing you couldn't sort out with some trial and error and brute forcing of a few weird payloads to their sandbox environment. :)
whalesalad 9y ago
We had horrible interactions with Zuora in terms of integration. Worst vendor ever.
Boxbot 9y ago
Not gonna argue that integrating with their platform is a gigantic pain in the ass, but I feel that part of it is the flexibility (and complexity) of their subscription model. Would you say different? Not too familiar with the other players in the field so I don't know how they compare really. Definitely some reliability and performance concerns, though. I feel like half the pain is just having to shove so much defensive programming in our integration.
- xfour 9y ago
  Stripe specifically has a great subscription model. When Zuora was getting started and gaining momentum they didn't. We've recently onboarded a Stripe Subscription with their connect accounts even and it's been extremely smooth.

xfour 9y ago

This so much. Worst company I've ever had the misfortune to interact with, integrating with them is a disaster, don't waste your time. As a developer or CTO somehow they seem to get the ear of someone in business management or finance or accounting who believe their reporting lies, and they may attempt to cause this company to be forced upon you. Do not acquiesce, they are terrible, just so terrible. And if you let them in you're stuck with them and their professional services etc. We ended up just hiring one of their now former employees full time just to make sense of it. Bottom line if you're a big enough company for Zuora, you're big enough to negotiate a deal with stripe for reasonable pricing. Heed this warning!

FunnyLookinHat 9y ago

Yup. Literally the worst. I've implemented 4 different payment providers and they're in last place, far behind any of the others.

abakker 9y ago
Out of curiosity, who were the other? Aria? Stripe? PayPal nee Braintree?
- FunnyLookinHat 9y ago
  (In order of ease of implementation) Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net TBH though - Authorize.net was a pretty good experience overall (esp. considering when I had to implement it years ago). I'd still take their 10-year-old API over Zuora's nowadays. The docs were a bit rough, but nothing you couldn't sort out with some trial and error and brute forcing of a few weird payloads to their sandbox environment. :)

whalesalad 9y ago

We had horrible interactions with Zuora in terms of integration. Worst vendor ever.

Boxbot 9y ago

Not gonna argue that integrating with their platform is a gigantic pain in the ass, but I feel that part of it is the flexibility (and complexity) of their subscription model. Would you say different? Not too familiar with the other players in the field so I don't know how they compare really. Definitely some reliability and performance concerns, though. I feel like half the pain is just having to shove so much defensive programming in our integration.

xfour 9y ago
Stripe specifically has a great subscription model. When Zuora was getting started and gaining momentum they didn't. We've recently onboarded a Stripe Subscription with their connect accounts even and it's been extremely smooth.