3 ms·

I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more importantly th

I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more importantly their data model for B2C businesses is beyond terrible. Their definition of an active subscriber was a clear mistake almost a decade ago that they have stubbornly stuck to.

gobluebackstage 9y ago
and forgot to mention - bc their data-model is so poor they email us constantly like we are a still an active subscriber and sometimes like a completely new lead but never like a winback customer
atak1 9y ago
Agreed. I was the engineering lead on our company's integration a couple years back, and we wound up cutting ties and sticking with our own solution. The biggest pain points during the integration were: * Zuora is run on a legacy tech stack (SOAP interfaces, inflexible and inextensible WSDL), and will continue to do so b/c a substantial part of the architecture & coding were outsourced overseas (as told to me by an integration consultant) * Getting data in and out of their platform is very difficult, error-prone, time-consuming, and does not meet the high-volume demands of a digital subscription business * ZOM (Zuora Object Model) is monolithic and hard to evolve your business around * You need someone at your company (possibly 1+ engineering resources) to deeply understand and keep up to date with Zuora's platform. For engineers who want to learn and grow, this project is a potential de-motivator. To be fair, we did this transition back in 2015, when Zuora was in its early stages with their REST api. Not sure how far they've come in that department since then. Zuora appears best for transitioning brick-and-mortar shops to a digital business via their UI. If you're running an online-subscription-based business, I'd recommend: * Stripe + keeping your data models in-housed * checking out a modern / extensible platform like Recurly * checking out an open-source solution like Killbill and see if it meets your set of needs

gobluebackstage 9y ago

and forgot to mention - bc their data-model is so poor they email us constantly like we are a still an active subscriber and sometimes like a completely new lead but never like a winback customer

atak1 9y ago

Agreed. I was the engineering lead on our company's integration a couple years back, and we wound up cutting ties and sticking with our own solution. The biggest pain points during the integration were: * Zuora is run on a legacy tech stack (SOAP interfaces, inflexible and inextensible WSDL), and will continue to do so b/c a substantial part of the architecture & coding were outsourced overseas (as told to me by an integration consultant) * Getting data in and out of their platform is very difficult, error-prone, time-consuming, and does not meet the high-volume demands of a digital subscription business * ZOM (Zuora Object Model) is monolithic and hard to evolve your business around * You need someone at your company (possibly 1+ engineering resources) to deeply understand and keep up to date with Zuora's platform. For engineers who want to learn and grow, this project is a potential de-motivator. To be fair, we did this transition back in 2015, when Zuora was in its early stages with their REST api. Not sure how far they've come in that department since then. Zuora appears best for transitioning brick-and-mortar shops to a digital business via their UI. If you're running an online-subscription-based business, I'd recommend: * Stripe + keeping your data models in-housed * checking out a modern / extensible platform like Recurly * checking out an open-source solution like Killbill and see if it meets your set of needs