The subscription economy is growing at an accelerated rate, and as an increasing number of businesses move to the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, there is a need for subscription management and billing software to manage and automate key aspects of subscription billing.
The global subscription & billing management market is expected to grow from $5.10 billion in 2021 to $5.84 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.40%. (1)
There are many benefits to using subscription management and billing software, including:
- Better accuracy and efficiency in billing
- Easily track and manage customer subscriptions
- Generate detailed reports on subscription activity
- Automatically bill customers on a recurring basis
- Offer discounts and promotions
The use of billing software can help subscription businesses to streamline their entire billing process. This will also help them save time and money and ultimately improve customer retention. If you’re into a subscription-based business, it’s vital to invest in the right recurring billing software.
The following article covers the top SaaS and subscription billing software along with a comparison of their features and benefits.
Top 10 Subscription Billing Management Software
1. Chargebee
Chargebee is a comprehensive subscription management and recurring billing software that has support for automation. It is designed to help subscription businesses automate the billing and invoicing management. By helping providers cut manual billing redundancies, the software can help maximize revenue earning capacity. It has support for over 10 languages and 25+ payment gateways.
Features and benefits:
- Subscription Management and Recurring Billing: It can manage the end-to-end subscription life cycle with the capacity to create, pause, manage, reactivate subscriptions, etc. It further supports customizable billing cycles, quotes, prorated payments, consolidated invoicing, and more.
- Support for multiple pricing: It has support for grandfather pricing, custom pricing, dynamic pricing, etc. Service providers can set limits on plans and customize them easily.
- Checkout and Self-serve Portal: The platform offers a PCI-compliant hosted checkout page. Service providers can also request cart abandonment recovery reports. There is support for guest and mobile checkout as well.
- Security and Compliance: The platform is PCI-DSS Level 1-certified. Thus, it supports encryption of customers’ personal data related to their banking details and card information.
- Reporting and Analytics: It has a RevenueStory feature that allows service providers to access to over 80 custom reports, alerts, dashboards, etc. Service providers can also track new account trials and conversion rate with the help of the trial analytics feature.
- Global Expansion Support: With multi-currency, eInvoice compliance, multi-language, and multi-entity management, Chargebee can make a subscription business global-ready.
- Integrations: It has support for various third-party software like NetSuite, Xero, Sage Intacct, Zendesk, QuickBooks, Freshdesk, Slack, and more.
2. Chargify
The Chargify platform allows subscription providers to track and manage all subscriptions throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The platform has a centralized interface that can help you in keeping a track of all subscription-related activity in one place. It also has support for billing and invoice management.
Features and benefits:
- Subscription Management: It provides several features related to subscription management. You can create plans, set up renewals, apply discounts, define billing cycles, etc.
- Faster Onboarding: It allows subscription service providers to set up a smooth onboarding experience. The checkout page is customizable and PCI compliant. It also offers an API that can seamlessly integrate with existing signup or shopping cart systems.
- Customer Service: With Chargify, providers can manage all types of plans, view billing history, modify plans, or even customer details.
- Communication Management: With Chargify, you can schedule automated email communications. The platform has support for welcome emails, upcoming renewal reminder emails, trial-ending emails, etc.
- Invoice Management: You can also manage the invoices through the platform. The invoices can be customized as per your requirements.
Cleverbridge comes with a suite of services that includes capabilities like credit card processing, tax calculation, subscription management, invoicing, local payment gateways, and fraud prevention tools. In addition, it also provides an API that allows subscription and SaaS businesses to integrate their e-commerce platforms with Cleverbridge’s payment solutions.
Features and benefits:
- Single Platform Support: The platform allows subscription providers to manage the complete customer lifecycle. You can set up plans and create multiple offerings, add offer codes, discounts, etc.
- Customer Centric: It also allows customers to manage various aspects related to their subscription – like upgrading/downgrading, adding new services, activating, or deactivating accounts, converting from trial periods, etc.
- Single Sign-On Support: It supports the SSO (Single-Sign-On technology). The customers can use a single sign-on to access all other subscription applications as well as resources.
- Renewal Management: It allows service providers to reduce voluntary churn with the help of A/B testing or by supporting the implementation of a wide range of tested retention campaigns. It focuses on helping businesses grow and retain renewals.
- Reports and Analytics: It also provides insights into different types of data and modules like trial conversions, payments, product usage, and churn.
FastSpring is one of the leading eCommerce platforms that provide SaaS companies and other sellers with everything they require to sell their products online. It provides a complete suite of tools for creating an online eCommerce store, processing global payments, managing taxes, and completing orders.
Features and benefits:
- Subscription Management: The platform empowers SaaS providers with a variety of subscription management tools to manage upgrades, downgrades, account trials, proration billing, renewals, and more.
- Global Payments: With it, service providers can easily accept global payments. It has support for multiple currencies and global tax collection with intelligent payment routing.
- Risk Management: The platform further helps prevent fraud by taking care of the chargebacks and complying with existing and upcoming tax or financial regulations.
- Smoother checkouts: The platform supports easier and faster checkouts with features like customized checkout flows, intelligent product display, dynamic merchandizing, up-selling, cross-selling, and more.
- Digital invoicing: The digital invoicing feature can help businesses process and manage B2B orders alongside their traditional commerce channel.
The cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software – NetSuite, helps businesses manage their finances, inventory, and billing operations. The software includes different modules for inventory management, accounting, and order management. It also offers an eCommerce platform to create and manage online stores.
Features & benefits:
- Complete Order Management: NetSuite is a holistic ERP solution that is built on the cloud. It supports functions like inventory management, order management, and supply chain management with ease.
- Billing Management: The SuiteBilling available within the financial management module allows subscription businesses to automate invoicing operations. It supports discounts, multiple pricing models, renewals, notifications, etc.
- Global Business Support: The platform is a global-ready solution with in-built support for various languages, accounting, currency, and tax rules.
- Customer Management: It enables service providers to manage their customers’ lifecycles. It further supports SFA (sales force automation), customer service management, and even marketing automation.
- Reporting and Analytics: It has support for business intelligence tools to help service providers discover various trends and deliver meaningful insights to take their businesses toward success.
RackNap is a powerful billing and subscription management platform that is designed to save subscription businesses time and money. With RackNap, businesses can automate their billing processes and invoicing, reduce manual errors, and view and track payments. The platform also offers a flexible pricing model to allow businesses to scale their product plans as required.
Features and benefits:
- Customer-lifecycle Automation: RackNap helps businesses automate the entire customer lifecycle – right from onboarding to order management, billing, invoicing, and support.
- Billing and Provisioning: Service providers can set up different plans and automate renewals. It also offers a customer self-service portal to help you improve your customer satisfaction.
- Business Intelligence: The platform has support for multiple dashboards to serve the interest of various business stakeholders – CTO dashboard, CFO dashboard, etc.
- Cloud Marketplace: It helps businesses set up an eCommerce website and sell cloud or non-cloud services with complete pricing flexibility, subscriber management, live chat integration, and more.
- Partner Management: It has support for partner management. Thus, you can build and manage a partner ecosystem via RackNap with complete end-to-end automation.
- Integrations: RackNap supports over 50 integrations. This includes integrations with multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Paystack, Stripe, and accounting software like Sage and Xero.
With Recurly, you can manage recurring billing and invoices, track subscriptions, and automate customer lifecycle. Recurly is integrated with various accounting software platforms, allowing businesses to keep their financial data updated and accurate.
Features and benefits:
- Plan Management: Manage subscription plans with complete ease with features like flexible pricing models – fixed, hybrid, tiered, and volume-based. The centralized item management further supports functions like one-click updates.
- Recurring Billing: The platform supports automated billing and invoicing. It can be used to manage taxes globally and customize invoices. It can be integrated with other third-party software like CRM, ERP, etc.
- Analytics: The platform also provides smart business analytics tools with actionable insights with the help of its integration with Snowflake.
- Recurring Payments: The platform makes it easier for businesses to discover new audiences and drive growth with higher conversion rates. It supports multiple payment gateways and follows a seamless checkout process.
- Intelligent Retention: Recurly helps subscription businesses minimize failed payments and customer churn with intelligent insights into future payments and finances.
Stripe is another powerful subscription billing management platform that is highly scalable. It allows businesses to manage a large number of transactions on a daily basis. It offers a wide variety of recurring billing management features that perfectly fits the needs of a modern subscription business.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- End-to-End Billing: With Stripe Billing, service providers can start accepting recurring payments within minutes. Furthermore, the secure, built-in customer portal helps businesses to empower their customers with a self-service panel.
- Multiple Pricing Support: It supports all major types of billing methods – one-time, recurring, usage-based, tiered, etc.
- Global Payments: It offers a unified API to help businesses accept global payments with support for international cards and currencies.
- Customizable Invoices: It also supports the customization of hosted invoices. Service providers can set email reminders for invoices overdue.
- Tax and other compliance support: Stripe billing platform is designed to help protect business revenue with compliance for major tax and finance regulations.
The subscription Billing Software by Zoho can support all major aspects of a modern subscription business – including but not limited to billing, payments, invoicing, etc. It perfectly fits the needs of growing subscription businesses.
Features and benefits:
- Automated Billing: The platform has support for automated billing. The invoices generated are GST compliant – helping the subscription businesses to comply with tax and other billing regulations.
- Multiple Payment Modes: The platform can support multiple payment modes and currencies – both offline and online. It also has a provision for retry of any involuntary failed payment.
- Subscription Management: The platform allows you to create multiple plans. You can also include add-ons, discounts, and coupon codes. It further offers a customer self-service portal – to allow your end customers to manage their subscriptions with you.
- Customization: It supports white labeling of hosted payment pages and the customer portal to deliver a great subscription experience.
- Reporting and Analytics: It has built-in analytical features related to revenue, sales, churn rate, and more. Users can get strategic information from dashboards and reports like MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), LTV (Lifetime Value), etc.
Zuora as a subscription management software helps subscription businesses manage various business processes effortlessly. It has support for multiple industries like manufacturing & IoT, software, high tech, as well as media and entertainment.
Features and benefits:
- Centralized Billing: The software supports all complex billing operations and can help businesses reduce overheads on various manual processes.
- Smart Pricing: It has support for multiple customer PoC (point of contact) to enable smoother onboarding.
- Manage Subscriptions: The platform also supports order orchestration with the help of several abilities like automatic upgrading and downgrading, account renewal, suspension, etc.
- Custom Orders: It allows subscription service providers to combine various fees like subscriptions, one-time, and even physical goods in a single order.
- Flexible Pricing: It allows service providers to price and packages their products and services with flexible pricing models (one-time, recurring, metered, etc.).
Detailed Comparison (Feature-by-Feature)
| Features | Chargebee | Chargify | CleverBridge | FastSpring | NetSuite | RackNap | Recurly | Stripe | Zoho | Zuora |
| Free Trial | 14-days | 30-days | NA | Yes | 14-days | 14-days | Yes | NA | 15-days (CRM) | Yes |
| Billing and Provisioning Features | ||||||||||
| Multiple Billing Models
(One-time, recurring, usage, contract, etc.) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discounts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cancellation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Upgrade and downgrade | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Payment History | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automated Invoicing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Invoice Customization | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Renewal Notification | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Billing Dashboard and reports | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Subscription Management Features | ||||||||||
| End-to-end order lifecycle management | NA | NA | NA | NA |
Yes |
Yes | NA | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time Order Status | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Offer scalability
(create multiple variations of a plan) |
NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Forecast demand
(visibility into paid, unpaid orders) |
NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Upsell/cross-sell | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
Customer self-service portal (Customer Capabilities) |
||||||||||
| Raise Support Ticket | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Renew a service | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Upgrade/downgrade | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| View billing history and status | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Communication dashboard | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Access to knowledgebase | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Access to Add-ons | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Business Intelligence Features | ||||||||||
| CFO Dashboard | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Revenue Dashboard | Yes | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Order Visibility | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| CTO Dashboard with Inventory Insights | Yes | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA |
| Server Metrics | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Demand Forecasting | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | NA |
| CRM Dashboard | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-tier Partner Management | ||||||||||
| Partner Onboarding | NA | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | NA |
| Reseller Partners | NA | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | NA |
| Commission-based affiliate partners | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Discount Management | NA | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| White labelling | NA | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Lead-lock feature | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Partner performance metrics | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | NA |
| Partner Revenue Generation forecast | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Integrations | ||||||||||
| Web Hosting Control Panels (cPanel or Plesk)
|
NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Marketing, email, and customer support
|
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | NA |
| Accounting Integrations
|
Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud Platforms and Software Solutions
|
NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | Yes | NA | NA | Yes | NA |
| SSL, Security, and Domains
|
NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | Yes | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| eCommerce | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA | NA | NA |
| Payment Gateways
|
NA | Yes | No | Yes | NA | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Important Note: The NA stands for direct Information Not Available. It may not necessarily mean that the vendor lacks the particular feature. They may have this under some other names or via third-party integrations.
Wrapping-up
Due to pricing flexibility, Subscription businesses have great potential in the digital age where everyone needs services on-demand. However, to make the most out of the customers and to increase average revenue per user, you will need to overcome billing-related challenges. Billing is a major challenge for any subscription business and when selecting subscription billing software – you must focus on billing and invoicing automation, renewal management, and customer support. You must also ensure that the software will help you manage key aspects of your customer service – like ticket generation and resolution, while also allowing your customers to manage their subscriptions with you.
So, write down what you’re looking for in the subscription management and billing software and then select the solution that meets the short-term as well as long-term goals of your subscription business.
We hope you liked our article. If we missed anything, leave a comment to let us know.
This article was first published, here.
Disclaimer: This article aims to provide information about the subscription billing solutions of different vendors as available in the public domain in November 2022 for general informational purposes only. Vendors may change their product or service pricing and features from time to time. Updated information should be verified from the respective vendor’s site, before making any purchase. Though we make our best endeavors to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date, we do not guarantee its 100% accuracy or timeliness.
