The subscription economy is proliferating, and as more businesses move to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, the need for subscription management and billing software becomes increasingly essential.
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:
- Increased accuracy and efficiency in billing
- The ability to automatically bill customers on a recurring basis
- The ability to track and manage customer subscriptions
- The ability to offer discounts and promotions
- The ability to generate detailed reports on subscription activity
Using subscription billing software can help businesses to streamline their billing process, save time and money, and improve customer retention. If you’re running a subscription-based business, it’s essential to have the right software in place to manage your billing effectively.
In this article, we’ll compare the top SaaS and subscription billing software options to help you choose the best solution for your business. We’ll cover features, benefits, and more to help you make an informed decision.
Comparing the top 10 Subscription Management and Billing Software
Chargebee is a popular subscription management and recurring billing software with support for automation. It is positioned to help subscription businesses automate their billing management. It can help them maximize revenue opportunities by cutting manual billing redundancies and inefficiencies. It supports more than 10 languages and can work with 25+ payment gateways.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Subscription Management and Recurring Billing: Chargebee supports the end-to-end subscription cycle with the ability to create, manage, pause, reactivate, etc. The platform supports customizable billing cycles, prorated payments, quotes, consolidated invoicing, etc.
- Multiple Pricing Support: Supports grandfather pricing, dynamic pricing, custom pricing, etc. Service providers can set limits and customize plans seamlessly.
- Checkout and Self-serve Portal: Offers a PCI-compliant hosted checkout page with cart abandonment recovery reports. It also supports guest checkout – the customer does not have to sign in every time. It also supports mobile checkout through its application.
- Security and Compliance: The Chargebee platform is PCI-DSS Level 1-certified. It supports the encryption of customers’ personal data like card information and banking details. It also has a built-in fraud detection system.
- Reporting and Analytics: RevenueStory feature allows service providers to benefit from access to over 80 custom reports, dashboards, threshold alerts, etc. You can also track new trials and conversion rates with the trial analytics feature.
- Global Expansion Support: With multi-currency, multi-language, eInvoice compliance, and multi-entity management, Chargebee makes your subscription business global-ready.
- Integrations: It supports various integrations like Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, and custom integrations.
The Chargify platform allows you to track and manage subscriptions throughout the customer lifecycle. It provides a centralized interface to help you track all subscription activity in one place. It further has support for billing and invoice management.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Subscription Management: It provides all features related to subscription management – you can create plans, apply discounts, set up renewals, define billing cycles, etc.
- Faster Onboarding: It allows service providers to set up a smooth sign-up experience. It is customizable and PCI compliant. You can also utilize the API to seamlessly integrate with existing signup or shopping cart systems.
- Customer Service: With Chargify, you can manage plans, and billing history, change plans, modify customer details, etc. It allows you to manage all aspects of your customer service.
- Communication Management: With Chargify, you can send automated email communications. It has support for welcome emails, trial-ending emails, upcoming renewal reminder emails, and more formats.
- Invoice Management: The platform also allows you to manage invoices. You can customize invoice formats and send proforma invoices.
Cleverbridge offers a suite of services that includes credit card processing, subscription management, tax calculation, invoicing, fraud prevention, and local payment methods. In addition, Cleverbridge provides an API that allows businesses to integrate their own e-commerce platforms with the company’s payment solutions.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Single Platform Support: The Cleverbridge platform allows subscription providers to manage the end-to-end customer lifecycle via a single platform. You can set up products and create bundle offerings, add discounts, and more.
- Customer Centric: It allows your customers to manage various aspects of their subscription – like upgrading/downgrading, activating or deactivating accounts, adding new services, converting from trial periods, etc.
- Single Sign-On Support: It supports the Single-Sign-On technology. Your customers can use a single sign-on to access all subscription applications and resources.
- Renewal Management: It allows you to reduce voluntary churn via A/B testing or by implementing a wide range of tested retention campaigns. It focuses on helping you grow and retain your renewals.
- Reports and Analytics: It provides detailed insights into various data and modules like payments, renewals, trial conversions, product usage, and even churn.
FastSpring is a global eCommerce platform that provides software companies with everything they need to sell their products online. FastSpring offers a complete suite of tools for creating an online store, processing payments, managing taxes, and fulfilling orders. It is an ideal solution for software companies that want to sell their products online.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Subscription Management: The platform empowers SaaS businesses with a wide variety of subscription management tools – including the ability to manage upgrades, downgrades, proration, trial periods, renewals, and more.
- Global Online Payments: With it, businesses can easily accept global payments with support for multiple currencies, global tax collection, and intelligent payment routing.
- Risk Management: The FastSpring platform helps prevent fraud by managing chargebacks and complying with existing and emerging tax or financial regulations. It has partnered with Sift – a global risk analysis and fraud prevention leader, for the same purpose.
- Smoother checkouts: The platform supports smoother checkouts with features like customized checkout flows, dynamic merchandizing, intelligent product display, cross-selling, up-selling recommendations, and more.
- Digital invoicing: The digital invoicing feature by FastSpring allows businesses to process and manage B2B orders alongside your traditional commerce channel.
NetSuite is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite that helps businesses manage their financials, inventory, and operations. The software includes modules for accounting, inventory management, and order management, among others. NetSuite also offers an eCommerce platform that allows businesses to create and manage online stores.
Features & benefits you’ll get:
- Complete Order Management: Being a holistic ERP solution built on the cloud, NetSuite supports functions like order management, inventory management, and supply chain management with ease.
- Billing Management: The SuiteBilling available under financial management allows businesses to automate invoicing operations. It supports multiple pricing models, discounts, renewals, notifications, etc.
- Global Business Support: The NetSuite platform is global-ready with support for multiple languages, currencies, accounting, and tax rules.
- Customer Management: It also enables businesses to manage customers’ lifecycles. It also supports sales force automation (SFA), customer service management, and marketing automation.
- Reporting and Analytics: It also has built-in business intelligence tools to help businesses discover trends and deliver meaningful insights to take their businesses toward success.
RackNap is a billing and subscription management platform designed to save businesses time and money. With RackNap, businesses can automate their billing processes, reduce manual errors, and track payments. In addition, the platform offers a flexible pricing model that allows businesses to scale their subscription plans as needed. As a result, businesses can save time and money on their subscription management costs.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Customer-lifecycle Automation: RackNap helps you automate the entire customer lifecycle – from onboarding, order management, billing, and invoicing to support.
- Billing and Provisioning: You can set up different plans and automate renewals. You also get a customer self-service portal, graphical dashboards, and more with the help of RackNap.
- Business Intelligence: It has multiple dashboards to serve the point of interest of various stakeholders – CFO dashboard, CTO dashboard, CFO dashboard, CSO dashboard, etc.
- Cloud Marketplace: It helps you set up an eCommerce website and sell cloud/non-cloud services with complete pricing flexibility, live chat integration, subscriber management, and more.
- Partner Management: You can also expand your business by building a partner ecosystem and managing it via RackNap with end-to-end automation.
- Integrations: RackNap supports 50+ integrations, including integrations with multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Paystack, and accounting software like Sage and Xero.
With Recurly, you can easily manage your recurring payments and invoices, track customer subscription data, and automate customer account updates. Recurly is also integrated with major accounting software platforms, so you can keep your financial data up-to-date and accurate.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Plan Management: Manage your subscription plans with ease with the availability of flexible pricing models – fixed, tiered, hybrid, and volume-based. The centralized item management further helps you to perform functions like one-click updates.
- Recurring Billing: The platform supports automated invoicing with a variety of billing options. You can also manage taxes globally and personalize invoices. It can also be integrated with third-party software solutions like CRM, ERP, etc.
- Analytics: The platform offers robust subscription business analytics tools with actionable data insights. It is also integrated with Snowflake for seamless business analytics.
- Recurring Payments: Recurly platform makes it easier for businesses to uncover new audiences and drive growth with higher payment conversions. It has support for multiple payment gateways and a seamless checkout process.
- Intelligent Retention: Recurly helps businesses minimize failed payments and customer churn with intelligent insights into future payments and finances.
Stripe is a powerful subscription and billing management platform. It is designed to be highly scalable – allowing businesses to manage a large number of transactions on a daily basis. It also offers a wide variety of features for the billing and invoice management needs of modern subscription businesses.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- End-to-End Billing: With Stripe Billing, businesses can start accepting recurring payments within minutes. The secure, built-in customer portal further helps businesses to empower their end customers with a self-service panel.
- Multiple Pricing Support: It supports majorly all types of billing methods – one-time, usage-based, recurring, tiered, etc.
- Global Payments: The unified API allows businesses to accept global payments with support for international cards and currencies.
- Customizable Invoices: It supports the customization of hosted invoices. Users can set email reminders for invoices overdue.
- Tax and other compliance support: Stripe is designed to help protect revenue with compliance with major tax and finance regulations.
The Zoho Subscription Billing Software supports all major aspects of a subscription business – like billing, invoicing, payments, etc. It understands the needs of growing businesses and hence can be scaled seamlessly.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Automated Billing: The Zoho Billing Software supports automated billing and invoicing. The invoices sent are GST-compliant – helping the business comply with tax and other financial regulations.
- Multiple Payment Modes: It supports multiple payment modes and currencies – both online and offline. It also has a provision for retry of involuntary failed payments.
- Subscription Management: It supports the creation of multiple plans, add-ons, and offer coupons. Businesses also get a self-service portal for their clients.
- Customization: The software also supports customization and white labeling of hosted payment pages and a customer portal for a great subscription experience.
- Reporting and Analytics: It has built-in analytical features related to sales, revenue, churn rate, and more. Users can get key information from dashboards and reports like MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), LTV (Lifetime Value), etc.
Zuora is a great subscription management software that helps subscription businesses manage processes effortlessly. It supports multiple industries like manufacturing & IoT, high tech, software, media, and entertainment.
Features and benefits you’ll get:
- Centralized Billing: The Zuora Billing Software supports complex billing operations and helps businesses reduce overheads on manual processes.
- Smart Pricing: It supports multiple customer points of contact to enable smooth onboarding.
- Manage Subscriptions: It supports order orchestration with the help of features like automatic upgrading, downgrading, renewal, suspension, and more.
- Custom Orders: It allows businesses to combine fees like subscriptions, one-time, and even physical goods in a single order through Zuora.
- Flexible Pricing: It allows businesses to price and package products and services with flexible pricing models like one-time, recurring, and usage charges.
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 in the above table 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
Subscription businesses have great potential in the digital age due to pricing flexibility. However, to leverage the most out of the customers and to increase the ARPU (average revenue per user), you will need to overcome the billing challenges. Billing is the primary challenge for any subscription business and when selecting subscription management and billing software – you must focus on billing, invoicing automation, and renewal management. 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.
Features like partner management are an added advantage if you want to scale your subscription business. You can manage both your end customers and partners from a single software.
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.
Suggested reading: How to choose a great subscription billing software to manage your business?
We hope you liked our article. If we missed anything, leave a comment to let us know.
