Executive Summary

B2B Subscription Management

The era of subscriptions has fundamentally reshaped how businesses operate and how consumers engage with services across industries. Enterprises are moving beyond traditional ownership models, increasingly embracing digital-first sales strategies and offering digital products that complement physical goods. Customers now expect flexible options, whether through subscriptions, consumption-based pricing or on-demand access rather than one-time purchases. Coupled with the growing preference to buy on their own terms, across digital commerce platforms, self-service portals or even voice and text, today’s landscape is dramatically different from just five years ago.

ISG defines subscription management as the end-to-end process of delivering a seamless subscriber experience, from selection and configuration through billing, payment and fulfillment, while enabling organizations to treat subscriptions as products with full lifecycle management. This includes automation, analytics, pricing, loyalty and system integration, as well as support for diverse monetization models such as flat-fee, usage-based, milestone and one-time sales. Effective applications must also manage complex payment flows, allocate revenue across partners and asset owners and ensure strong receivables, cash flow and collections capabilities.

Subscriptions, once limited to newspapers, magazines and early models like Netflix’s DVD rentals, have become widely adopted across digital products, SaaS, mobile apps and entertainment platforms like HBO and Spotify, as well as enterprise software. The model provides consumers and businesses with predictable access over defined periods, lowers upfront costs and aligns spending with delivered value. At the same time, it enables providers to generate recurring, forecastable revenue tied to sustained usage while spreading risk more evenly with customers, making subscriptions a cornerstone of modern commercial strategy in both consumer and B2B markets.

Enterprises built on or heavily using subscription models in B2B face the challenge of providing organizations with seamless, self-service ways to initiate and modify plans at scale.

Enterprises built on or heavily using subscription models in B2B face the challenge of providing organizations with seamless, self-service ways to initiate and modify plans at scale. These companies typically manage fewer customers with far more complex, negotiated orders across multiple products and services. For organizations new to subscription pricing, often alongside traditional one-time sales, the priority is to integrate these models in a way that feels seamless to subscribers, avoiding issues such as duplicate bills, inconsistent payment methods or fragmented purchasing experiences.

In B2B contexts, effective subscription management systems must accommodate diverse business models and complex use cases, either through built-in capabilities or seamless integration with ERP, CRM and other enterprise platforms. For organizations that have traditionally relied on one-time or project-based sales, adopting subscription models requires new systems and processes that complement existing infrastructure without disrupting the client experience. Whether the new platform serves as the central hub for billing and subscription management or simply integrates with legacy systems, interoperability is critical—particularly in synchronizing customer and product master data to ensure a consistent, frictionless subscriber journey across the enterprise.

In B2B markets, subscription and digital product models require far greater agility than traditional one-time sales, as pricing, bundling and catalogs must be updated frequently to address evolving client needs. Effective subscription management goes beyond flat fees to support usage- and consumption-based pricing, where charges reflect actual consumption (such as transactions or usage volume) and better balance risk between buyer and seller. These models often involve sophisticated structures that demand both flexibility and simplicity in execution. Examples include tiered pricing triggered by volume thresholds and multi-attribute pricing that incorporates variables such as contract duration, geography, customer profile and bundled product or service offerings.

By 2026, increased adoption of the subscription business model will lead to more complex pricing, rating and billing, and if not successfully addressed, will diminish the customer experience and restrict growth.

By 2026, increased adoption of the subscription business model will lead to more complex pricing, rating and billing, and if not successfully addressed, will diminish the customer experience and restrict growth. In B2B settings, usage-based pricing can appear attractive to customers but introduces uncertainty, as charges fluctuate and are difficult to forecast. Costs may be tied to factors such as Internet of Things (IoT) transactions, payment processing volumes or cloud resource consumption, creating challenges similar to those once faced by telecom providers that moved from per-call billing to block or unlimited models that simplify pricing. Unlike flat fees, usage-based models demand robust forecasting and analytics capabilities to help both providers and clients anticipate costs, validate invoices, manage budgets, predict churn and support revenue planning—capabilities that are often lacking in many subscription management systems.

Subscription pricing in B2B has major implications for revenue recognition, as most revenue is deferred and only realized upon qualifying events such as service delivery, milestone achievement or payment. While ERP systems manage accounting, the underlying recognition events are best handled within subscription management platforms. Advanced solutions can capture usage data and event triggers, calculate necessary adjustments, generate sub-ledger entries, and seamlessly integrate with the general ledger—ensuring accuracy, compliance and efficiency in revenue accounting.

Data mediation is often essential for usage-based transactions, and raw data typically originates from multiple systems in different formats. This requires normalizing and aggregating the data to a level suitable for pricing. At scale, providers may rely on pre-aggregation and rolling pricing, with mechanisms to reprice when customers reach thresholds or cumulative tiers. In other cases, usage may be pre-priced externally and tagged to bypass internal pricing logic. These approaches reflect the complexity of real-world enterprise scenarios and the need for flexible, adaptable subscription management systems.

In subscription management for B2B, a critical yet often overlooked requirement is accurately accounting for revenue owed to partners who contribute complementary products or services within a bundled offering. Today’s ecosystems extend beyond traditional reseller arrangements, as enterprises increasingly rely on partnerships to enhance the value proposition—shifting the approach from “build or buy” to “build, buy or partner.” This creates accounting complexities, including calculating commissions, applying markups and allocating bundle costs across multiple third parties. Examples include software providers sharing revenue with cloud or integration partners, manufacturers bundling maintenance services or logistics firms collaborating with carriers. As partner ecosystems grow, enterprises must move beyond basic back-office accounting and adopt advanced capabilities to manage complex revenue allocation formulas aligned with the pricing models presented to customers.

Successful subscription management systems must integrate tightly with customer, product, pricing and vendor data.

With subscription models for B2B, improving efficiency and financial transparency requires managing revenue allocations to partners as the mirror of payments received, with contracts explicitly defining not only product and service terms but also revenue-sharing or royalty obligations. This makes contract management a critical element of subscription management, ensuring that modifications to orders, plans or terms—such as proration, adjustments or refunds—are executed seamlessly while maintaining accuracy in both customer billing and partner settlements.

Successful subscription management systems must integrate tightly with customer, product, pricing and vendor data so that updates to contracts or orders flow seamlessly into billing, receivables, payables and the general ledger for accurate revenue recognition. Robust contract management ensures changes are executed smoothly with proper proration, adjustments or refunds, while billing, payments and collections also require close integration. To reduce manual effort and maintain efficiency, intelligent automation and proactive alerts are critical—resolving issues quickly and delivering a frictionless experience for subscribers.

While automation is the ultimate goal, reporting remains critical for both auditing and business insight. Reporting needs typically fall into two categories: operational and analytical. Operational reporting delivers detailed transaction-level data for validation and compliance, often drawn directly from stored records with minimal filtering and distributed in formats such as CSV or print. Analytical reporting, on the other hand, aggregates and filters data to uncover trends in customer behavior and staff performance, commonly presented through dashboards, drillable tables or integrations with BI tools and data warehouses.

Subscription management software providers are increasingly adding AI-driven analytics and predictive capabilities, such as recommending collection strategies for overdue accounts or detecting passive churn from expired cards or invalid addresses. While adoption of value-added features such as pricing optimization and bundle recommendations has been slower, providers recognize that non-digital-native companies are seeking to supplement one-time sales with subscription and usage models, while even digital-first firms are exploring physical products to complement digital services.

Enterprises need subscription platforms that work today while scaling for tomorrow. The best applications use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve operations and customer experiences—like smarter payment strategies, churn prediction and productivity tools—while integrating seamlessly with existing systems for smooth billing, orders and payments. They should also support partner ecosystems and new product models without workarounds, making it easy to test, adjust and grow offerings. Ultimately, the right platform helps businesses meet customer expectations, stay compliant and drive long-term profitability.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for B2B Subscription Management evaluates software providers and products in key areas as part of the capability model, including the following:

• The Subscriber Experience
• Managing Subscriptions
• Loyalty and Rebates
• Data Mediation
• Pricing and Rating Methods
• Revenue Allocation for Third Parties
• Payments In—Billing
• Payments Out—Revenue Allocation
• Payment Accepting Systems
• Contract/Order Management and Adjustment
• Dunning and Collections
• Bulk Updates
• Revenue Recognition
• Automation and Error Handling
• Operational Reporting
• Analytical Reporting

This research evaluates the following 21 software providers that offer products to address key elements of B2B subscription management as we define it: AdvantageCS, Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Certinia, Chargebee, Cleverbridge, Conga, Gotransverse, keylight, LogiSense, Maxio, NetSuite, OneBill, Oracle, Recurly, RecVue, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, Stripe and Zuora.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for B2B Subscription Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for B2B subscription management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for B2B subscription management to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of B2B subscription management technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of B2B subscription management software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating B2B subscription management systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

Key Takeaways

B2B subscription management is evolving rapidly as enterprises shift to digital-first, usage-based and partner-driven models. Effective platforms must unify pricing, billing, contract management and revenue recognition while handling complex partner allocations and usage data. AI and automation are essential to streamline forecasting, invoicing and collections, while predictive analytics reduce churn and subscriber engagement. Integrated solutions provide the ability to support diverse business models and drive sustainable growth.

Software Provider Summary
The research identifies Zuora, Oracle and BillingPlatform as overall leaders, with Zuora topping the rankings across multiple categories. Classification places Zuora, Oracle, BillingPlatform, Salesforce and Gotransverse in the Exemplary quadrant, while Aria Systems, keylight and SAP are categorized as Innovative. Chargebee, OneBill and Recurly are placed in Assurance, and AdvantageCS, Cleverbridge, LogiSense and Stripe in Merit. The research assesses the balance of product and customer experience.

Product Experience Insights
Product Experience represented 80% of the overall evaluation, weighted across Capability, Usability, Reliability, Adaptability and Manageability. Zuora, Oracle and BillingPlatform led overall. Oracle, Salesforce and Zuora excelled in Adaptability; Salesforce, BillingPlatform and Zuora in Usability; Zuora, BillingPlatform and Oracle in Reliability; and Zuora, Oracle and Conga in Manageability. Leaders earned distinction through the breadth of B2B subscription capabilities, scalability, integration depth and configurability, identifying providers best suited for enterprises seeking robust, flexible platforms.

Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience accounted for 20% of the overall evaluation, focused on validation and TCO/ROI. Zuora, Oracle and Conga ranked highest overall for Customer Experience by demonstrating strong commitment, validated references and lifecycle support. In TCO/ROI, Zuora, BillingPlatform and Oracle performed best, showcasing clear ROI tooling and business-case transparency. Providers that fell short often lacked sufficient references, communication or ROI frameworks, which may limit enterprise confidence.

Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should treat subscription management selection as a strategic investment that balances deep product capability with proven customer experience. Buyers should prioritize platforms that unify pricing, billing, contracts and revenue recognition while supporting partner allocations and compliance. Providers with transparent ROI and strong validation offer greater confidence for long-term success. Using this research framework, enterprises can align software provider selection with operational needs and financial accountability, ensuring subscription management investments that drive growth and resilience.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.

   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.

   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Zuora atop the list, followed by Oracle and BillingPlatform. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Zuora has done so in seven categories, Oracle in six, BillingPlatform in five and Salesforce and Conga in two categories.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: BillingPlatform, Certinia, Conga, Gotransverse, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce and Zuora.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Aria Systems, keylight and SAP.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Chargebee, OneBill and Recurly.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the thresholds for the Assurance, Exemplary or Innovative categories in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AdvantageCS, Cleverbridge, LogiSense, Maxio, RecVue, Sage and Stripe.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle B2B subscription management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (25%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Zuora, Oracle and BillingPlatform were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Zuora, Oracle and Conga. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not Leaders, Gotransverse and Salesforce were also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for B2B Subscription Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $15 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 20 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months.

For the B2B Subscription Management Guide, providers should:

• Offer a solution that can accommodate individually negotiated multi-year-term contracts.
• Support complex usage, subscription and milestone pricing models.
• Allocate revenue to third parties where required.
• Support data mediation for usage and consumption models.
• Support for integration with order management, CPQ, and CRM systems.
• Offer revenue recognition capabilities
• Support extensive integration with third party back office and front office systems
• Provide analytics and operational reporting.

If a provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product as reflected on its website that is within the scope of the Buyers Guide, it is automatically evaluated for inclusion. We have adopted this approach because we view it as our responsibility to assess all relevant vendors whether they choose to participate or not.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant B2B subscription management products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”