Executive Summary

Subscription Billing

The era of subscriptions has fundamentally reshaped billing, changing how businesses operate and how customers expect to engage with products and services. Companies are moving beyond traditional ownership models, adopting digital-first strategies and offering subscription-based access to digital products alongside physical goods. Customers now demand flexible options—whether subscriptions, consumption-based pricing or on-demand access—rather than one-time purchases. Combined with the shift toward buying on their own terms through digital commerce platforms, self-service portals or even voice and text, subscription billing has become a core enabler of today’s dramatically different landscape compared to 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 manage subscriptions as products with full lifecycle oversight. This includes supporting both B2B and B2C models with automation, analytics, pricing, loyalty and system integration, as well as diverse monetization approaches such as flat-fee, usage-based, milestone and one-time sales. Effective subscription billing solutions must also handle complex payment flows, allocate revenue across partners and asset owners, and ensure strong capabilities for receivables, cash flow and collections.

Subscription billing systems must support a wide range of business models and use cases, either through built-in functionality or seamless integration with ERP, CRM and other third-party platforms.

Subscription billing systems must support a wide range of business models and use cases, either through built-in functionality or seamless integration with ERP, CRM and other third-party platforms. For organizations that have historically relied on one-time sales, adopting subscription models requires additional processes and systems that work alongside existing infrastructure without disrupting the customer experience. Whether the billing platform becomes the central hub for subscriptions or simply integrates with legacy systems, interoperability is critical—especially in synchronizing customer and product master data to ensure a smooth and consistent subscriber journey.

By 2026, increased adoption of the subscription business model will lead to more complex pricing, rating and billing which, if not successfully addressed, will diminish the customer experience and restrict growth. In subscription billing, usage-based pricing can feel attractive to customers but often creates uncertainty, since charges fluctuate and are difficult to predict in advance. Costs may be tied to things like data usage, transactions or storage consumption, echoing challenges telecom providers once faced before moving from per-call billing to block or unlimited plans for simplicity. Unlike flat-fee subscriptions, usage-based billing requires strong forecasting and analytics to help both providers and customers anticipate charges, validate invoices, manage budgets, reduce churn risk and support revenue planning—yet these capabilities are still often lacking in many subscription billing systems.

Subscription billing applications manage core billing activities within the revenue lifecycle, supporting multiple pricing models such as subscriptions and usage, near real-time updates from plan or order changes, negotiated pricing and the handling of usage data before rating. They integrate with both back- and front-office systems while providing analytics and reporting for deeper insights. Digitized billing schedules and calendars can automatically trigger actions like renewal reminders, while digitized terms reduce manual input by persisting key data within the platform. By analyzing repeated steps across the process, platforms can identify inefficiencies—for example, when certain contract types consistently require legal review—allowing continuous improvement across the entire revenue lifecycle.

Once a sale or renewal is secured, billing becomes a critical step in the revenue lifecycle and a key part of the customer experience. Accurate, timely invoices drive satisfaction and sustained engagement, especially as varied product and service pricing models add complexity. This is particularly important when offerings come from multiple business units—customers expect a single, seamless invoice rather than being burdened with fragmented billing tied to organizational structure.

In subscription billing, complex pricing models create challenges for accuracy, since final charges depend on processing all relevant transactions.

In subscription billing, complex pricing models—especially usage- or volume-tiered structures—create challenges for accuracy, since final charges depend on processing all relevant transactions. Unlike flat-fee subscriptions, it is harder to estimate predictable bills, and invoices often need to include clear breakdowns showing how totals were calculated for transparency. Some subscriptions also require billing more frequently than the standard monthly cycle, or even continuously. To handle this, subscription billing platforms must support high-performance processing and flexible billing windows, ensuring accurate, timely invoices that improve cash flow and give customers real-time visibility into changes.

Traditional ERP or in-house billing systems were built around one-time sales with simple pricing and infrequent product changes, making them ill-suited for today’s complex subscription and bundled offerings. Treating billing as separate from the customer experience is a mistake—modern approaches bring billing closer to quote and contract processes, enabling direct billing tied to the contract, order or plan. Contemporary subscription billing systems support diverse models, including subscriptions, usage and milestone-based pricing, and generate billing schedules that project what will be billed and when. Combined with revenue recognition rules under standards like ASC606 (IFRS 15), these schedules provide accurate revenue and cash flow projections while delivering a more seamless customer experience.

Modern subscription billing systems must integrate seamlessly with customer, product, pricing and partner data to ensure updates to contracts or orders flow directly into billing, receivables, payables and the general ledger for accurate revenue recognition. Effective contract management enables smooth changes with proper proration, adjustments or refunds, while billing, payments and collections also require close integration. Intelligent automation and alerts are essential to reduce manual effort, quickly resolve issues and deliver a frictionless subscriber experience.

At the same time, reporting remains critical for both auditing and insight. Operational reporting provides detailed transaction-level data for validation and compliance, often pulled directly from stored records with minimal filtering and delivered in formats like CSV or print. Analytical reporting, on the other hand, aggregates and filters data to highlight customer behavior and performance trends, typically presented through dashboards, drillable tables or integrated with business intelligence (BI) tools and data warehouses.

Subscription billing platforms are increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics and predictive capabilities, such as recommending strategies for overdue collections or detecting passive churn from expired cards or invalid addresses. While adoption of advanced features like pricing optimization and bundle recommendations has been slower, providers recognize shifting market demands: traditional companies are adding subscription and usage models to supplement one-time sales, while even digital-first firms are expanding into physical products to complement their digital services.

Enterprises need subscription billing platforms that meet today’s needs while scaling for tomorrow.

Enterprises need subscription billing platforms that meet today’s needs while scaling for tomorrow. The most effective solutions leverage AI to enhance operations and customer experiences—through smarter payment strategies, churn prediction and productivity tools—while integrating seamlessly with existing systems for smooth billing, order management and payments. They should also support partner ecosystems and diverse pricing models without workarounds, making it easy to test, refine and expand offerings. Ultimately, the right billing platform enables businesses to meet customer expectations, maintain compliance and drive sustainable profitability.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Subscription Billing evaluates software providers and products in key areas that support the billing aspects of the subscriber’s revenue lifecycle. This Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities that facilitate using an integrated and extensible platform to help orchestrate activities across sales, finance, legal and operations teams. In addition, the data and data model should be accessible using a set of standard reporting and analytic methods.

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

• Managing Subscriptions
• Loyalty and Rebates
• Data Mediation
• Pricing and Rating Methods
• Payments In—Billing
• Dunning and Collections
• Revenue Recognition
• Automation and Error Handling
• Operational Reporting
• Analytical Reporting

This research evaluates the following 22 software providers that offer products that address key elements of subscription billing as we define it: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargebee, Cleverbridge, Conga, FastSpring, Gotransverse, keylight, LogiSense, Maxio, NetSuite, OneBill, Oracle, Paddle, RecVue, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, Stripe, Younium, Zoho 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 Subscription Billing 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 subscription billing 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 subscription billing 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 subscription billing 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 subscription billing 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 subscription billing 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

Subscription billing is becoming increasingly complex as enterprises adopt usage-based and ecosystem-driven models. Success requires unified platforms that integrate pricing, billing, contracts and revenue recognition while supporting partner allocations and compliance. Automation, AI and predictive analytics are reshaping operations to improve forecasting, optimize collections and enhance customer experience. Scalable solutions provide the flexibility to test new offerings, reduce churn 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 placed Zuora, Oracle, BillingPlatform, Salesforce, Aria Systems and Gotransverse in the Exemplary quadrant, while keylight and SAP were categorized as Innovative. Chargebee and OneBill were placed in the Assurance quadrant, while Cleverbridge, LogiSense and Stripe were categorized as Merit. The research assessed 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 in capability and reliability, while Oracle, Salesforce and Zuora excelled in adaptability. Salesforce, BillingPlatform and Zuora were recognized for usability, and Zuora, Oracle and Conga for manageability. Leaders distinguished themselves through breadth of subscription billing functions, scalability, adaptability to enterprise needs and depth of integration and customization, making them 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 led in customer experience by demonstrating strong commitment, validated success cases and lifecycle support. In TCO/ROI, Zuora, BillingPlatform and Oracle performed best, showcasing clear business value and ROI frameworks. Providers that fell short often lacked sufficient customer references, clarity in communication or tools to justify ROI, which may limit long-term enterprise confidence.

Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should treat subscription billing as a strategic investment and balance the need for product capabilities with strong customer experience support. Buyers should prioritize providers that deliver breadth across pricing, billing and revenue recognition while ensuring business processes and roles. Platforms that demonstrate transparent ROI provide greater confidence for long-term success. Using this research framework, enterprises can align software providers with operational needs, and financial accountability, ensuring subscription billing 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 four; and Conga and Salesforce in two.

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: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Conga, Gotransverse, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce, Zoho 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: 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 and OneBill.

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: Cleverbridge, FastSpring, LogiSense, Maxio, Paddle, RecVue, Sage, Stripe and Younium.

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 subscription billing, 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 (10%), Capability (30%), Reliability (20%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (10%). 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.

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 Subscription Billing 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 last 12 months.

For the Subscription Billing Buyers Guide, providers should:

• Offer a solution that can rate different pricing models and includes one-time, fee-based subscription, usage or consumption, and milestone.
• Support for individually negotiated pricing
• Bills should be able to include third-party bill lines to consolidate bills where necessary
• Support extensive integration with third-party back-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 providers 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 subscription billing 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.”