Executive Summary

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 support for B2B and B2C business models with 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 are not new—newspapers and magazines adopted the model decades ago, and Netflix began with DVD rentals on a flat monthly fee. However, digital products and services like SaaS and mobile apps accelerated widespread adoption. From HBO and Spotify to enterprise software, subscriptions are now common across consumer and business markets, offering predictable access for a set duration. This shift created broad acceptance of subscriptions as a pricing model, allowing consumers to spread expenses over time and businesses to share risk more evenly with customers, while vendors benefit from recurring, predictable revenue streams tied to ongoing usage or contracts.

Enterprises built on or heavily using subscription models, especially in B2C, face the challenge of providing customers with seamless, self-service ways to initiate and modify plans at scale. B2B organizations 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.

Effective subscription management systems must support diverse business models and use cases, either through built-in capabilities or seamless integration with ERP, CRM, and third-party platforms. For non-digital-native enterprises that historically relied on one-time sales, introducing subscription models requires additional systems and processes that work alongside existing infrastructure without disrupting the customer experience. Regardless of whether a new platform becomes the consolidated billing and subscription hub or simply feeds data into legacy systems, interoperability is essential, extending to customer and product master data, which must be synchronized or centrally managed to ensure a seamless subscriber journey.

Unlike one-time sales, which change infrequently and rely on relatively static product lists, subscription and digital product models demand frequent updates to pricing, bundling and catalogs that require both flexibility and simplicity. Effective subscription management must move beyond flat fees to include usage- or consumption-based pricing, where charges depend on actual consumption (e.g., number of transactions) and can better balance risk between buyer and seller. These models often involve complex formulas with tiered pricing triggered by volume thresholds, as well as multi-attribute pricing that factors in variables such as time, geography, buyer characteristics and product or service combinations.

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. Usage-based pricing can seem consumer-friendly, but it creates uncertainty since charges vary and are hard to predict in advance. Costs may come from transactions, credit card swipes or cloud storage usage. Telecom providers highlight this challenge—once itemizing every call, many shifted to unlimited or block models to simplify billing. Unlike flat fees, usage pricing requires effective forecasting to help providers and customers anticipate charges, validate invoices, manage budgets, predict churn and support revenue planning. Yet this capability is often missing in subscription systems.

Subscription pricing significantly impacts revenue recognition, since most revenue is realized in the future and only upon qualifying events, such as delivery, payment or service milestones. While ERP systems can handle accounting, the events driving recognition are better managed in subscription platforms where advanced applications can compute adjustments from usage data and events, generate sub-ledger entries and seamlessly transfer them to the general ledger.

Data mediation is often required for usage transactions, since raw data comes from multiple sources in varying formats. The process involves normalizing and aggregating data to the level needed for pricing. With high volumes, pre-aggregation and rolling pricing may be used, with the option to reprice if thresholds or cumulative tiers are triggered. In some cases, usage may be pre-priced outside of the system and tagged to bypass internal pricing. These variations reflect common real-world use cases.

A key but often overlooked need in subscription management is properly accounting for revenue owed to partners who provide complementary products or services within a subscribed offering. Partnerships today go beyond traditional reseller models, with enterprises increasingly leveraging ecosystems to bundle offerings and compete more effectively without building everything in-house—shifting the mantra from “build or buy” to “build, buy or partner.” These ecosystems create accounting complexities, such as calculating commissions, markups or allocating bundle costs across third parties. Real-world examples include gyms bundling nutrition services, rental car firms leasing fleets or travel companies paying commissions to partners like airlines and hotels. As partner ecosystems expand, enterprises must evolve beyond back-office accounting to support complex revenue allocation formulas tied directly to the pricing models used for customer charges.

To improve efficiency and profitability insight, revenue allocations to third parties should be managed as the mirror of payments received, with contracts capturing not only product and service terms but also revenue-sharing or royalty obligations. Contract management is, therefore, a key component of subscription management, ensuring that any changes to orders, plans or terms are executed seamlessly with proper proration, adjustments or refunds.

Today’s subscription management systems must integrate seamlessly with existing customer, product, pricing and vendor data, ensuring updates to contracts or orders flow quickly into billing, receivables, payables and the general ledger for accurate revenue recognition. Effective contract management supports seamless changes with proper proration, adjustments or refunds, while billing, payments and collections also require tight integration. Intelligent automation and alerts are essential to minimize manual intervention, resolve issues and deliver a frictionless experience for subscribers.

While automation is the goal, reporting remains essential for auditing and insight. Reporting needs fall into two categories: operational and analytical. Operational reporting focuses on detailed transaction-level data for validation and audit, often drawn directly from stored data with minimal filtering, and can be scheduled for delivery in formats like CSV or print. Analytical reporting, by contrast, aggregates and filters data to reveal customer behavior and staff performance, typically presented through dashboards, drillable tables or integrated 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 like pricing optimization and bundle recommendations has been slower, software providers recognize that non-digital-native enterprises are seeking to supplement one-time sales with subscription and usage models, while even digital-first firms are exploring new physical products to complement digital services.

Enterprises should seek subscription platforms that not only meet current needs but also scale for the future. Current solutions are increasingly leveraging predictive and generative AI to streamline operations, reduce manual collections with smarter payment strategies and enhance productivity through assistant features, while integrating seamlessly with existing systems to ensure smooth billing, orders and payments. Platforms must also support diverse pricing models, partner ecosystems and complementary offerings natively, enabling easy testing and scaling of new products and services. By combining automation, analytics, and flexibility, the right platform helps enterprises improve customer engagement, predict churn, forecast revenue, stay compliant, and drive long-term profitability.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for 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 15 software providers offering products to address key elements of subscription management as we define it: AdvantageCS, Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargebee, Cleverbridge, Gotransverse, keylight, LogiSense, OneBill, Oracle, Recurly, 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.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for 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 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 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 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 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 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

Subscription management 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, artificial intelligence (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 and Gotransverse in the Exemplary quadrant, while Aria Systems, keylight and SAP were categorized as Innovative. Chargebee, OneBill and Recurly were placed in the Assurance quadrant, while Stripe, AdvantageCS LogiSense and Cleverbridge 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, BillingPlatform and Oracle 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 keylight for Manageability. Leaders were distinguished by the breadth of subscription management functions, scalability, adaptability to enterprise needs and depth of integration and customization, 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 Gotransverse 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 management 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 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 four, Salesforce in two and Gotransverse and keylight in one category.

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, Gotransverse, 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 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 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 (15%), Adaptability (15%) 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 Gotransverse. 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 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 Subscription Management Guide, providers should:

• Support the ability to rate and price using many different pricing models, including one-time, subscription, usage and milestone or event-based
• Support both B2B and B2C customers
• Be able to generate billing schedules for future billing
• 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 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 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.”