Executive Summary

Subscription Platforms

The era of subscriptions has fundamentally reshaped how platforms operate and how users engage with them across industries. Platforms are moving beyond traditional ownership models, embracing digital-first strategies and offering digital services that enhance or complement physical products. Users now expect flexible options—whether through subscriptions, consumption-based pricing or on-demand access—instead of one-time purchases. Combined with the growing preference to interact on their own terms via digital marketplaces, self-service portals or even voice and text, today’s platform-driven landscape looks 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 solutions must also manage complex payment flows, allocate revenue across partners and asset owners, and ensure strong receivables, cash flow and collections capabilities. The subscription platforms that support subscription and billing processes across B2B and B2C have an extra level of requirements to ensure they can support interoperability with other processes and systems.

Subscriptions are not new—newspapers and magazines adopted the model decades ago, and Netflix first launched by offering DVD rentals on a flat monthly fee—but digital platforms and services like SaaS and mobile apps accelerated their widespread adoption. From HBO and Spotify to fitness apps and streaming platforms, subscriptions are now standard across industries, giving users predictable access for a set period. This shift has made subscriptions a broadly accepted pricing model, enabling consumers to spread expenses over time while platforms benefit from recurring, reliable revenue tied to ongoing usage or contracts.

Platforms built on or heavily reliant on subscription models face the challenge of delivering seamless, self-service experiences that let users easily start, manage or modify their plans at scale. While some platforms serve high volumes of individual consumers and others handle more complex, negotiated subscriptions across multiple products or services, the priority remains the same: integrate subscription models smoothly alongside traditional one-time purchases. To succeed, platforms must avoid pitfalls like duplicate billing, inconsistent payment methods, or fragmented checkout flows, ensuring a consistent and frictionless subscriber experience.

Effective subscription platforms must support a wide range of business models and use cases, either through built-in features or seamless integration with ERP, CRM and other third-party systems. For organizations that have traditionally relied on one-time sales, adding subscriptions often requires new processes that work alongside existing infrastructure without disrupting the user experience. Whether the platform serves as the central hub for billing and subscriptions or connects into legacy systems, interoperability is critical—especially in synchronizing customer and product data to ensure a smooth, consistent subscriber journey.

Unlike one-time sales, which are relatively static and rarely change, subscription platforms must constantly update pricing, bundles and catalogs—requiring both flexibility and simplicity. Effective subscription management goes beyond flat fees to support usage- or consumption-based pricing, where charges depend on actual activity (such as transactions or usage volume) and help balance value between the user and the provider. These models can include tiered pricing triggered by thresholds as well as multi-attribute pricing that accounts for factors like time, location, user profile or bundled product and service combinations.

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. Usage-based pricing can appear attractive on subscription platforms but often creates uncertainty, as charges fluctuate and are difficult for users to predict in advance. Costs may stem from activities like data usage, transactions or storage consumption, echoing the challenges telecom providers once faced when itemizing every call before moving to block or unlimited plans for simplicity. Unlike flat fees, usage-based models require strong forecasting tools to help anticipate charges for both businesses and subscribers while also helping businesses validate invoices, manage budgets, reduce churn risk and support revenue planning—yet many subscription systems still lack these capabilities.

Subscription pricing has a major impact on revenue recognition, since most revenue is realized over time and only upon qualifying events like service delivery, payment or milestones. While ERP systems manage the accounting, subscription platforms are better suited to track and manage the recognition events. Advanced capabilities can calculate adjustments from usage data, generate sub-ledger entries and seamlessly transfer them into the general ledger—ensuring accuracy, compliance and efficiency in financial reporting.

Subscription platforms often require data mediation for usage-based transactions, since raw data typically comes from multiple sources in different formats. This involves normalizing and aggregating the data to the level needed for pricing. At scale, pre-aggregation and rolling pricing may be applied, with the ability to re-price if thresholds or cumulative tiers are reached. In some cases, usage may be pre-priced externally and tagged to bypass internal pricing logic. These variations reflect the practical realities of managing usage data in real-world subscription scenarios.

An often-overlooked requirement in subscription platforms is properly accounting for revenue owed to partners who provide complementary products or services within bundled offerings. Partnerships now extend well beyond traditional reseller models, as platforms increasingly rely on ecosystems to combine offerings and compete more effectively without building everything in-house—shifting from “build or buy” to “build, buy, or partner.” This creates accounting complexities such as calculating commissions, applying markups or allocating bundle costs across multiple parties. Real-world examples include gyms bundling nutrition services, rental companies leasing fleets or travel platforms sharing revenue with airlines and hotels. As ecosystems grow, platforms must move beyond basic back-office accounting to support complex revenue allocation formulas tied directly to the pricing models used for customer charges.

To improve efficiency and gain clearer insight into profitability, subscription platforms should manage revenue allocations to partners as the mirror of payments received, with contracts detailing not only product and service terms but also revenue-sharing or royalty obligations. Strong contract management is therefore essential, ensuring that any changes to orders, plans or terms are applied seamlessly, with accurate proration, adjustments or refunds.

Modern subscription management platforms must integrate seamlessly with customer, product, pricing and partner data so that updates to contracts or orders flow directly into billing, receivables, payables and the general ledger for accurate revenue recognition. Intelligent automation and proactive alerts are critical to reducing manual effort, resolving issues quickly and delivering subscribers a seamless, frictionless experience.

While automation is the goal, reporting remains essential for both auditing and insight. Subscription platforms typically require two types of reporting: operational and analytical. Operational reporting delivers detailed transaction-level data for validation and compliance, often pulled directly from stored records with minimal filtering and distributed in formats like CSV or print. Analytical reporting, on the other hand, aggregates and filters data to uncover trends in customer behavior and performance, usually presented through dashboards, drillable tables or integrations with business intelligence (BI) tools and data warehouses.

Subscription management platforms are increasingly embedding artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics and predictive tools, such as recommending collection strategies for overdue accounts or detecting passive churn caused by 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 businesses are supplementing one-time sales with subscription and usage models, while even digital-first companies are exploring ways to add physical products that complement their digital services.

Enterprises need subscription platforms that work for today while scaling for tomorrow. The best solutions use 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 Subscription Platforms evaluates software providers and products that support integration, intelligent workflow and processes and make critical processes available as a service that can be accessed via APIs. The research evaluates key areas as part of the capability model, including the following:

• Managing Subscriptions
• Data Mediation
• Pricing and Rating Methods
• Payments In—Billing
• Payments Out—Revenue Allocation
• Payment Accepting Systems
• Contract/Order Management and Adjustment
• Bulk Updates
• Automation and Error Handling
• Operational Reporting
• Analytical Reporting

This research evaluates the following 17 software providers that offer products that address key elements of subscription platforms as we define it: AdvantageCS, Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargebee, Cleverbridge, Conga, Gotransverse, LogiSense, OneBill, Oracle, Recurly, RecVue, Salesforce, SAP, Stripe, 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.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Subscription Platforms 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 platform 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 platforms 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 platform 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 platform 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 platform 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 platforms are evolving rapidly as consumers shift to digital-first, usage-based, and ecosystem-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 improve 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 among subscription platforms, with Zuora topping the rankings across multiple categories. Classification places Zuora, Oracle, BillingPlatform, Salesforce and Gotransverse in the Exemplary quadrant of subscription platforms, while Aria Systems and SAP are categorized as Innovative. 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 for subscription platforms.

Product Experience Insights
Product Experience represented 80% of the overall evaluation for subscription platforms, 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 distinguished themselves through the breadth of B2B subscription platform capabilities, scalability, integration depth and configurability, making them best suited for enterprises seeking robust, flexible platforms.

Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience accounted for 20% of the overall evaluation of subscription platforms, 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, limiting enterprise confidence.

Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should treat subscription platforms as a strategic investment and balance the need for product capabilities with strong customer experience support. Buyers should prioritize providers that deliver breadth across key functionality while ensuring business processes and roles are addressed. 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 platform 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 three.

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, Conga, Gotransverse, 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: Aria Systems 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: 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, Chargebee, Cleverbridge, LogiSense, RecVue 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 platforms, 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 (25%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (20%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Oracle, Zuora, BillingPlatform and Salesforce 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 Platforms 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 Platforms Buyers Guide, providers should offer:

• a common data model shareable across functional areas
• common workflow and process management capabilities
• unified analytics and reporting
• a common AI framework
• unified data and process integration

These functions should be available on mobile and collaborative channels and should integrate with CRM, SFA, finance, HR and order systems to support management, operations, analysts and administrators in finance, HR, sales and IT roles.

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 platform 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.”