ISG Buyers Guide for B2B Subscription Management in 2025 Classifies and Rates Software Providers

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The B2B Subscription Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

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. 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. 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.

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
• 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.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of B2B subscription management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating B2B subscription management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for B2B Subscription Management in 2025 finds Zuora first on the list, followed by Oracle and BillingPlatform.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Zuora.
• Oracle.
• BillingPlatform.
  
  

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Zuora.
• Oracle.
• Conga.
  
  

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Zuora, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• Oracle in six categories.
• BillingPlatform in five categories.
• Conga and Salesforce in two categories.
  
  

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle B2B subscription management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our B2B subscription management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.