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 Subscription Billing: 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 billing, changing how businesses operate and how customers
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. 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—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. 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:
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.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of subscription billing 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 subscription billing 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 Subscription Billing 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:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
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 subscription billing, 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 subscription billing 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.