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 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
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:
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.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of 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 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 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:
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 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 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.