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 Platforms: 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 platforms operate and how users engage with them across industries. Platforms are moving
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:
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.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of subscription platforms 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 platforms 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 Platforms 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 platforms, 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 platforms 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.