5 best SaaS billing software reviewed

Buyer’s Overview

An adaptable SaaS billing engine isn’t just a tool for finance—it’s a strategic advantage.

In a recent webinar where we hosted Mountu Jinwala, who built billing systems for Netflix and eBay, he emphasizes:

At Zenskar, we recognize the challenges caused by inefficiencies in SaaS billing. Drawing from our founders' experiences building in-house billing systems twice, this buyer’s guide dives deep into the challenges of billing for SaaS companies and how to solve them, how to choose the best SaaS billing software, and a comparative analysis of five major vendors.

1. Zenskar

Zenskar is ideal for B2B SaaS companies, both PLG and SLG, needing scalable, automated billing software. As long as you can describe your pricing in English, Zenskar can encode it to automate billing. It supports every imaginable subscription, usage-based pricing, and hybrid pricing model, including tiered, volume, milestone, dynamic pricing, custom sales contract, and more.

Zenskar’s USP is it decouples metering from pricing, allowing you to iterate on pricing without altering your metering setup, adjust your metering without impacting existing contracts, and configure vast flexibility with usage-based pricing.

Pricing:

Unlike competitors who charge a percentage of revenue, Zenskar’s pricing is not directly linked to your revenue. The exact quote depends on the complexity and scale of your revenue automation needs, so you only pay for what you need. 

While a free sandbox is available, the commitment-free pilot program is unmatched. The team will configure sample contracts, data flows, and invoices so you can see the platform live in action.

2. Stripe Billing

Stripe is suitable for B2C and eCommerce businesses with straightforward subscription models. However, setting up usage-based pricing or custom terms—like prepaid subscriptions with postpaid overages or matrix and tiered pricing—can be challenging with Stripe. Each custom pricing model typically requires separate product configurations, and since multiple products on a single invoice must use the same currency and billing interval (with a 20-product limit), billing quickly complicates. 

Pricing:

Stripe’s 0.7% fee on billing volume makes it costly as you scale. Additionally, invoicing and tax support are offered as paid add-ons. The self-driven sandbox requires technical expertise, making Stripe a developer-friendly billing platform.

3. Chargebee

Chargebee is ideal for eCommerce and B2C/B2B SaaS companies with simple subscription models. While it can handle one-time, flat/seat-based, and recurring billing, it has limitations in managing usage-based pricing scenarios, like milestone-based contracts. 

Pricing:

Chargebee's pricing can become expensive as your business scales. It starts at $599/month for up to $100k in monthly billing and then adds a 0.75% fee. While a free plan is available for startups with early traction, the cost can escalate due to add-ons. Furthermore, self-driven sandboxes are only available on the Performance and Enterprise plans.

4. Maxio

Maxio is best-suited for PLG SaaS companies with simple usage-based pricing models. It can handle simple usage-based models like tiered, stair-step, events-based, and metered billing. However, it requires engineering bandwidth to work with complex pricing. It only supports complex UBP scenarios like wallet-based transaction options and hybrid billing, limiting its scalability for sales-led SaaS companies.

Pricing:

Maxio's pricing model starts at $599/month for SaaS subscription billing with up to $100k monthly billing, after which overage fees apply. Add-ons like Account Receivables, Payments, and Metering are extra, significantly increasing costs and making it an expensive choice for many businesses. While it offers a sandbox for testing, this is only suitable for developers.

5. Zuora

Zuora is ideal for enterprise-grade PLG and SLG companies with a high volume of transactions. It supports various subscription, usage-based, and hybrid pricing models but faces limitations due to its legacy subscription-first structure. It also needs to work on inflexibility around custom payment plans though. The pricing changes require engineering bandwidth similar to Maxio, making it less adaptable to rapidly changing business needs. 

Price:

Zuora provides a 30-day free trial, but its robust functionalities come with a premium price tag. Hidden fees further complicate budgeting as businesses scale.

SaaS billing challenges and best practices to tackle them

SaaS billing complexities require implementing best practices to address them effectively.

1. Evolving SaaS pricing

Most legacy SaaS billing tools run on archaic architecture and often lack the flexibility to adapt to modern pricing strategies such as usage pricing, sales-led contracts, or new monetization approaches, limiting a SaaS business's revenue potential.

• Best practice: Value-based pricing supports long-term SaaS growth by ensuring customers are paying for the value received. Our co-founder, Saurabh Agrawal, caught up with Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, in a webinar, where he suggested:

It should also integrate with usage-tracking systems to automate billing for fluctuating consumption without disrupting day-to-day operations or increasing engineering overhead.

2. Aligning billing with your growth model

The requirements for a billing system differ significantly between product-led growth (PLG) and sales-led growth (SLG) models. A billing tool without self-serve capabilities that cannot handle a surge in customers or provide predictable software spend may hinder scalability for PLG companies. Conversely, a billing tool lacking integrations with CRM or support for complex contract configurations can disrupt the quote-to-cash process for SLG companies.

• Best practice: Mountu Jinwala, who built billing systems for Netflix and eBay, shared tips on aligning billing with growth in a webinar with our co-founders:

3. Managing multi-currency & global sales taxes

Some billing solutions struggle to keep up with evolving tax regulations, and managing global customers adds challenges like multi-currency setups.

• Best practice: A billing platform with built-in capabilities for regional tax compliance or integration with tax automation tools like Avalara. It should support multi-currency payments and real-time currency conversions as well.

4. Real-time reporting

Handling refunds, account credits, one-time payments, discounts, and cancellations can significantly impact the relationship between billing workflows and reporting on MRR and ARR. Delays in SaaS insights impair time-sensitive business decisions.

• Best practice: A billing system with real-time analytics to provide actionable insights into key SaaS metrics, such as cash flows, churn, and revenue trends, ensuring more informed decision-making.

5. Manual billing processes

If you manually manage various plans, billing cycles, and adjustments for upgrades or downgrades, there are likely delays and errors. Implementing sales programs like discounts, promotions, or coupons manually using a legacy system is also costly and labor-intensive.

• Best practice: A centrally managed and automated billing platform automates billing and sales programs by eliminating manual effort. 

6. Handling SaaS revenue recognition

Revenue recognition in compliance with standards like ASC 606 or IFRS 15 can be challenging if your billing system cannot distinguish between when products/services are billed and when they are delivered. Correctly accounting for revenue and recognizing it over the subscription term is essential for accurate financial reporting and investor confidence.

• Best practice:  A SaaS billing platform that automates revenue accounting by assigning transactions and recognizing revenue in real-time. The platform should maintain audit trails, support custom recognition rules, and generate audit-ready reports while adhering to ASC 606 and IFRS 15. Beyond that, it should provide insights into revenue patterns, unlocking the full benefits of SaaS billing software.

Must-have features in the best SaaS billing software

To help you supercharge your billing workflows, we’re sharing the top 9 things that you need to keep in mind when you set out to choose a SaaS billing system.

1. Stakeholders and their needs

Typically, most organizations have the following stakeholders involved in the quote-to-cash process:

• Sales
• Finance/account manager/customer success
• Collections
• Accounting
• Business management
• Product and tech

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It’s important to ensure that the billing system you select is solving the pain points that stakeholders in your organization are dealing with. ‍

1. Sales teams

Consider how sales teams contribute to the overall billing process, from contact management to potential points of engagement throughout the billing lifecycle. Most sales teams initiate the billing process by getting contacts into the system. Ensure that the billing system that you opt for also effortlessly syncs with the tools used by sales teams to create contracts and automatically retrieves contract data from those sources. The billing system’s interface needs to be simple and intuitive, with clear navigation and control options. It should provide a hassle-free billing experience for sales teams.‍

2. Finance/account manager/customer success teams

For the finance teams, account managers, and customer success executives, browsing through invoices and cross-checking them to ensure they are correct should be made easy. All the data from different internal systems needs to be pulled in correctly to the billing tool, empowering finance teams to effortlessly identify and resolve billing issues.

3. ‍Collections teams

Collections become a hassle for your teams, primarily when dealing with a sizable customer base or opting for non-auto charging mechanisms. Implementing a robust receivables system is crucial to prevent overdue accounts, streamline debt recovery processes, and enhance cash flow through automated payment reminders. Select a billing system that has a seamless process in place for sending out timely payment reminders, creating a proactive approach to streamline collections and minimize involuntary churn.

4. Accounting teams

Choose a billing system that supports advanced accounting needs. Each company uses accounting rules that are sometimes quite complex and differ in nuanced and subtle ways. The billing tool should automate the process of passing accounting entries, regardless of the complexity involved. Opt for a billing system equipped with a flexible and easy-to-configure accounting rule engine to meet your specific requirements. A billing tool that automatically generates accounting entries based on billing workflows eliminates the need for accounting teams to manually download data from various systems in the required formats. Additionally, a billing tool with the capability to automatically recognize revenue in accordance with regulations like ASC 606 and IFRS 15 would be highly beneficial for accounting teams in terms of financial reporting.

5. Business management teams

For effective business management, a billing tool should extend beyond basic tracking to equip teams with real-time or, at most, daily analytics on diverse metrics. This includes analytics derived from contract and revenue data such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), and churn metrics, along with data on user base growth, usage patterns, and trends. These insights will empower teams to identify growth opportunities, make strategic decisions, and manage financial performance with ease.

6. Product and tech teams

For companies with sizable customer bases, involving product and tech teams in the billing process is common. Billing tools should enable product and tech teams to easily automate interacting with contacts and sending usage data. In provisioning and entitlement cases, the billing system should accurately track and facilitate easy access to relevant data, including analytics on top of it. The billing tool should offer robust API integrations, allowing automated data exchange across diverse business systems and applications. Ideally, billing tools should provide APIs that are essential for customer and contract management, usage data transmission, entitlements, provisioning, and retrieving outputs such as invoices, monitoring data, and analytics. This functionality will not only automate internal workflows but also equip customers with timely reports and insights.

‍‍2. Integration requirements

Prioritize smooth connectivity, where every aspect of your billing system effortlessly integrates with the rest of your tech infrastructure. Look for capabilities that enable smooth integration with essential components, such as:

• CRM/CPQ
• Payments
• ERP
• Sales tax
• Metering/usage data
• Provisioning 

Integration with the tool of your choice is key, given how you have multiple internal dependencies and existing processes are built around those tools. 

1. ‍CRM/CPQ

Sales teams utilize Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) tools for a range of tasks that include managing their deal pipeline and creating quotes. In some companies, this data is manually entered into the billing tool due to the lack of integration between these tools. This leads to duplicate data entry, systems that are out of sync, and errors due to human intervention. To streamline this process, it's crucial to choose a billing tool that integrates with CRM and CPQ tools, ensuring accurate data retrieval and automating invoice generation, even for complex contracts.

2. ‍Payments

In the era of expanding digital payment choices, it is essential to provide customers with flexible payment options. Your billing system should smoothly integrate with various payment gateways to offer the variety of payment methods that exist today, ensuring a smooth transaction experience. Additionally, the billing tool should be capable of automating alerts for payment receipts, pending payments, failed payments, and expiring credit cards. Proactivity in communication enhances customer engagement and helps reduce the risk of customer turnover.

3. ERPs

Accurate financial reporting depends on seamless integration between billing tools and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Choose a billing tool that effortlessly syncs with your ERP, eliminating manual back-and-forth data handling. This saves a lot of manual effort from your accountants as well as back and forth with various teams to get the right data from your billing system into your ERP and eventually close your books on time. All the information needed to create journal entries related to your customers is present in your billing system. A seamless integration ensures this data flows into your ERP without manual intervention. 

4. ‍Sales tax

The integration of the billing system with specialized sales tax tools becomes a necessity, as it streamlines the complex task of sales tax calculation. A seamless integration reduces the potential for errors and ensures compliance with dynamic tax regulations and the accurate reporting of sales tax across various jurisdictions. 

5. ‍Metering/usage data

One way to reduce engineering bandwidth is to opt for a billing tool that integrates smoothly with multiple data sources that hold your metering data. This is because different methods of integration are useful in different situations. Quick uploads of CSV files are great for quickly getting started with a billing system. The manual entry of usage data using a web interface is useful for products where the usage is quite low and tracked manually. The billing system's ability to plug into different sources of data (such as your product database or your company’s data warehouse) helps you integrate your original source of data directly with billing without any effort from your engineering team. The billing system having APIs to send usage data is useful for an integration that is easier to maintain in the long run but demands more upfront engineering effort.

6. Provisioning 

Select a billing tool that seamlessly integrates with the provisioning process. This integration will ensure an accurate reflection of customer purchases from contracts in the billing system into your product systems. As services or products are provisioned or modified, the billing system should be able to send real-time updates, keeping your product’s provisioning system in sync with the contracts that your customers sign. 

3. Different billing models

You don’t want to be playing catch-up with the ever-evolving complexities in billing logic and pricing models. Your billing tool should be able to offer your teams the flexibility to experiment and switch between different pricing models as your product iterates and evolves over time. Select a billing tool that not only comes with capabilities to cater to your current needs and existing pricing models but is also able to automate pricing model experiments in the future. This allows you to explore different business models and usage meters to maximize revenue.

• Opt for a billing solution that has the capability to accommodate various pricing models. Be it one-time charges, recurring subscriptions, postpaid based on usage, prepaid with postpaid overages, prepaid with provisioning (requiring top-ups for credit depletion), or any combination thereof — choose a tool that effortlessly handles the complexity of your billing models. This is really important so that you never have to think about switching billing systems in the future as your pricing structures evolve.

• Billing systems that are not future-proof are in many ways rigid, slowing down your sales teams, limiting their ability to get creative with contracts, and eventually affecting your revenue goals. The billing system should empower sales teams with limitless pricing flexibility and contract configuration capabilities, fostering agility in strategy execution. 

4. Comprehensive reporting capabilities

The billing system should equip you with powerful reporting capabilities. This will help you gain actionable insights around churn rate, active subscriptions, usage aggregates, customer balances, revenue numbers, etc., ideally along with customer segmentation insights, empowering informed decisions. Moreover, Deloitte’s report further reveals that customers have also shown interest in receiving insights pertaining to their current and forecast usage as well as spending.

• The billing system you opt for should provide in-depth financial reports and tax summaries, offering a comprehensive overview of your business's fiscal health.
• Real-time reports of incoming cash and related revenue numbers will help you stay on top of your cash flow and plan ahead with ease. 

5. Self-serve functionalities

Billing systems with self-serve options are incredibly helpful in gaining better control over billing processes, streamlining operations, and reducing dependency on your internal teams. Evaluate how a billing tool saves you the costs associated with hiring a team to manage the billing and invoicing workflows.

• Self-serve functionalities that don't demand engineering intervention will help finance teams navigate billing complexities with ease, leading to increased productivity and minimizing operational challenges.
• These capabilities will also give financial operations teams and other stakeholders more time to enhance product features, meet service delivery benchmarks, and identify new customer service strategies.

‍6. Robust security measures

Minimizing the risk of data breaches should be a top priority for every business. Select a billing tool that is backed by robust security measures that are designed to safeguard your billing operations and customer data.

• Choose a tool that implements two-factor authentication, adding an extra layer of security to your billing processes. Implementing two-factor authentication for critical billing systems not only secures your organization's data but is also imperative for meeting your security compliance requirements.
• Ensure the billing system enforces stringent access controls, safeguards confidential customer data, and creates a secure billing environment for your business.

7. Efficient compliance management

Owing to the ever-changing compliance and regulatory environment, the billing system that you select should help you address the evolving dynamics of global regulations and the required standards for your industry.

• Consider the billing system's capability to handle the diverse landscape of tax regulations in global markets.
• Ensure the billing system excels in handling regulatory requirements like ASC 606 and IFRS 15 on revenue recognition and meets payment card industry standards.

8. Reliable customer support

If you ever run into a hitch managing your billing processes, quick and reliable customer support from the billing system will help you resolve issues with ease.

For a crucial system like your billing tool, having prompt and reliable support from the billing vendor is essential, particularly given that the quote-to-cash process engages various stakeholders within your organization and issues that arise are typically of higher criticality than usual. Without this support, internal team members tend to take on the role of customer support, aiding other stakeholders in overcoming obstacles they encounter in the process.

• Right from the point of simplifying implementation and the onboarding processes, billing systems should provide documentation, quick guides, and developer tips to facilitate a quick and efficient adoption.
• Responsive and dependable customer support via chat, calls, or emails is essential for receiving timely guidance and solutions, preventing disruptions, and ensuring streamlined billing workflows.

9. Global billing standards 

As you step into new markets, billing systems designed for international success will be crucial to embracing global business standards with ease.

• Firstly, it should provide multi-currency capability. For example, a software company expanding into Europe might price its products in euros for customers in Germany while offering them in pounds for customers in the UK. This not only attracts a global customer base but also supports competitive pricing strategies in international markets and minimizes currency exchange complexities.
• Along with ensuring accurate time zone logic, the billing system needs to use the correct decimal and thousand separators to ensure the customers are billed correctly — for the right amount, at the right time.
• Furthermore, ensuring global tax compliance is essential. The billing system should be equipped with integration capabilities, particularly with sales tax providers like Avalara. This integration empowers the system to adapt to various tax regulations across different regions, automatically applying the correct tax rates and handling tax calculations, such as VAT in Europe or GST in Australia, to ensure compliance and prevent legal issues.

Questions to ask vendors to choose the right SaaS billing software [checklist]

This checklist ensures you cover all critical aspects when evaluating SaaS billing software vendors.

Step into the future of SaaS billing with Zenskar

The SaaS billing software category is evolving, and most vendors in the market need to be more clunky or were built over a decade ago. 

At Zenskar, we believe in transforming billing for SaaS companies from a challenge into a catalyst for growth. We've built the most flexible SaaS billing software with advanced automation capabilities to cater to complex billing and custom pricing needs.

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As a result, globally leading SaaS companies turn to Zenskar to build a successful SaaS billing engine. Take an interactive product tour to see us in action. Or, book a free demo to see if Zenskar is the right fit for you.