Choosing the best economical option for B2B Subscription Management

One of our customers is using SaaSOptics for their day-to-day subscription management process in their company. The solution is flexible with their growing B2B SaaS business needs and helps them analyze their annual recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue churns, and deferred revenue. But they approached us to look for an economical alternative as the additional integration add-on charges were adding more financial burden on them.

We scanned our database of 150,000k applications to find software similar to SaaSOptics that offered subscription management features and reports like ARR, MRR, and deferred revenue. In addition to this, another requirement was that the alternative must have integrations with Mosaic, Salesforce, and QuickBooks.

Our platform recommended two software – ChargeBee and Stripe Billing which satisfied their use cases and integration requirements.

When should a customer choose ChargeBee?

When a customer wants a platform to automate and optimize the subscription billing and management of their SaaS and eCommerce businesses. Businesses can use Chargebee to experiment with usage-based, one-time, and recurring pricing models. They can set the billing frequency to get automatically paid from their customers.

Within the platform, users are also offered features such as checkout and customer self-service portal, SaaS metrics and reporting, custom email notifications, dunning management, and taxing and invoicing. Customers can also use it for organizing and running product promotions and discounts.

Integrations:

Integrates with more than 30+ payment gateways such as Stripe, Paypal, Braintree, Checkout.com, GoCardless, and Amazon Payments. Also integrates with Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, QuickBooks, and Shopify.

Pros:

1. Offers an extensive set of features automating recurring billing, invoicing, discount management, applying taxes, and customer communications.
2. Intuitive user interface.
3. The API is sleek and easy-to-use, perfect for establishing integrations as businesses continue to grow.
4. Chargebee offers users tons of integrations including 30+ payment gateways, shopping carts, e-commerce tools, analytics, and email marketing apps.

Cons:

1. Chargebee becomes expensive once you upgrade past their free plan.
2. Slow and ineffective responses from customer support.
3. Unclear documentation and technical challenges.
4. Customer payment needs that fall under a parent brand with numerous locations need billing separately. No functionality supporting a parent-child relationship.

Customers:

Freshworks, Study.com, Calendly, Doodle, ShareTribe

Pricing:

• Launch(up to 3 users): Free up to your first USD 100k in revenue
• Rise(up to 10 users): $249/billed annually includes USD 600K/yr revenue
• Scale(up to 25 users): $549/billed annually includes USD 1.2M/yr revenue
• Custom plan

Chargebee pricing

When should a customer choose Stripe Billing?

Stripe billing is a Stripe add-on to handle the recurring billing scenarios for Stripe payments. Stripe Billing fits in the middle of your order-to revenue workflow by connecting to your CRM, ERP, accounting, or other systems. Customers can use Stripe invoicing, another add-on to collect payments from existing customers, or share a payment link to sell a subscription without any developer effort.

Stripe billing supports designing and testing pricing plans, managing management, promotions, and trial periods. Stripe also accepts all major debit and credit card payments in 135+ currencies. If needed, Stripe can also enable 3D Secure for any payment.

Integrations:

Alipay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and lots of other platforms.

Pros:

1. Excellent support.
2. Super easy to set up and has an intuitive interface.
3. Ideal if you want to handle both one-time payments and recurring billing and you are already in the Stripe ecosystem.

Cons:

1. While Stripe has revolutionized payment processing, Stripe Billing is not as robust and feature-rich as competitors. It does not address many recurring payment challenges.
2. It is an add-on to Stripe payments and features like invoicing, deferred revenue recognition costs extra.

Customers:

Slack, Eero, MeetUp, and Wetransfer

Pricing:

• Starter: 0.5% on recurring payments
• Scale: 0.8% on recurring payments and one-time invoice payments.

Stripe billing pricing page

While ChargeBee and Stripe offered all required features and integrations, they turned out to be more expensive than SaaSOptics. ChargeBee provides a feature-rich suite for subscription billing and management, automating all the mundane tasks from financial collections to the recognition cycle which could be overkill to our customers.

The customer didn’t switch and decided to renew SaaSOptics. Though Zoho provided a more economic option in the pricing plans, the platform presented reviews about the Zapier integrations which prevented the customer from switching.

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