Billing is more than a back-office task or simple invoicing tool; it’s a critical strategic lever to drive growth, enhance agility, and foster customer trust. Agile billing solutions enable companies to approach pricing with creativity, package offerings flexibly, and quickly adapt to market changes, transforming a potential pain point into a significant competitive advantage.

The challenge lies in navigating a crowded market that caters variously to SaaS billing and/or recurring billing software, usage billing and metered billing, dynamic and hybrid pricing models, and many other approaches, across a range of market segments and industries.

MGI MarketLens™ reports help companies better understand the relative positioning of technology suppliers within markets, simplify and accelerate solution evaluations, reduce risks, and optimize costs. Each MarketLens maps suppliers against a two-dimensional system of coordinates.

MGI MarketLens help buyers construct a shortlist of potential suppliers, compare an incumbent billing system with alternatives, and understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of solutions; it also gives vendors a tool for benchmarking their performance vs direct peers and the broader market.

This MarketLens™ report maps 35 leading MGI 360 Rated™ agile billing software solutions by comparing each vendor’s agility against its ability to handle complexity:

Given the diversity and domain experience of agile billing software solutions rated in the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide, it is critical to identify suppliers whose ideal use cases and experience match your organization’s specific requirements. The options range from broad horizontal solutions like Stripe Billing to highly focused solutions addressing a narrower industry/geography/technology stack (e.g., Cleeng or Evergent for D2C sports and entertainment streaming). Many are standalone organizations and quite a few are captive to a larger company that includes a billing software capability as part of its product portfolio. MGI MarketLens™ reports help users narrow the market to the suppliers that fit their specific market segment, agility, complexity, and volume requirements.

Agile Billing Vendors Under Coverage

The Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide provides ratings and analysis of the fifty most significant suppliers of agile billing software solutions. It includes MGI 360 Ratings™ of 35 suppliers and analysis of 15 honorable mention vendors. According to MGI Research, these are the most significant solutions and suppliers in the market today. Only the top vendors are included in this report. MGI 360 Ratings are calculated via a rigorous quantitative rating (scored 0-100). MGI 360 Rated™ suppliers are also given a letter grade based on quartile rating results, as well as a qualitative analyst outlook (positive, neutral, or negative).

The 35 vendors receiving full 360 Ratings and letter grades are: Aptitude, BillingPlatform, Binary Stream, BluLogix, Certinia, Chargebee, Cleeng, CSG, Evergent, Good Sign, Gotransverse, JustOn, LogiSense, m3ter, Maxio, Metronome, Monetize360, MonetizeNow, OneBill, Opencell, Oracle, Oracle NetSuite, Ordway, Recurly, RecVue, Rev.io, Sage Intacct, Salesforce, SAP, Stax Bill, Stripe, Subskribe, Workday, Zoho, and Zuora.

The 15 suppliers receiving honorable mention, but not rated for this report, are: Amberflo, Amdocs, Billsby, ChargeOver, DigitalRoute, Frisbii, HubSpot, Lago, MasterCard, Nitrobox, Nue.io, Orb, Paddle, Zenskar, and Zone & Co.

MGI Research tracks approximately 30 more vendors in this space and reserves the right to publish ratings and analyses on select vendors as deemed worthy and appropriate.

What is Agile Billing?

Billing solutions support the quote-to-cash process and enable an organization to maintain complex product, price, offer, and customer hierarchies. MGI Research defines agile billing as billing solutions that are inherently intelligent and versatile in the way they are designed, implemented, and operated. The UX is modern and intuitive, making it much easier for a business user to manage and run the system. The solution can integrate with other sophisticated agile monetization tools and operate with minimal ongoing maintenance. Most, but not all, agile billing solutions are cloud-based and are applicable to a wide range of industries and use cases. Agile billing is a key element of the agile monetization platform.

Billing is at the core of pricing, packaging, and the customer experience. Done right, it can delight customers and burnish a positive brand experience. Done poorly, it damages customer, partner, and investor trust and even puts the business at risk. Unlike most technology investments, billing solutions can directly impact revenue growth, profitability, and competitive standing. For buyers, getting the right match between a billing system’s architecture and capabilities and its common use cases is essential to business success.

No organization wants to find itself limited in its business choices because its billing system cannot adequately support the desired business model. Finding the right solution fit for particular requirements makes the difference between smooth billing and project success, or customer losses, revenue shortfalls, and project failure.

This guide aims to inform anyone interested in billing – prospective buyers, customers, partners, investors – about the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ideal fit for each of the 50 leading vendors in agile billing.

Agile Billing Top 25 – Why These Companies?

While MGI Research tracks hundreds of billing software suppliers, only 50 software vendors were selected for this report. These vendors are among the most consequential agile billing suppliers in the market and merit the attention of buyers, partners, and investors. This guide covers solutions supporting a wide spectrum of pricing and business models – like subscription billing, usage billing, hybrid models, etc. MGI’s survey work and research indicate customers typically (but not always) require a solution to support a range of pricing and business models and generally do not want to be locked into a single business model. As such, the solutions rated include relatively simple subscription billing tools, vertical-specific solutions, and highly sophisticated enterprise systems that can model and bill for virtually any conceivable business model.

The inclusion criteria for the Agile Billing Top 50 are based on factors such as the breadth and depth of the billing solution and its appeal to a broad audience across industries, geographies, stages of company evolution, breadth and depth of support for various business models, pricing approaches, and use cases. Company visibility, funding, and the profile of its management team and customers are also contributing factors. Typical criteria for inclusion may consist of one or more of the following (partial list):

  • Market visibility: The company meets one or more of the following characteristics: above-average growth, often included in longlists and shortlists of buyer evaluations, large installed base, and/or most MGI clients express interest in the company or mention them in analyst calls.
  • Innovation: The product has unique capabilities and the potential to disrupt the market – buyers should be aware of this product/company, even if it is not a fit for them today. Having AI-based capabilities and features is important, but not the only part of innovation that MGI considers.
  • Solution strength: Breadth and depth of solution, support for various business models and use cases, and the supplier’s ability to help customers implement and gain value from the solution.
  • Demonstrated success: Most, but not all, vendors covered are able to provide MGI with reference customers and partners to interview. Independent of the provision of vendor references (or lack thereof), MGI conducts its own interviews and field research on customers, partners, and investors.

The MGI 360 Rating methodology is quantitative in nature with a tough, nonlinear grading scale. Any vendor among the 35 rated suppliers is, in our view, important and impactful, regardless of the absolute score. The 15 companies receiving honorable mention also merit user attention and may or may not receive full 360 Ratings in future evaluation cycles. Vendors are not excluded uniquely based on size (e.g., revenue or customer count below any threshold) or willingness to participate in the research process.

About MGI MarketLens™ Reports

The agile billing market is highly fragmented – while some solutions look similar on the surface, they address completely different use cases and buyer personas. MGI MarketLens™ charts plot suppliers using a pair of key coordinates to shed light on the variations among solutions in each market. They help prospective buyers, investors, and partners see where products align relative to core requirements.

There are four types of MGI MarketLens™ charts:

  1. Solution Strength vs. Go-to-Market Strength: Solution Strength represents a supplier’s MGI 360™ Product score, while Go-to-Market Strength is a composite of the supplier’s MGI 360™ Management, Channels, Strategy, and Finance scores.
  2. Complexity vs. Agility: Complexity refers to a solution’s ability to handle complex billing scenarios, while agility refers to a solution’s flexibility to deploy new pricing and billing strategies and introduce changes quickly.
  3. Volume vs. Agility: Agility refers to a solution’s flexibility to deploy new pricing and billing strategies and introduce changes quickly, while volume refers to the volume of billing transactions a solution can handle.
  4. Complexity vs. Volume: Complexity refers to a solution’s ability to handle complex billing scenarios, while volume refers to the volume of billing transactions a solution can handle.

MGI Research defines agility, complexity, and volume as follows. More detailed definitions can be found in the full report.

AGILITY: Billing Agility (BA) describes the flexibility to quickly configure and test new pricing mechanisms and introduce changes as dictated by market conditions. Lack of agility results in long launch cycles, difficulty, or inability to introduce new pricing mechanisms within a window of opportunity, and often translates into loss of market share and significant competitive disadvantage. BA can be measured as a composite of its three primary dimensions: Business, IT, and Product Agility. See the full report for definitions of Business, IT, and Product Agility.

COMPLEXITY: MGI assigns a relative score of Billing Complexity (BC) on a scale of 0 to 100 to what is the most likely (not the most complex) use case a supplier can tackle with ease. BC measurement should be synthesized based on numerous factors that reflect both the current and potential complexity of a business. Examples of such factors include:

  • Product Complexity: describes the various capabilities of a standalone product, fixed subscription, or complex suite of interdependent components, software, and services. The sale of kitchen knives through an e-commerce portal might represent the low end of the product complexity spectrum, while the high end of the spectrum might include a programmatic relationship to deliver and manage a fleet of commercial aircraft over many years.
  • Pricing Complexity: the number of different pricing models and attributes that require support now and in the near-to-midterm future; e.g., simple subscriptions, usage and other metered approaches, outcome-based pricing, etc. • Billing Attributes Complexity: how many billing and metering attributes need to be supported; e.g., prepaid vs post-paid, volume purchasing agreements and commitments, peak-vs-off-peak pricing, etc.
  • Channel Complexity: how product catalog, pricing, and discounting discipline can be maintained when a product is sold through a channel.
  • See the full report for more examples.

VOLUME: MGI Research defines Billing Volume (BV) as comprised of a range of billing events that can impact customer charges or support any corporate function where billing information is required as the source of truth. These include but are not limited to: invoices generated, account changes and amendments, GL transactions posted, billing reports generated, metered (measured) system events that can, in individual or aggregated form, translate into customer charges, API calls, customer statements generated, internal billing reports produced, and a number of other examples. For example, a customer may generate millions of transactions per month but only receive one consolidated invoice. The BV metric is not a proxy for complexity, but a relative indicator of a system’s ability to scale with large volumes of events and transactions within a defined time period. The window of measurement is an important factor of assessing Billing System Velocity and any presentation of processed volume should be accompanied by the processing window: second, hour, day, month, year. Some billing software suppliers also provide the maximum speed indication by sharing actual volume of transactions processed within the shortest possible processing window. These should be from actual accounts willing to act as confidential references and not just theoretical values or results of a lab test, which could be useful as a data point but cannot support purchasing decisions. MGI classifies BV in terms of four categories:

  • Hyperscale – From 100 million to 1 billion+ billing events daily
  • Enterprise – From 10 million to 100 million billing events per day
  • Midmarket – From 10,000 to 10 million billing events per day
  • SmallBiz – Anything below 10,000 billing events per day

BV takes into consideration both batch and real-time volumes to account for different billing system deployment methods and operational windows. Some companies operate billing systems only within a short cycle and some operate it continuously.  Billing Volume alone does not determine if a product fits into a specific segment of the market. It is the combination of volume, complexity, installed base and use case supported that is a more deterministic indicator of the specific market segment. Within MGI Research MarketLens graphs, BV is measured on a relative scale of 1-100.

For more on these vendors, the agile billing market, and MGI 360 Ratings, get the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide.

There are 3 additional MGI MarketLens™ reports for this specific group of vendors including:

SPEAK TO AN ANALYST: Organizations looking for additional support in crafting an evaluation strategy and conducting an independent assessment of potential suppliers should contact MGI Research here.

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MGI Research clients can download the Agile Billing Agility vs. Complexity MarketLens™ below.