This MGI 360 Rating™ and accompanying MarketLens™ are designed to help buyers, suppliers, and investors assess the product functionality, management teams, channel breadth, marketing strategy, and financial positioning of Salesforce‘s agile billing software tool.
We update the MGI 360 Rating of Salesforce in Agile Billing to 53 and a Neutral Analyst Outlook. This rating focuses on Salesforce Billing, which is part of the Salesforce Revenue Cloud suite and was originally introduced to capitalize on the success of Salesforce CPQ, one of the mostly widely used CPQ products on the market. By contrast, Salesforce Billing has a smaller installed base and has demonstrated mixed customer satisfaction. Customers give positive marks to the CRM integration, but dislike the time and cost to implement, its limited capabilities, and the data model. Its sweet spot is smaller organizations with low-complexity requirements and low-to-medium billing volumes. As companies scale, they often seek more sophisticated options. Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced and Revenue Cloud Billing are ambitious replacements of the original CPQ and Billing products, significantly expanded in scope, capability, depth, and use cases, potentially addressing more sophisticated billing requirements.
*This unlabeled Go-to-Market Strength vs. Solution Strength MarketLens highlights how agile billing vendors, including Salesforce, compare with one another across a combination of key factors. Salesforce’s go-to-market and solution strength are broken down in depth in the report. A fully labeled version of this MarketLens can be found inside the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide.
About Salesforce
Salesforce is the leading global provider of cloud enterprise software. The company is best known for its core functionality in the CRM space. The company has a broad product line that also covers Service Desk, Analytics, Integration Middleware and other technologies. In 2024 Salesforce made a significant pivot to Agent-based AI approaches – a promising initiative with mixed results so far. Salesforce continues to grow rapidly and today is the second largest enterprise applications vendor in the world.
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 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 Are MGI 360 Ratings?
MGI 360 Ratings™ are a comprehensive structured system for evaluating technology companies. The MGI 360 scores reflect analyst opinions based on a scale of 0 to 100, combined with an analyst outlook (Positive, Negative, or Neutral). The 360 Rating system is comprised of 149 unique data points across five pillars:
- PRODUCT: How strong is the product’s competitive position?
- MANAGEMENT: How competent and experienced is the management team?
- CHANNELS: Does the company have a sales capability and channels needed to bring products to market?
- STRATEGY: Does the company have a realistic view of the opportunity and a compelling strategy for success?
- FINANCE: Is the company growing and profitable?
360 Ratings in Agile Billing condense hours of research and customer references into simple, easy-to-understand ratings and recommendations to clearly demonstrate strengths, weaknesses, and differences among billing software vendors. All 360 Ratings in agile billing are available in the Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide.
What are 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:
Go-to-Market Strength vs. Solution 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.
Agility vs. Complexity: 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.
Agility vs. Volume: 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.
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.
Learn More
MGI clients can download the report below to find out how Salesforce compares to peer averages in the agile billing market.
NOT AN MGI CLIENT? Click here to schedule an inquiry.
