Piano vs Zuora vs Omeda

Omeda offers full service paid subscription management and billing for both digital and print subscriptions. Our solution supports multiple revenue and pricing models, diverse pricing, product bundles and multiple currencies, so you can customize exactly to the needs of your brand.   

But Omeda doesn’t just help you manage payments. We combine subscription management with a native CDP and marketing automation so you can grow your audience and reach your revenue goals.  

Our full-service solution makes it easier and cheaper to grow and monetize your audience. Subscriber and payment data flows to our customer data platform immediately and updates in real time, where it can be queried and added to customer segments. The CDP takes in first-party data from every touchpoint, standardizes and stores it in one place indefinitely. Each subscriber’s data is stored under one persistent customer ID.  

This ID is layered above personal information, so that someone’s activity across every channel and device — whether it’s under their work and personal email addresses, mobile and laptop browser cookies, website activity and mailing addresses — are all connected to one record.  

Right away, your team gets the insights they need to target subscribers and onsite visitors  with offers, upsells and content recommendations based on their individual browsing or purchase history. Reach your audience with the right message at the right time — no time-consuming transfers required!  

Piano has a native data management platform (DMP), but not a CDP. While DMPs provide useful audience insights, they have distinct limitations that will keep you from fully activating and monetizing your subscriber base. DMPs typically only take in third-party data then store it for a short period of time, whereas CDPs take in all audience data and store it indefinitely. So Piano users won’t be able to see how their subscribers are engaging across every channel — or use that to inform their strategy.  

Piano also has several on-site targeting and personalization features that rely on underlying audience data. But because Piano doesn’t create a single audience view, users will need to perform additional data transfers to make sure that their targeting isn’t distorted by incomplete profile information.  

Zuora offers subscription management, revenue recognition and monetization, but it lacks a CDP and native email and marketing automation. This means that companies won’t be able to use it to create subscription and payment recovery emails, or add payments to a subscriber’s record, without setting up extra integrations.  

With 40+ years in publishing, Omeda is purpose-built to help media companies grow, inspire and drive revenue from their audiences. Omeda’s leaders come from the B2B and consumer media space and use their first-hand experience to give clients the most relevant industry-specific advice. They’ve experienced the same challenges as their clients — and they design the product specifically to meet those needs. Headquartered in Chicago, Omeda is also able to provide hands-on support for US-based clients. 

While Piano provides consulting services, their offerings are geared more toward product launches and also require an additional cost. As an European based company, they also have less resources to support American clients in real time. So if you’re based in the US, you may not receive the personalized support with Piano that you might with another platform.  

Zuora’s solutions have a wide appeal across manufacturing, tech, and media. But the Zuora team doesn’t have a media-centric team that can help clients with industry-specific questions.  

Omeda is a fully customizable solution that emphasizes onboarding, training and ongoing support. We partner with clients one-on-one to set up the APIs, integrations and custom use cases they need to reach their audience growth goals. From there, our client success team is always available to help clients master the platform and drive revenue. This is available for every client as part of the standard Omeda experience.  

Piano offers strategic services covering conversion, monetization and product strategy for an additional cost. If you’re on a tight budget, this may keep you from making the most of the Piano platform.  

Although Zuora offers a named support engineer for certain accounts, reviewers have mentioned difficulties with implementing and onboarding, as well as connecting it with the rest of their stack. 

Omeda’s integrated database gives your team a single view of each subscriber across every channel. So you can view each subscriber’s activity alongside their engagement across your website, email, ads, and print and online events, to see what content and messaging generate the most income.   

Omeda also provides robust financial reporting: Paid and controlled reporting is stored on one database, giving you a real-time and historical picture of your audience. Reports include in-depth renewal percentage, expire and auto-renewal analysis, paid audit reporting, a full financial reporting package, and more.  

While Piano has real-time reporting, its suite has shortcomings that could create unnecessary busywork and lengthen your time to follow up. Since it’s connected to a DMP rather than a CDP, Piano users must take additional steps to connect someone’s subscription and payment records with the rest of their profile.  

Because Zuora’s not connected to a CDP or email platform, you can’t view your subscription reports in the context of your broader audience growth and engagement efforts. So you’ll need to transfer your subscription data to another tool to really evaluate your conversion funnel and audience engagement strategy.  

Omeda and Piano each help customers deliver more customized experiences for their audiences. Omeda offers content recommendations, on-site personalizations and renewal reminders, while Piano offers product and content recommendations, targeted promotions and newsletter sign-up forms.   

However, targeting is only as effective as the data it’s built on. On Omeda, each customer’s profile includes every interaction from every channel. Incoming data is verified, standardized and cleared to duplicates, so you can always trust that your customer profiles are complete, current and correct. 

Since Piano’s not connected to a CDP, users will need to use a third-party tool to unify, validate, and remove dupes from their audience profiles to be sure that they will reach the right people with the right offers. Zuora does not offer on-site targeting.  

Omeda’s paywalls (also called meters), gated content and subscription-based services help publishers drive growth and income from their content. For best results, clients can target meters at specific audiences (i.e., only non-subscribers that have previously read 3+ articles about the article’s topic will see the meter). They can view each meter’s clicks, impressions and conversions in real time, then adjust targeting or messaging accordingly.  

Since Omeda’s connected to a CDP, every form submission and payment is automatically added to the subscriber’s system of record. From there, clients can use our native email and marketing automation solution to send confirmation, payment or reminder emails.

Piano also offers the ability to provide premium content, but it’s unclear what kind of analytics they offer specifically for paywall performance. Zuora does not offer meters. So Zuora users will need to invest in third-party services, and transfer payment data between platforms, in order to implement paywalls and monetize their content.  

Omeda’s subscription management, email and marketing automation and subscription management solutions are offered under one solution. Piano and Zuora are each organized into several apps. To get everything that Omeda offers through Piano or Zuora, you may need to pay for each of those applications separately. This organization could complicate your workflows, make it more difficult to manage your audience tech costs, and anticipate future spending.    

Omeda is the only tool with a native CDP, marketing automation and subscription management capabilities. It’s designed specifically for media organizations, professional creators or any company with a large audience that they’re engaging with content.  

For those brands, Omeda’s all-in-one audience marketing platform is more affordable and effective than solutions without the data management or cross-channel marketing tools necessary to deliver personalized content and campaigns.   

Zuora’s feature slate is well-suited for many industries, but it lacks the content metering, data unification and omni-channel marketing features that media companies need to reach their subscriber base.