Top 5 Tabs Alternatives Reviewed

Introduction

Tabs is an AI-powered revenue automation platform for B2B businesses. It offers contract ingestion, billing, receivables, payments, revenue recognition, and reporting.

This guide examines Tabs' key limitations and compares six alternatives: Zenskar, Chargebee, Maxio, Stripe Billing, and Zuora. Each Tabs alternative is evaluated based on O2C automation and ease of integration.

Top 5 Tabs alternatives and competitors

1. Tabs vs Zenskar

Zenskar is an AI-native Order-to-Cash platform, built ground-up to automate finance workflows with intelligent agents and human-in-the-loop reliability.

The software serves finance teams who are scaling fast, but don’t want to scale headcount just for revenue operations.

It automates the entire revenue workflow using intelligent agents, from ingesting contracts to generating invoices, syncing journal entries, and surfacing actionable insights.

2. Tabs vs Chargebee

Chargebee is a subscription management platform optimized for scaling B2B and B2C SaaS businesses. It offers strong automation for standard subscription workflows but lacks native usage-based and hybrid billing support, leading many companies to explore Chargebee alternatives that can handle more complex billing needs.

3. Tabs vs Maxio

Maxio, created through the 2022 merger of Chargify and SaaSOptics, still functions as two separate systems. Data between billing and revenue recognition doesn’t flow cleanly—usage, invoices, and payments often fail to sync, breaking revenue schedules. As a result, finance teams are stuck manually reconciling records and re-exporting data between the systems, pushing many to explore alternatives to Maxio.

4. Tabs vs Stripe Billing

Updating pricing or rolling out new pricing models on Stripe Billing often demands extensive coordination between sales, finance, and engineering teams. This slows down execution and makes it difficult to respond quickly to market changes, prompting many businesses to look for Stripe Billing alternatives that offer greater flexibility and speed.

5. Tabs vs Zuora

Zuora isn’t the perfect solution for every business. While it's an established platform for enterprise subscription billing, many growing businesses face challenges with its high pricing, complex implementation, and limitations around support for complex pricing models and contract structures, forcing users to seek Zuora alternatives.

5 common challenges with Tabs that finance teams face

1. Product-level limitations

Tabs treats each product as an atomic unit, creating limitations when dealing with contract-level features such as minimum commitments or cross-product credit applications. Features at the contract level are harder to implement and often require workarounds.

2. No native entitlements management

 Tabs lacks a native entitlements module, providing no way to track credits or prepaid usage. This absence forces businesses to require engineering bandwidth to support prepaid billing models.

3. Limited revenue recognition capabilities

Revenue recognition is available only within Tabs and cannot push data to ERP systems. The functionality is dependent on the product level, and performance obligations are closely tied to invoice line items without configurability.

4. Basic ERP integration

ERP integration supports only basic object sync and does not create journal entries to automate accounts receivable, revenue, unbilled revenue, deferred revenue, or payment gateway charges. There is no Xero integration, limiting usability for companies using Xero for accounting.

5. No customer portal

Tabs does not offer a customer portal, preventing customers from managing their billing or subscriptions autonomously.

What to look for in the best Tabs alternative?

1. Contract-level flexibility

• Contract Amendments → Seamless handling of upgrades, downgrades, and mid-cycle changes
• Native Contract Features → Support for minimum commitments, cross-product credits, and custom performance obligations
• Multi-Product Logic → Ability to define rules once at the contract level and handle complex scenarios automatically

2. Prepaid credits & entitlements

• Credit Management → Grant and manage credits without engineering involvement
• Native Entitlements Module → Built-in support for managing prepaid contracts and credit tracking
• Usage Depletion → Automatic tracking of usage against prepaid balances

3. Advanced usage metering

• Format Flexibility → Ability to ingest raw usage data in any format via API, CSV, or database connection
• Decoupled Usage → Usage tracking independent of pricing models‍
• Automatic Mapping → Intelligent mapping of usage events to contracts and invoices

4. Comprehensive revenue recognition

• Full Automation → Automated handling of all customer-side accounts including AR, revenue, unbilled revenue, deferred revenue
• Compliance Support → ASC 606/IFRS 15 compliant revenue recognition‍
• Real-time Adjustments → Automatic adjustments based on usage and contract changes

5. Deep ERP integrations

• Journal Entry Sync → Creation and sync of all necessary journal entries
• Multi-platform Support → Integration with NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, and other ERP systems‍
• Two-way Sync → Bidirectional data flow between billing and accounting systems

6. Customer self-service

• Customizable Portal → Fully branded customer portal for billing management
• Account Management → Customer ability to view contracts, invoices, balances, and make payments‍
• Subscription Control → Self-service subscription and billing management

7. Advanced analytics & reporting

• Full Data Access → Complete access to all billing and revenue data
• Custom Reports → Ability to create any chart or report needed for business‍
• Pre-built Analytics → Out-of-the-box charts for ARR, MRR, churn, revenue waterfall

8. API-first architecture

• Comprehensive APIs → Full API coverage for all UI functionality
• User-friendly Design → Simple, well-documented APIs for easy integration‍
• Real-time Capabilities → APIs that support real-time data processing

What makes Zenskar the best Tabs alternative?

Zenskar's contract-level flexibility, native entitlements management, and comprehensive revenue recognition automation makes it the ideal AI-native order-to-cash solution.

To experience Zenskar's AI-native capabilities, you can book a demo or take an interactive product tour.