# Advantage Reviews **Vendor:** AdvantageCS **Category:** [Subscription Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/subscription-management) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 22 ## About Advantage Looking for a solution for digital and print? Do you bundle digital and print together and sell the package at a discount? Are your systems for digital and print disparate and it’s difficult or impossible to sell or manage such combinations? Advantage is the solution that manages both digital and print. Whether it’s entitlements, access to content, eBooks, pay-per-view, downloads, or pdf versions of the magazine, Advantage can combine these with the print product and keep the two components of the bundle synchronized and allocate the income however you like. There are numerous solutions for digital sales, including recurring billing platforms, but these don’t handle print products and distribution, and they are a struggle for marketers who want to sell combinations of digital and print products. Advantage does this naturally. And Advantage does much more, including membership management, marketing, sales, order processing, and customer relationship management. AdvantageCS has been developing software for major companies since 1979. Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our more than 80 employees are the most experienced and dedicated in the industry. All work is done by our staff---never farmed out to third parties. ## Advantage Reviews ### 1. CS review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Terri C. | Client Services Manager **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Advantages Online Help Documentation is great to work with **What do you dislike about Advantage?** The complexity of the system that makes it great can also be a challenge **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Subscription management ### 2. Advantage is a mature, fully featured financial and fulfillment system for publishers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Neal H. | Senior Program Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** One of the best things about Advantage to me is the stability of the system, the robust feature sets and the solid accounting backbone **What do you dislike about Advantage?** There isn't a lot to dislike. Advantage is a very complex system, so training new users does take some time and optimizing the system for your specific environment can be time-consuming. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** I have used Advantage for over 20 years across three different organizations, including my current org. I have found their features to be robust and well thought-out. Their system is flexible, making each instance unique. If you are looking for a platform that is flexible, powerful and well-supported, consider Advantage **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Advantage truly is the backbone of our infrastructure. The financial transaction and reporting capabilities, specifically for audit purposes ensure that we are always able to pass audits without any issues. Additionally, the fulfillment processes that Adv offers are flexible and robust. ### 3. 20+ Years on the system **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Airlines/Aviation | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2021 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Advantage has successfully supported the various item types in our catalog including integrating with our physical warehouse. They look for trends and are continuously updating. The employees are passionate about the product and the company as witnessed by the longevity of so many. They are always open to discussing functionality. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** They substitute system processes for User IDs in the data. Makes it extremely hard to track user stats and errors. At previous revisions, reporting for average users is difficult. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** This is an extremely flexible system and can be used for so much more than just subscription management. It is that flexibility that causes the low mark on Ease of Set up. Their staff is extremely knowledgeable and will take the time to learn your business to better assist in set up and use. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** It very easily supports financial transactions/general ledger postings. Simple to pull detail behind each GL entry. ### 4. Very robust software. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Advantage?** I've been with my company for 41 years so I've been on Advantage since the beginning. I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the current version mostly because of the visual alignment and spacing issues that you've corrected in the newest version. There's also a lag between screens and it sounds like that too has been corrected. I'm hoping we upgrade as the new features look very inviting! **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Sorry, I put that in the last box, but my least favorite thing is the poor use of real estate, all the spacing that requires us to scroll. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not really sure how to answer that, we use it for fulfillment of AMB, Circulation and Pro products and every aspect of that business. We don't currently use Cider but I would love for our company to adopt that process. I feel we use too much 2nd and 3rd party software which makes the integration a challenge. ### 5. n/a **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Melissa B. | Trainer/Quality Assurance Analyst **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2021 **What do you like best about Advantage?** I've been using it for years, and I think once you learn it, it's easy to use. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Right now we are on a 2019 or 2020 version and we have a lot of open white spacing, and it doesn't fit nicely on a laptop screen. There's a vertical and a horizontal scroll bars **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** not sure how to answer this. ### 6. Flexible Publishing Software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** T K. | Director of IT, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The Advantage software is quite flexible and new features are being added all the time! I also like that there is an option for an integrated web solution. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Sometimes with lots of flexibility comes complexity, the Advantage software can be complex, particularly for those new to the product. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** My publishing organization uses the Advantage software for managing customer transactions, tracking product metadata, and hosting our public website. ### 7. A flexible and evolving solution **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** canus p. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The big number of options and settings to fit our business, the integration with the e-commerce platform, the continuous features and the support service. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** The cost can be expensive for a small publisher like us. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** The Advantage software may seem complex at first glance, but it was designed, in my personal opinion, to handle all types of situations. This is why we find a very advanced configuration as well as a very large number of options in the software, but in the majority of cases the configuration remains ‘basic’ and we rarely use all the options. One could cite the French adage “qui peut le plus peu le moins” to reflect this: if you can do many big things, you can also do simple ones. Another advantage of working with ACS is the fact that they are open to your requests, that is to say that if you have a specific request related to your core business, they have the ability to develop and to integrate it into Advantage, which makes the Advantage tool very flexible. As for the AdvantageCS company itself, they are always forging ahead with new software modifications every year. For technical support they are always available, and there is always someone there to respond very quickly and solve the problem. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have been using the Advantage software from AdvantageCS for 10 years now, and are very satisfied. Our use mainly consists of managing paper subscriptions, digital access and mail order sales. The choice of this software is essentially based on the fact that everything is customer-centric and contains all the tools we need; there is none better on the market. We recently implemented the Cider e-commerce platform, also provided by the company ACS, which is directly tied into the Advantage product. This is a real asset for us because we did not need any integration (very often complex and very time-consuming to set up) between the customer system and the e-commerce site. ### 8. Complex, but strong support team **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Connie H. | Business Analyst **Reviewed Date:** February 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The support team -- from tier 1 to project managers to implementation specialists are very helpful. Our Account Manager is always willing to step in and help work through challenges. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Configuration is very complex. There is a lot of documentation, but not very helpful in terms of configuration. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Inventory management, books and subscription fulfillment, access to digital products. ### 9. Advantage has always been able to keep up with our changing business needs. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** andy s. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** They have listened to our business needs and been flexible to help us customize workflows where needed. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** There really aren't things I dislike as much as the version we are operating is somewhat dated which makes reporting on occasion a challenge. But as I mentioned above their support team has been very helpful in creating work arounds if needed. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** I would suggest that you not limit yourselves to the out of the box offering as Advantage can do a lot of customization's in case your business has unique needs. And with Advantage continually rolling out enhancements based on the feedback of their clients and users I would think they will be able to meet your needs. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our biggest challenge was to allow our clients to be able to self-register for access to our online content and then manage that access automatically. So if that client ever expired or canceled their access would terminate immediately. This has been a huge time saver and created urgency for our clients to renew on time. Also we recently brought our advertising clients into Advantage and we are using their installment billing for monthly, quarterly, semi-annual billing plus using their auto renewal feature. This has been a big help with spreading out client payments and eliminated a lot of manual work. ### 10. Great Vendor! Great Subscription Management Software! 20 Year + Administrator **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Suzanne E. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** I've worked with this subscription management tool for over 20 years. I have to say there are two things I like best: 1. is the flexibility in the application to solve any business need, and 2. the company that runs this application is one of the best vendor's I've ever worked with in my career. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** There are few things I dislike. I had a tremendous relationship with this business and we worked through issues easily. Obviously there are areas of the application that are challenging but for the most part those areas are negotiable by knowledge and understanding of how to use the application. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** Spend time to implement correctly. Build team of knowledgeable administrators. Take advantage of the features and functions within the tool. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We solved many problems with using this application. It's built for a publishing business and it supports that type of business well. We use it for subscription management, memberships, conferences, product delivery, Auto Delivery, List Management, Customer Service, Access Management, etc. It handles multiple currencies, multiple payment processors, multiple languages, taxing rules, many business owning structures, rules and order processing integrations, and many other functions, all in support of domestic and international publishing businesses. They continue to expand the software to support all of these areas across the globe and they listen to their customers about enhancements and integrations to the software, Their customers also have the opportunity to contribute to it's direction through strong relationships. ### 11. Good software - great people **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peter S. | Senior Project Manager, ICT Strategy Consultant, Managing Partner, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The software is very good in the management of subscriptions with all kinds of exceptions. We have print, digital and premiums (a gift if you make a commitment of a longer period). The software is flexible for adaptation. Best thing is probably that ACS has a great team of top-notch consultants. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** The financials for EU-GAAP is not very performant - we needed quite some extra work in that area. Secondly is that the top consultants come at a price. ACS is fairly expensive. The many features come with some added complexity. For end users the software and its logic are not always easy to use and understand. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** Look if the financial capabilities are sufficient for your organisation. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** management of daily print subscriptions together with digital component. Previously this was done in legacy systems which were merged in one overall system. It is a bit too early to comment on further benefits as we are stabilizing after our go-live. The goals is that now we have a system with the needed flexibility to put new products in the market. ### 12. Advantage software is powerful. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Susanne G. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 13, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Flexibility for all products we sell from print, digital and single product orders. The website is customer friendly and easily allows customers to register, purchase and access products. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Customizations can be a challenged but are necessary in the subscription business. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** With the Wayfair ruling in 2019, Advantage provided us with a simple solution to collect sales tax. Bundling print and digital products. The website has reduced the number of employees needed in customer service by allowing customers to change address, online bill paying and access to free content. ### 13. A partner for decades... **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tara R. | Director of Advantage Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The relationship I have with AdvantageCS is by far better than any other provider I have worked with over the years. They're responsive, they listen to their clients and geniunely care about my business needs. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Training a new customer service member can take a couple of weeks, due to the flexibility within the system. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** Even though the system may appear too complex, it can absolutely be the bus driver for your business. Working with their implementations team makes it a lot less overwhelming, they are on the journey with you. Every step of the way. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Currently, we are working on the re-design of the teleservices module. The benefits to this are they want to ensure that I am involved and will not lose any functionality that we are currently using within our business. ### 14. Outstanding software for managing subscriptions and other MRR businesses **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carver B. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Advantage software flexible enough to be able to handle multiple lines of business for us with each having high level of variations. At the same time, the software maintains data quality and adherence to business rules and standards to such a high degree that our annual audits are now sweat free! The many Integration and extensibility options with Advantage allow many of our e-commerce and digital paywall product lines to complete hands off O2C cycles. Modular software allows you to buy only what you need, skip the rest. Once staff learns the data structure they can bulid custom reports on just about any aspect of the business themselves. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Modular platform covers several business models and can take some time to fully learn all of them. Engineering and consulting teams can and are happy to build and configure just about any functionality you can dream up into their product; for a cost. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation is key with Advantage. The extensibility, workflow events, and API integrations allow us to provide top notch service with a very lean team. ### 15. Product is expensive and complex but very stable **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Edward B. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Can be customized to suit special needs. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Very expensive to purchase and maintain. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** Depending on the volume of transactions your company does, you need to allocate plenty of internal support resources for testing version upgrades and patch releases if you choose to remain current on the product. Advantage is good at supporting legacy versions but the further behind you get the more it will cost to bring you up to the current version. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing many periodical subscriptions as well as product fulfillment within one system. Custom modifications to fit our company's unique workflow has been beneficial. ### 16. Great Subscription Managment Software - Great People **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ricky L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The software allows you to centralize customer management, subscription management, and related financials in one system. The eCommerce platform (Cider) provides the ability to fully link your website to Advantage. For example, price changes made within Advantage are automatically reflected on your website. You can easily create promotions with all of their special pricing and offers as well as the corresponding landing page for your eCommerce site. Several third party integrations are available such as Address Standardization, Taxation, Salesforce, etc.... Workflow Events offers the ability to create your own integrations based on events. The software is PCI compliant. If needed, they can customize the software to meet specific needs. The consultants and engineers are extremely knowledgeable and always willing to help. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** The learning curve can be difficult. There are so many modules and capabilities, it can be overwhelming at times. Custom development can get expensive, especially if it is a large project. Reporting is pretty basic. We have created a lot of custom reports (SQL) to meet our needs. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** Create detailed maps of all business processes and functionality desired. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is our core system for managing our entire customer base: print, digital and licensing. Integration with our website, flexible pricing models and the ability to easily setup new products have been key benefits. ### 17. Advantage has served as our subscription management system for the last 20 years. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tom H. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Advantage is very flexible. That is one of the reasons we selected them in 2000. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** With flexibility comes complexity. The software is very complex. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Subscription management, inventory, accounts receivable and e-commerce. ### 18. Advantage as subscription, access, and membership management software works for scholarly publisher **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Waylon I B. | Director of Customer Experience and Order Processing, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** Customer-centric, flexible product setup **What do you dislike about Advantage?** Configuration richness could be daunting **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Advantage allows us to support a variety of diversified revenue streams in one application. We can sell a single customer a variety of different product types through one invoice. We have a clear view of what products we have sold to which customers. And the Advantage system manages the accounting entries we need to feed our financial systems. With Advantage as a key business system, we have improved visibility into our business, improved receivables collection, improved up- and cross-sell success, and improved service to customers. ### 19. COO **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daryl B. | Chief Operations Officer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** We have used their software longer than any other software in our business **What do you dislike about Advantage?** I wish it was more web based/ built using microservices. **Recommendations to others considering Advantage:** It is a good system. It has been the backbone of our operations for years **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** They provide the backbone of our publishing businesses. ### 20. Challeging learning curve but a good choice for subscription mgt business **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 15, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** The features provided for Subscriptions and Payments are the most advanced I seen out of the box **What do you dislike about Advantage?** - Performance and scalability on some of the processes (Cycle-End, Labeling, Letters, Batch Order Uploads through Omnistream xml files) - Inefficient and limited integration for generating customer service letters and e-mails **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Better control on pricing and promo offers; - Improved financial reporting; - Payment options available ### 21. Deep and robust system with a great, service-oriented team behind it. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Publishing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Advantage?** There is almost always a way to do what we want in the system. **What do you dislike about Advantage?** It's very complex and requires a lot of discipline to use well. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it to package our subscription products into a new products. We've been able to increase our products to market by 50% in the time we've been using the system. ### 22. Great software subscription management software **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Advantage?** As an administrator I support the the users within my company. The software is very complicated however in troubleshooting the amount of resources available to assist in the pinpointing the issue is vast. You have easy access to the Online help, the SQL for the tables. Users are able to key in orders, take payments and this can link in to other software with ease **What do you dislike about Advantage?** The cost of support in resolving issues. The software can be quite buggy at times however the updates are quite prompt once the issue has been diagnosed. **What problems is Advantage solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is a core software in the company as it is used to store customer details, key in orders, take payments link in to the website for online orders. Overall its a good software - [View Advantage pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/advantage-computing-systems-advantage/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-13+18%3A41%3A21+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ec2c90d9-b10e-4ecc-8d90-968ffac93269&secure%5Btoken%5D=0ee8ad2d685d2a6f4ab4b33ad0e0cc2b5a525246ce70f656c02cd67b7b4576c4&format=llm_user) ## Advantage Features **Order Management** - Opportunities - Order History - Upsell & Cross-sell - Renewals **Products & Plans** - Packages - Plan Changes - Bundles **Pricing** - Standard Price - Discounts - Optimization **Revenue Management** - Automation - Consolidation - Adjustments - Billing Types **Integration** - Payments - Accounting - CRM & Sales **Agentic AI - Subscription Management** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Decision Making ## Top Advantage Alternatives - [Chargebee](https://www.g2.com/products/chargebee/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (956 reviews) - [Sage Intacct](https://www.g2.com/products/sage-intacct/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (3,910 reviews) - [Agentforce Revenue Management (formerly Salesforce Revenue Cloud)](https://www.g2.com/products/agentforce-revenue-management-formerly-salesforce-revenue-cloud/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (1,408 reviews)