Article about ISP's
Most ISPs who want to buy billing and RADIUS software shortlist two or three options, compare feature lists that all look roughly the same, and then guess. We've been asked repeatedly how Alt Radius Pro differs from Zal Ultra, because at first glance the two look alike.
To be honest, Alt Radius ISP CRM and Zal Ultra do have a lot in common. Both install on Ubuntu 24.04 with FreeRADIUS underneath. Both run standard RADIUS AAA on ports 1812 and 1813 with CoA for live disconnects.
Both cap their Professional tier at 10,000 subscribers and 100 NAS devices. If your requirement is "software that authenticates PPPoE users and raises invoices," either will do it.
The difference isn't the feature list. It's how each platform handles the day-to-day running of the business.
There are areas where the two genuinely diverge: dynamic service control, multi-vendor plan management, the reseller hierarchy, billing adjustment, payment gateways, captive portal, service management bandwidth reporting and detailed graphs.
Dynamic Service Control
Once a subscriber is authenticated and online, the session is then handled by the software. Changing anything about that live session means reaching back into the NAS and telling it to act. How the software does that determines whether a plan upgrade takes effect instantly.
There are two mechanisms and they do different tasks:
CoA (Change of Authorization) modifies a session in place. Bandwidth increases or decreases and FUP is applied to it. In short, the plan changes efficiently. The subscriber doesn’t notice anything except for changes in their internet speed.
PoD (Point of Disconnect) terminates the session when the software notices that no bill is paid. It forces the subscriber to reauthenticate. The software doesn’t modify anything. The session needs to start again. So, you will need to start the internet manually.
Both of these matter and Alt Radius supports both. CoA and PoD both solve different problems. Using the wrong one can provide the wrong result. Limiting a subscriber who has crossed the FUP quota doesn’t mean disconnecting them so CoA is important.
Cutting off an expired or non-paying account should end the session immediately. So that's a PoD. Clearing a ghost session that the router still thinks is live. This is the scenario where a subscriber can't reconnect because the system already counts them as online. This is a PoD as well.
Zal Ultra provides CoA only. It doesn’t provide a separate PoD path. On the other hand, Alt Radius provides access to PoD and CoA. So here Alt Radius stands out.
Plan for Multiple Vendors
Both Alt Radius and Zal Ultra work with 50+ router vendors. These also include popular vendors such as MikroTik, Cisco, Tenda, TPlink, Juniper, Huawei etc. The point is which one can work best for you.
In the Zal Ultra, plan creation and implementation are not as simple as in Alt Radius. Packages link to RADIUS policy through radcheck and radreply attribute groups, with user group membership and copyable policy templates.
You get finer control over exactly what each vendor's NAS receives, at the cost of building and maintaining those attribute groups yourself. It also provides NAS grouping and direct MikroTik API integration alongside RADIUS.
Alt Radius takes the opposite approach: you create one plan and use it across router brands. A plan built for MikroTik works on Cisco, and vice versa. This feature is valuable for an ISP running mixed hardware.
When they get this feature, it removes a whole category of duplicated setup work. In Alt Radius packages, link to the RADIUS policy through the radcheck and radreply attribute groups.
Zal Ultra publishes multi-vendor OLT support with ONU discovery and signal monitoring. Alt Radius includes an OLT/ONU module with 12 dedicated permissions in the role system.
Alt Radius stands out here as well as you just need to create a plan once rather than making multiple plans for multiple vendors.
Reseller System
This is where the two platforms look most similar and use the most different vocabulary.
The multi tier user structure works differently in Alt Radius. It structures the chain as Super Senior Partner → Partner → Agent. Zal Ultra calls the same shape Reseller → Sub-Reseller → Retailer. Both give every level its own login panel, its own balance, its own subscriber base and unlimited staff under that.
Both automate profit distribution up the chain. So a $10 base package that picks up $2 of margin at each tier reaches the subscriber at $16. The software calculates every split automatically. Neither requires manual bookkeeping.
Both also provide the same level of access control. Eight user types, 20+ modules and 395 individual permissions. This covers view, create, edit and delete at the action level.
The real difference is separation and pricing control. Alt Radius provides complete data isolation. The account of every ISP, branch, and partner runs independently. Moreover, it also lets the super admin set a commission percentage. It is a cap on how much margin a partner or agent can add. This may sound unworthy but it means a lot.
Suppose a retailer buys balance at $10 and sells the package at $70. People won’t buy it as their competitors are offering more Mbps for less. The ISP can lose the sale which is not good for the business. So the ISP can set the margin. By setting commission, the admin protects and retains subscribers.
Zal Ultra's distinguishing feature here is reseller self-service. Resellers can manage themselves. They can add money through a payment gateway. They can also provide discounts to customers using their own profit. There is no commission setting feature in Zal Ultra, so the admin can’t decide the commission percentage.
Both provide multi branch support but Alt Radius stands out as the admin can set a commission percentage. Where Alt Radius fits is multi-ISP and multi-branch operations where partners must be genuinely separated from each other.
Billing Adjustment
Every ISP deals with the same problems. These issues are related to mid-cycle upgrades and downgrades, install fees, static IP charges and the occasional invoice raised against the wrong account. How the software handles those in each case matters.
Zal Ultra publishes more detail on adjustment mechanics specifically. Package migration previews pro-rated costs before you commit and handles excess credit on downgrades. Invoices are reversed and not deleted.
Extra fees can be flat, percentage or equation-based. A double-entry ledger posts every charge, profit split and top-up. There's a fixed-expiry-date package type where a whole batch renews on the same day of the month.
Alt Radius automates recurring and prepaid billing, handles pro-rations and refunds, and produces tax and compliance reports. Alt Radius syncs directly with QuickBooks and Xero. So month-end reconciliation stops being a CSV export and a manual import.
It also supports Stripe and PayPal alongside bank transfer. This matters if you bill in USD or EUR.
Credit Notes
Corrections are handled with credit notes and not by edited or deleted invoices. A credit note reduces a customer's outstanding invoice or creates a credit balance when they've been overcharged or are owed an adjustment.
For example: a customer's monthly bill is $30, but the ISP owes them a $10 service credit. The system issues a credit note for $10 and the payable becomes $20. Nothing is overwritten. The original invoice still stands in the record.
Enforcement
The other half of billing is enforcement. It runs automatically. When a subscriber's plan expires, Alt Radius issues a disconnect to the router and ends the session without anyone touching a keyboard.
That single behaviour removes the month-end headache of manually suspending non-paying accounts.
Payment Gateways
Payment collection is another part of ISP operations where the software needs to connect billing with the subscriber experience.
AltRadius provides payment gateway functionality for ISP businesses. The payment system covers more than simply accepting payments from the admin panel. Subscribers can make payments themselves through the customer portal. It includes paying their internet bills without needing an operator to process the transaction manually.
The self payment of internet bills is built for subscribers (refers to customers who subscribe to internet service from an ISP). A subscriber can use the self service portal to access their account, view billing information and make payments.
Alt Radius also provides a self service portal for ISPs. Subscribers can access their account and related services. This gives the ISP a customer facing layer. It doesn’t require every payment or account request to go through staff.
For hotspot and Wi-Fi deployments, Alt Radius also provides a captive portal. This allows an ISP to present an authentication or access page to users before they receive network access.
Alt Radius supports multiple payment methods and payment gateways. It includes Stripe and PayPal. It also supports bank transfer based payment collection. Zal Ultra also provides payment gateway integration.
There are 12+ payment providers and it supports subscriber self service payments for package renewals, balance top ups, invoice payments and payment history. Resellers can also top up their balance through payment gateways.
So the difference is not simply whether a payment gateway exists. Both platforms connect payment collection with ISP billing and subscriber self service. The more useful comparison is their gateways and how payment flows.
Captive Portal
Alt Radius also provides a captive portal for ISPs that offer hotspot and controlled internet access services. A captive portal gives users an access page before they can use the internet. This allows the ISP to authenticate users and control how they access the network.
The captive portal can be used for subscriber authentication, hotspot deployments and other public or controlled-access Wi-Fi environments. It gives the ISP a customer-facing access layer.
It also keeps authentication and network access connected with the wider RADIUS and subscriber management system.
This is particularly useful for ISPs that operate Wi-Fi hotspots, guest networks, public internet access locations or other deployments where users need to authenticate before getting online.
Zal Ultra also provides a captive portal builder for hotspot deployments, including configurable portal pages and authentication options. Therefore, the difference is not simply that one platform has a captive portal and the other does not.
Service Management
Both platforms include ticketing and full subscriber lifecycle management. Beyond that, they've built in genuinely different directions. This is probably the clearest split in the whole comparison.
Zal Ultra invests in the automation and connected-device layer instead: scheduled auto-renewal, tiered expiry reminders, stale session cleanup, quota resets, queued CoA processing, MAC address binding, voucher and prepaid card generation, and a captive portal builder for hotspot deployments.
Alt Radius service management differs from Zal Ultra as Alt Radius provides:
Subscriber Support
Alt Radius provides a complete support system. It doesn’t provide the usual ticket list. Every complaint lands on a single page. So agents work from one queue instead of opening tickets one at a time to find out what's in them.
SMS and WhatsApp are connected to the same screen through API integration. When a subscriber messages over WhatsApp or SMS. The message appears in the portal. The agent's reply goes back out on the same channel. In short, there’s no switching between a phone, a web console and the CRM to hold one conversation.
Internal handling sits in the same place. Agents can message teammates about a ticket, view the subscriber's full details, reassign the complaint to another team member or escalate it to the admin.
Tickets also move between departments. Not every complaint that lands in the NOC queue is a network problem. A subscriber reporting a service outage may actually have a billing block on the account, which finance has to clear.
Rather than closing the ticket, a department can assign the issue to another relevant department. That department handles the issue. The diagnostics view covers team member reviews, ticket status, ticket category and ticket duration.
GIS Mapping
Alt Radius includes a GIS (Geographic Information System) view that shows subscribers on a map. If you have subscribers in a given area, you can see them geographically. You can also see line or connection faults surface on the same map.
That turns "several complaints from the same neighbourhood" into a visible cluster. This helps in diagnosing a shared line fault.
Network Provisioning and Complete Topology Understanding:
The GIS layer is used to understand the network beyond simply locating subscribers. For an ISP, mapping subscribers against the fundamental network helps provide a clearer picture of network provisioning and the complete network topology.
This means the ISP can understand how connections are distributed across the network and how subscriber locations relate to the infrastructure serving them. It doesn’t look at subscriber records and network infrastructure as separate pieces of information.
GIS provides a geographic view of how the network is provisioned. For field teams, this can make it easier to understand where infrastructure is located and the affected area.
This is specifically helpful when an ISP is expanding coverage, provisioning new connections, troubleshooting outages or planning infrastructure changes.
Zal Ultra also provides geographic area management and network modules. It includes NAS, IP pools, OLT/ONU management and subscriber to ONU mapping. Its documentation describes subscribers to ONU association and network area hierarchy.
Reporting Bandwidth Usage
Bandwidth data serves two purposes: showing you where the network is straining, and showing you which subscribers are consuming what.
Alt Radius provides real-time network monitoring and bandwidth management across the platform, visible from a single dashboard alongside RADIUS, IPAM and device status. Data usage, bandwidth, speed and RADIUS health are all presented graphically, so you can read consumption and system state at a glance rather than reconstructing it from tables.
Interim accounting arrives from the router every five minutes. This is what keeps usage, session time and bandwidth figures updated. Report access scales with plan: the Professional tier includes up to 18 system reports while Business includes 20+ system reports.
Zal Ultra's bandwidth reporting includes live per-subscriber upload and download graphs and usage statistics exposed in the subscriber portal. All report modules are available at every tier. It doesn’t scale with the plan. It also offers BTRC-format regulatory export, which is specific to operators in Bangladesh.
If per-subscriber graphing is the single feature your operation is built around. You should give it significant importance. For most ISPs, the more useful question is whether reporting is present in the same system as billing, RADIUS and network monitoring, which is true of both.
Alt Radius fits for ISPs who want network monitoring, bandwidth data, billing and subscriber records on one dashboard instead of three tools.
Detailed Graphs Across the ISP Operation
AltRadius does more than a single bandwidth graph. It provides detailed graphical reporting across different parts of the ISP operation. For example, an ISP uses graphs to understand:
Network usage
Bandwidth consumption
Internet usage
Subscriber usage
Network and device activity
Financial and finance-related data
Sales and revenue trends
RADIUS and system health
The purpose of these graphs is to turn operational data into something that you can understand quickly. Administrators can use graphical views to identify usage patterns, bandwidth demand, subscriber consumption and financial trends.
This makes graph based reporting helpful not just for the NOC but also for management, finance and customer support teams.
Zal Ultra also has extensive graphical reporting. It provides subscriber live graphs, NAS interface graphs, sales analytics graphs and bandwidth usage graphs. It also includes real time upload/download monitoring and historical usage data.
Therefore, the difference is not that one platform has graphs and the other doesn’t. Both provide graphical reporting. The distinction is how those graphs are integrated into the wider workflow of billing, RADIUS, network management and subscriber operations.
Payment, Portal and Graph Reporting
When comparing the two platforms specifically around customer facing payments and reporting, both provide more than basic ISP billing.
Alt Radius combines payment gateways with a subscriber self service portal. It allows subscribers to manage their accounts and pay internet bills themselves. It also provides a captive portal for network access scenarios and detailed graphical reporting across network, bandwidth, usage and financial information.
Zal Ultra also combines payment gateways with a subscriber portal and captive portal functionality. Its current product page lists 12+ payment providers, subscriber self-service payments and captive portal configuration. It also provides real-time bandwidth and other operational graphs.
For an ISP evaluating these features, the relevant question is therefore not simply whether the feature exists. It is how deeply the payment, portal, network and reporting functions fit into the ISP's existing operational workflow.
Conclusion
Zal Ultra is strong on adjustment mechanics, reseller self-service, and hotspot and voucher automation, and it exposes more report modules at the entry tier.
Alt Radius is built around operations: both CoA and PoD for correct session handling. One plan across all router brands, walled-off partner accounts with admin-controlled commission, QuickBooks and Xero sync with credit-note accounting.
It also involves a unified support desk that pulls WhatsApp and SMS into one screen, GIS mapping for field faults, and IPv4/IPv6 IPAM on the same dashboard as everything else.
If you're running a single-brand network and mostly need billing and vouchers, the gap is narrow. If you're running mixed hardware, multiple branches, a support team and a field crew, that's where the two platforms stop looking alike.
FAQs
What's the difference between a credit note and a reversed invoice?
Zal Ultra reverses an invoice. Alt Radius issues a credit note against it. Both preserve the audit trail, but they do different things to the balance. A reversal cancels the original charge immediately. A credit note leaves the invoice standing and posts a separate transaction setoff. So a partial adjustment of $10 off a $30 bill is one document rather than a cancel-and-reissue. It also matters downstream.
What's the difference between controlling a router over RADIUS and controlling it over a vendor API?
Zal Ultra offers direct MikroTik API integration alongside RADIUS. An API connection can do things RADIUS can't: queue edits, firewall rules, device-level config, but it only works on that vendor. RADIUS is the common language every NAS speaks.
What's the difference between NAS grouping and one plan across multiple vendors?
NAS grouping organises devices so the right attribute set reaches the right routers. You still build a plan per vendor; you just apply it in bulk. Alt Radius removes the per-vendor plan entirely, so one plan will work for every vendor. Grouping reduces the repetition; a single plan removes it.
What's the difference between role permissions and data isolation?
Both platforms have 395 permissions across 20+ modules, so both control what a user can do. A permission means an agent can't edit another partner's subscribers. Isolation means those subscribers aren't in that account's database. If two partners are competitors in the same city, that distinction will be useful for both.
What's the difference between reassigning a ticket and escalating it?
Reassignment means moving a ticket to another agent or another department which can solve the issue or is working on that same thing. Escalation moves it up to admin, usually because of SLA risk or authority, not because the issue changed hands. Alt Radius supports both as distinct actions.
What's the difference between interim accounting and per-subscriber usage graphs?
Interim accounting update is a periodic message that the router sends to the RADIUS server while the customer session is active. It provides current session and usage data.
Per-subscriber graphs are one way of drawing that data. A platform can have current data without graphing it per user and a platform can graph outdated data precisely.
What's the difference between FUP throttling and suspension?
Throttling reduces speed on a live session and the subscriber stays connected - a CoA. Suspension ends the session and blocks reauthentication until the account is cleared - a PoD plus a billing state change. Sending the wrong one is how ISPs generate support tickets. A quota-exceeded customer who gets disconnected thinks that the network is broken.
What's the difference between a voucher and a prepaid plan?
A voucher is a one-off credential which usually remains anonymous; mostly businesses use these. Zal Ultra also generates these. A prepaid plan is a named subscriber account paid in advance, with a recurring cycle and a billing record.
