Web-based proposal generation and proposal management software has become an essential part of the sales environment, and Proposify has been a popular choice for sales teams since 2012.
However, in the rapidly evolving world of digital sales tools, you need to ensure your proposal software can provide you with a wide range of features and functions to save you time and effort while delivering sales collateral and proposals customized to the individual buyer relationship.
If you’re currently reviewing your proposal software options, Proposify is likely one of the potential solutions you’re assessing. It’s a popular choice among large and small businesses and may very well offer an end to the long and tedious process of reinventing your sales proposals and collateral repeatedly.
Unfortunately, Proposify customers are finding themselves increasingly short-changed by a tool that doesn’t allow you to send documents from mobile devices via its mobile app—challenging for salespeople on the go.
There are other issues, too - proposal creators will be hindered by the inability to upload pre-existing documents as templates. Pre-existing materials can only be uploaded as static PDFs, so you can’t update or alter these items once they’re on Proposify. You can read more about Proposify and its full range of features (there are still some great features in there), but our article focused squarely on reviewing a range of alternative options.
In addition to rounding up the best proposal software, we’ve included some adjacent products that include proposal software functionality, such as CPQ (configure, price quote) or RFP (request for proposal) tools.
Key takeaways:
- Despite its popularity and range of features, Proposify users face challenges with document management, particularly for salespeople needing flexibility with templates.
- Qwilr emerges as a strong alternative, specifically catering to sales teams with its interactive, customizable templates and time savings on proposal creation.
- Qwilr integrates with popular CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce, coupled with comprehensive analytics and tracking tools, offering a robust solution for modern sales efficiency.
- Notable mentions include PandaDoc's e-signature and templates, DealHub's quick CPQ, Responsive's RFP collaboration, and Loopio's intuitive RFP features.
Qwilr
Focusing on the needs of sales teams across SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise organizations has allowed Qwilr to become a dominant force in the proposal software space. Clients like Dropbox, Palo Alto, Lambda, and Zendesk leverage Qwilr’s capabilities to create and distribute proposals.
Primary use cases
Qwilr is designed to meet the needs of sales leaders, sales ops, marketing teams, and recruiters, allowing them to build a wide range of interactive, easily customizable sales materials that are packed with useful features and functionality.
Example of Qwilr's page editor
Standout features
Qwilr allows sellers to create an interactive, personalized space for every buyer that can be populated instantly with customizable templates from their content library. Qwilr’s frictionless processes will allow reps to reduce the time spent creating sales materials by up to 75%.
Templates
More than 100 proposal templates are available in Qwilr’s content library, which can be easily tweaked or customized to create whatever kind of sales collateral your team needs. There are also templates designed to align with popular sales methodologies, such as the gap selling template or the SPIN selling template.
The best proposal templates are customizable to the specific industry and client. Qwilr templates make this easy.
Tracking and analytics
Qwilr contains a comprehensive suite of analytics tools to give you unrivaled insight into your prospect’s engagement.
You’ve got instant notifications to help you respond within minutes to your prospects and pipeline velocity reports so you can review progress across all your current deals at a glance.
There’s also identity authentication functionality, letting you control who views your proposals and how many times they can view them and allowing you to set expiry dates to cut off access.
Integrations
You’ll get seamless CRM integrations with HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, and Pipedrive and transaction integrations with Stripe. Qwilr contains integrations with many of your other favorite SaaS tools, including Slack, Zapier, and Quickbooks.
Customer support
With a one-hour average response time and a 99% customer satisfaction rate, Qwilr’s email-based customer support system is simple and effective, much like its product.
Customer service staff are located all around the world, so whether you’re in the US, the UK, India, Europe, or Australia, you’ll be speaking to someone in your own time zone with a good understanding of your local situation.
Pricing
Qwilr offers a transparent two-tier pricing plan, with free trials available on both tiers. The Business package is available for $35 USD per user per month, while the Enterprise tier (with additional security features, integrations, training, account management, etc.) costs $59 USD per user per month.
Alternatively, you can try Qwilr's AI proposal generator for free and create your own professional looking proposal in minutes.
PandaDoc
Primary use cases
Although PandaDoc’s paid plans target larger businesses, their free plan offers great value for consultants or freelancers looking for an easy-to-use, intuitive proposal tool.
Preview of PandaDoc's editor
Standout features
There are some valuable features here - over 450 document templates, a content library, and in-document payment processing.
Templates
PandaDoc’s templates don’t just include sales proposals - you’ll find useful templates for other documentation here, too, including more general business proposals, quotes, and invoices.
Unlike Proposify, you can upload (and reuse) your own documents and save them as templates (although PDFs, images, and MS Office files can’t be edited within PandaDoc - docx. files are the only accepted file types).
There are also a couple of standard editing features missing that you’d expect - like the ability to reorder the pages of your documents.
Tracking & analytics
PandaDoc allows you to track client behavior. You can track the frequency and duration of the prospect’s engagement at both individual page and document levels and monitor downloads of your document.
Integrations
Rather than direct integrations, like many other tools, PandaDoc uses Zapier to drive numerous external software connections, such as Google Drive, HubSpot, OneDrive, etc. Salesforce integration is offered for clients on the bespoke top-tier Enterprise package, along with API functionality.
Customer support
Opinions on PandaDoc’s customer support services are mixed - while customers generally praise the quick response and helpful attitude of the service operators, some reports suggest the Customer Success team struggles to respond satisfactorily to more complex or technical issues - particularly where the mobile app is involved.
Pricing
PandaDoc’s free plan, eSign, doesn’t allow you to edit your documents or create proposals. However, it allows you to upload up to five proposals or documents per month. Clients can sign and pay using the eSign document, making PandoDoc’s free plan a great toolkit addition for freelancers and micro businesses.
PandaDoc’s paid plans are available in three tiers - Essentials (at $25 per user per month), Business ($59 per user per month with additional features like ‘white label’ documents, content library, and Zapier integration), and an Enterprise tier (bespoke packages and pricing, with the Salesforce integration included)
Get Accept
Primary use cases
Get Accept is intended to facilitate deal design, orchestration, and closure, emphasizing creating automated deal workflows incorporating multimedia content.
Preview of GetAccept's editor
Standout features
For teams with a fairly static sales process, Get Accept can help you build a sales workflow with video, live chat, automated email responses, and reminder messaging, all in one platform.
Templates
Get Accept includes some rudimentary templates - however, adapting these templates is a slow manual process, so there’s little to be gained from their use compared to building a fresh document.
Tracking & analytics
The standard document tracking functions can be found here - as well as seeing who’s engaged with which page and when Get Accept enables you to zoom out for a bird' s-eye view of your current deals. You can also look at individual sales reps to gather additional performance data and look at monthly reports.
Integrations
Not Get Accept’s strongest suit - there are no transactional or payment integration options, so you’ll need an additional tool to process payments.
Some users also reported issues with unreliable or malfunctioning CRM synchronization. Also, it’s unclear from Get Accept’s pricing structure which integrations are included - unless you’re willing to negotiate on the top tier for ‘premium’ integrations, you’re stuck with the ‘basic’ integrations.
Customer support
Customer opinion of Get Accept’s support is generally positive, though some customers expressed frustration when attempting to resolve integration-related issues.
Pricing
With a 14-day free trial, Get Accept offers two tiers. Professional, at $39 per user per month, and then Enterprise rates to be negotiated.
Dealhub.io
Primary use cases
Dealhub.io is CPQ software, which means it’s primarily intended for sales professionals looking to quickly assemble customer quotes personalized to the individual customer according to factors like quantity, relevant discounts, customizations, optional features of products, multiple revenue types, and incompatibilities.
This is usually achieved via rules-based processing so that personalized quotes can be generated in seconds. Many CPQ software solutions (like Dealhub) also incorporate proposal creation as an additional feature.
Preview of DealHub.io's interface
Standout features
Dealhub is often compared favorably with the market leader, Salesforce CPQ, as being much simpler to deploy, providing a more streamlined proposal process with comparable features and results. The customer support service is also highly rated, and partnering with Dealhub means you’ll have a dedicated CPQ domain expert at your disposal.
Templates
Unfortunately, proposal templates are only available on the top tier.
Tracking & analytics
Much like the templates, features like buyer engagement tracking and real-time alerts are only available on the top tier. The lower tiers provide limited buyer engagement analytics, so you’ll still get some insight into how your quotes and proposals are performing.
Integrations
Again, it seems that the lower tiers might be getting a raw deal when it comes to integrations - while top-tier customers can enjoy connecting their new tool to Freshworks 360, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, and Slack, the two lower tiers have to content themselves with two integrations - Docusign and HubSpot.
Customer support
As mentioned above, Dealhub’s customer support is highly regarded, with a dedicated CPQ domain expert on each account.
Pricing
It’s hard to compare Dealhub’s pricing - mainly because they don’t want you to see it. Prices on all three tiers are only provided on request. Online reviews seem to suggest that packages start around the $50 per month mark.
Responsive (formerly RFPIO)
Primary use cases
Another proposal-adjacent tool, Responsive, is an RFP (request for proposal) software. Primarily aimed at response teams in larger enterprises across various verticals, RFP software is used to generate a range of responses to standardized inquiries, such as RFIs (requests for information), RFPs (requests for proposals), DDQ (due diligence questionnaires), and vendor security questionnaires.
Understandably, RFP tools are popular in compliance-heavy industries like healthcare and finance. However, they’re also used by a wide range of sales teams for proposal management.
Preview of Responsive's interface
Standout features
Users regularly praise Responsive for the collaborative working features available on the platform, allowing multiple users to work simultaneously in the individualized workspaces.
Integrations with Word, Excel, and Chrome make it easy to import content and data, and content can be grouped according to users and specialisms, making it easy for siloed teams like data security to review and collaborate.
Templates
Responsive doesn’t ship with any sales templates, and creating templates isn’t easy. There’s a high barrier to entry, with a lot of tasks to complete (configuring user roles, building templates, writing sections, amassing a knowledge library, training users, etc.) before any documents can be generated.
Tracking & analytics
Engagement tracking lets you see who’s using the documents and how they use them. A nice additional feature here is proposal effectiveness reporting, which allows you to track the performance of each piece of content. There are also customizable reports and dashboards.
Integrations
Responsive plays well with CRMs, with ‘push and pull’ integrations available for HubSport, Pipedrive, and Salesforce. There are also the aforementioned content integrations with Word, Excel, Chrome, etc.
Customer support
Responsive has a strong reputation for customer support and is known for being attentive and quick to resolve issues and respond to tickets. Many customers remark on how the company ‘lives up to its name’ (presumably one of the reasons for the rebrand).
Pricing
Unfortunately, Responsive doesn't provide any pricing information for comparison - you’ve got to get in touch to find out more.
Loopio
Primary use cases
Another RFP platform, Loopio, was found by several customers to be more user-friendly than Responsive. Loopio specifically targets the software, healthcare, and finance industries.
Preview of Loopio's interface
Standout features
AI-driven import and question auto-detection provide significant time savings when creating proposals and other documents. There are also neat features like duplicate detection and freshness score for your content.
With white-label functionality, you can maintain a consistent brand identity across all your documents, too.
Templates
Loopio contains a variety of dynamic project templates. As well as proactive sales proposal templates, you’ll find product overviews, statements of work, and security white papers.
Tracking & analytics
Unfortunately, Loopio doesn’t provide any tracking or analytics functionality.
Integrations
Loopio provides CRM integration with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, as well as project management and communication tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams). It’s also well set up for cloud storage, with Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint, and Dropbox integrations available.
Customer support
Loopio customers are well looked after, with an unlimited support package that includes a dedicated enablement manager.
Pricing
Like many of the vendors on this list, Loopio prefers to keep their pricing information between them and their clients. There are three tiers, with a range of additional features like collaborative tools available at the top tier.
Docsend
Primary use cases
As it’s primarily document management software, Docsend might not seem like an obvious choice for a list of online proposal software at first glance - however, there are lots of great features here, as well as an attractively priced, high-value personal plan that makes this a credible alternative for smaller businesses and freelancers.
Preview of DocSend's interface
Standout features
With data rooms, eSignature, and document analytics, Docsend provides a feature set that stacks up well against solutions at twice the price. We particularly like the one-click NDA feature that allows you to dispense with the tiresome back-and-forth that often accompanies an NDA.
Templates
Unfortunately, Docsend doesn’t provide any document templates.
Tracking & analytics
As well as the fairly standard page-by-page engagement tracking and analytics, there are some interesting additional features here. With link analytics, individual users can easily be identified, and permissions can be controlled via the unique link sent to each user.
The version performance feature adds another dimension, allowing you to compare the performance of earlier versions of your document with newer versions if you’re trialing a new approach.
Integrations
Docsend uses Zapier to manage integrations, although there are some notable built-in integrations with Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook, and Dropbox (who acquired Docsend in 2021). The email integrations are particularly useful, allowing you to work directly from your Gmail or Outlook inbox.
Customer support
Docsend customer support seems to be generally well-received, with fast and effective service provided via email.
Pricing
Docsend offers four pricing tiers and a free trial on the lower three. The Personal plan offers great value for freelancers at $10, with subsequent tiers progressively adding features and extra seats.
The Standard package costs $45 per user per month, and the Advanced package includes three users for $150 per month and lets you add more users for $60 each. For the Enterprise package, as always, you’ll need to get in touch.
Conga Composer
Primary use cases
Conga Composer is part of a suite of CLM (contract lifecycle management) software, which also comprises a CPQ tool and a Digital Commerce tool that handles orders and payment transactions.
As a CLM tool, Conga Composer is designed for document creation across the account lifecycle, so as well as a solid set of sales proposal templates, you’ve also got customizable contracts and account plans.
Preview of DocSend's interface
Standout features
A strong Salesforce integration helps Conga users create some really useful automation, and the document editor is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of editing options that include Word docs and PDFs.
Templates
A comprehensive template library, combined with a powerful solutions manager, allows you to either use existing templates straight out of the box, customize them, or quickly build your own.
Tracking & analytics
As well as effective, accurate engagement data about who’s viewed which pages and for how long, Conga Composer provides real-time engagement notifications to help you stay on top of the deal.
Integrations
As well as extensive Salesforce integrations, Conga Composer offers Sharepoint, Google Drive, and Adobe integrations. Some customers report difficulty integrating Conga Composer with other Conga products, particularly Conga Sign.
Customer support
Users have expressed some frustration with the standard of customer support provided, noting a lack of guidance around onboarding and set-up. Some users also found the customer support staff to be lacking the expertise necessary to solve their problems.
Pricing
Conga Composer’s website doesn’t offer any clues about their pricing plans at all. There’s a free trial sign-up form, and that’s it. Customer review sites seem to indicate a starting price around the $35 per month mark.
Choosing the best Proposify alternative
Your choice of proposal software will ultimately be determined by your product and your sales strategy. For serious sales leaders and methodical teams, flexibility and agility are usually primary considerations.
Fortunately, this is where Qwilr comes into its own, with drag-and-drop editing, ready-to-use templates, electronic signature capabilities, and CRM, cloud, and payment integrations to streamline your processes and eliminate friction across the entire sales cycle.
Users have continuously outlined how easily they can create better proposals and a range of sleek, professional branded company content (including quarterly reports) without any assistance or graphic design experience.
With a full stack of integrations and embeddable functionality, our 14-day free trial will give you the full Qwilr experience and help you ensure you choose the right proposal software for your sales needs.
About the author
Brendan Connaughton|Head of Growth Marketing
Brendan heads up growth marketing and demand generation at Qwilr, overseeing performance marketing, SEO, and lifecycle initiatives. Brendan has been instrumental in developing go-to-market functions for a number of high-growth startups and challenger brands.
