If you want to learn more about best software for business proposals, read on. Our goal is to help you in choosing best proposal software for your business. If you are looking for the best free proposal software service, we’ve collected all information needed and made another article about this topic here.
Every day, online companies roll out their latest new business proposals software. How do you know you’re choosing the best software for you? I’ve been there myself and I know how confusing it can be. That’s why I’ve created this post for you to give you all the information about the best software for business proposals.
Proposify
We can highly recommend Proposify because it is the software we use in-house. The suite of options has grown since we first selected this tool, and Proposify still holds up. Our need was to produce professional, custom business proposals, but with the benefit of automation. Proposify develops sleek proposals using the helpful reusable Content Library and a drag-and-drop interface, enabling new documents to be built quickly and accurately. Once set-up, Proposify’s user-friendly interface can save hours in preparation time per proposal.
From the client’s point of view, they receive a professional and accessible proposal. We have had good feedback on the ease of review, modifications, and signing. Tracking active offers and how clients interact with each section has been valuable for targeting follow-up communication and winning sales.
Proposify is best for medium- to large-sized businesses with single or multi-person sales and marketing teams sending enough proposals that it warrants investing in a tool to streamline your process. It’s a fine tool for small businesses also, but Proposify’s business strategy is firmly focused on enterprise clients as of 2020, according to Proposify’s Director of Sales and Affiliate Manager.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc’s platform is honed to quickly produce sleek business proposals, move them through the sales process, and better understand how clients interact with proposals. The tool is intuitive for any user and includes the critical automaton and client interaction tracking that makes proposal creation software so valuable.
PandaDoc allows client payment through PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Authorize.net, which provides more options for companies using different payment systems. In comparison, Proposify only offers Stripe.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook offers useful but basic business proposals with the core feature that makes proposal creation software valuable. Its ability to auto-populate client information makes up for the limited formatting and content options on the platform. This feature eliminates the need for manual proposal editing with client information and allows for rapid proposal preparation.
HoneyBook’s proposals are just one feature in the suite of tools built for managing a small business. Proposals feed into the appointment and invoicing tools, allowing the company to be managed in one place. In addition, HoneyBook’s one paid plan option allows for unlimited users, enabling team collaboration to take place on one platform.
Better Proposals
Better Proposals is a simple-to-use proposal builder with features like automatic formatting, contact management, collaboration, e-signature capabilities, pipeline management, and more.
Its ready-made templates and drag-and-drop tools make creating professional-looking proposals easy. Predesigned templates include proposals, quotes, contracts, statements of work, and online brochures. Better Proposals offers dozens of integrations via Zapier. Support is available through the Help and Support center on the company’s website.
Audience: Freelancers and small businesses
Pricing: 14-day free trial available; paid plans begin at $19 per user, per month
Prospero
Prospero offers more than 30 proposal templates geared to different niches such as photography, graphic design, and writing. You can edit and customize templates with your own branding, including logos, images, and videos.
Prospero features e-signature capabilities, the ability to send a proposal directly to clients, and various integrations, such as Stripe, FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and others. Support is available through the “Help” prompt inside the dashboard and via email.
Audience: Solo entrepreneurs and freelancers
Pricing: 21-day trial for $1; unlimited proposals for $8 per month (or $5 per month if paid annually)
QuoteWerks
QuoteWerks is sales quote and proposal software that claims it “can save time and increase deals.”
You’ll be able to create interactive PDF proposals using templates and seamlessly integrate them with your customer relationship management tool of choice. You can also create quotes, invoices, and purchase orders, plus build reports and manage databases.
QuoteWerks offers 55-plus integrations with other tools, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Outlook, Gmail, QuickBooks, more than 10 payment gateways, and many, many more. Support is available via phone during business hours as well as online.
Audience: Most industries and companies of all sizes; common users include IT solution providers, manufacturers, value-added resellers (VARs), and managed service providers
Pricing: Free trial available; plans start at $15 per user, per month and come with a 30-day money-back guarantee
Jotform
Jotform is a simple and stress-free solution for creating proposals. It allows you to collect relevant data like contact information and get e-signatures on final proposals.
You can create a winning, professional-looking proposal in minutes using one of Jotform’s 32 free proposal templates. You’ll be able to add sections like objectives, strategy, and budget information.
Proposal submissions will automatically be converted into PDFs that are easy to print, pitch, and present. You can personalize your document using Jotform’s PDF Editor, and customize it with additional form fields and your choice of fonts and colors.
Jotform also offers a free project proposal form, commonly used by an organization’s project team or by a research company to convince customers or clients to approve the proposed project or research.
Additionally, Jotform offers consulting proposal templates with form fields for company and customer details, project description, company background, objective, scope of work, start date, completion date, consulting rates, payment terms, and signatures. Job proposal form templates are available when you need to create a job proposal quickly.
And finally, Jotform’s 270+ free table templates are ideal for team projects and when you need to create a database for tracking and managing proposals. All data is stored securely in your Jotform account, which you can access seamlessly on any device.
The Jotform customer support team is available 24-7.
Audience: Teams in the nonprofit, healthcare, real estate, human resources, marketing, and small business categories, as well as individuals and solo business owners
Pricing: All of the above options available for free; if you want more forms, submissions, or storage, you can upgrade to one of the paid plans
Whether you’re a freelancer, a small business, or a medium-sized or large enterprise, there’s likely a proposal management software out there that’s just right for your use case, your budget, and your business goals.
Bidsketch
Bidsketch design
This is where Bidsketch falls down somewhat. They haven’t kept up with design standards of even the last 10 years which for a customer facing product could potentially have a negative effect on your ability to win work.
Bidsketch pricing
Bidsketch is priced pretty much in line with the other major players but lacks some of the features and design polish that justify that price. You’ll need to pay $29 to get a fully unbranded experience. Fair price but the design polish makes that a bit of a steep ask.
Who is Bidsketch typically for?
It’s designed for and mainly marketed towards freelancers and web designers. Like any half-decent proposal software, you can customize the templates to suit any industry.
Bidsketch mobile support
It’s possibly down to the design being somewhat on the poor side but the mobile viewer (if you can call it that) is very uninspiring. If your proposal was opened on a phone it wouldn’t be presenting your business in its best light.
Bidsketch standout feature?
Looking at their website and marketing, the feature they’re still big on is the content library. This is standard across most proposal software these days and has been for years. They’re also massive on variables, or merge tags.
Think of it like a mail merge. You create 1 proposal and when sending it, it automatically replaces the name, company name, etc. Both excellent, time-saving features when creating proposals but far from groundbreaking.
Bidsketch integrations
Bidsketch is incredibly light on integrations. They seem to rely heavily on Zapier to expand their reach but in terms of proper, native integrations they have 6 with one of them being a side project of theirs.
Bidsketch templates
All their templates are written for the web, marketing and software industries. They don’t have much in the way of templates written for other industries, the design of the templates varies massively.
They’ve given a reasonable amount of attention to some templates and not for others. From a sales perspective, many are questionable.
Common complaints from review sites?
It’s just old. What kind of complaints do you have about a 10 year old car that hasn’t been serviced? The major worrying complaint that pops up time and time again is the ‘Accept proposal’ button not working for clients. This isn’t something we’ve experienced personally but a quick look on any review sites and you’ll see it in all different shapes and sizes.
Closing thoughts on Bidsketch
We have a lot to thank them for. They were the pioneer of the proposal management software industry and they deserve the respect and success they’ve had. That said, they haven’t modernised the software and have been overtaken by younger and more hungry proposal software businesses.
Qwilr
Qwilr design
Qwilr’s design ability is almost unmatched in the proposal software industry. Classy, minimalist, modern – it’s everything you want in a proposal, so when your software provides practices what it preaches then you know you’re off to a cracking start!
Qwilr pricing
Not cheap by a long shot. They have several plans but there’s little point talking about anything less than their $79/mo plan as anything less simply doesn’t have the features required.
If you want a completely unbranded experience then you’ll need to spend $3,000 a year with an annual commitment. Failure to do that will leave you sending your customers to yourcompany.qwilr.com for your proposals.
Who is Qwilr typically for
It contains the ease of use to be suitable across the board, the features aren’t too heavy on the corporate side (like PandaDoc) and appeal to freelancers too with modern design so they appeal across the board but it’s clear with the pricing that they are favouring the bigger spenders.
Qwilr mobile support
Absolutely superb. Client proposals will look smart on phones and tablets which is exactly how things should be. Qwilr definitely think of things in similar ways to us at Better Proposals – certainly when it comes to proposals being mobile friendly.
What’s Qwilr standout feature?
Their design, it’s world class and while they’ve adapted their viewer to look similar to ours, they’ve done it in their own way. They’re certainly one of the front runners in the design department.
Qwilr integrations
Rather disappointingly, they only have 9 integrations which is incredibly low for a company of Qwilr’s stature. You’d think this would be something they put more effort into moving forward.
Qwilr templates
With 50 templates, there’s certainly no shortage of design ideas. They all look outstanding so you’ll always look like you have your stuff together when pitching for work, at least from a design point of view. If there is a downside, it’s the content of the templates.
It’s clear design is a major focus but there’s a significant issue with the content – it’s very very poor from a sales point of view. It is unclear if it’s example content and not designed for use.
Maybe you’re supposed to supply your own? Either way, it’s important to check the templates and consider bringing in a proposal writing expert to polish it up.
Common complaints from review sites?
The general consensus is it’s pretty buggy, lots of things are “90% there” which might be good enough for some. In fairness, people do seem happy with the workarounds. One chap said he spends a few hours making the PDF version upon request because it’s not up to standard but in his own words admits it’s not frequent enough to be a problem.
Closing thoughts on Qwilr
In summary, they have thought about the problem in the right way in our opinion and their execution of the solution is pretty solid. Yes, it’s a bit buggy according to online reviews but of all of the options out there, it’s one of the better ones.
Conclusion:
Business proposals are compelling, formal documents that outline your strategy, actions, plans and goals for a project. They can be used to gain support or funding from key players such as funding agencies and/or prospective funders.