PandaDoc vs. Proposify – Which is Best for Sales Proposals? (2022)
Sales proposals help you outline your offer and are critical to B2B sales. This article compares two of the best: PandaDoc and Proposify.
Note: Here is the summary table for anyone not interested in reading the details.
| Capability | PandaDoc  | Proposify |
|---|---|---|
| G2 Ratings | 4.7/5.0 (1547 Reviews) | 4.7/5.0 (834 Reviews) |
| Paid Pricing | $49/user/month | $49/user/month |
| Templates | 400+ | 60+ |
| CRM Integrations — Small businesses will care less about integration with CRM tools — but you will want this option as your business grows. | Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, Copper, Sugar, Nimble, Zendesk Sell, Insightly, Microsoft Dynamics, Nutshell, Nimble, monday.com | Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive |
| Usability | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| CPQ Support | Yes | No |
| Additional Add-ons | Yes | No |
| Set Signing Order | Yes | No |
| Digital Signatures | Supported in all versions, including the FREE version. | Only in Paid versions which include a 14-day free trial |
| Variables and Custom Fields | Yes | Yes |
 | |
Creating the Sales Proposal – In PandaDoc
In PandaDoc, you have to upgrade to a paid version to use or create templates.
Note: You can create sales proposals without templates, but templates greatly simplify the process.
This upgrade to Essentials will cost you from $19/month to $29/month, depending on whether you pay annually. Note that this is less expensive than the lowest-level paid plan of Proposify.
To make this a valid side-by-side comparison, we upgraded, using the 14-day free trial of PandaDoc.
We can now create our proposal using the 400+ pre-created templates.
After choosing your template, you enter information about the prospect:
As with Proposify, a simple proposal is created from the template, and you can now edit this proposal, adding videos, images, and other formatting.
Updating the Sales Proposal
In PandaDoc, the drag and drop user interface makes it simple to update the business proposal.
Custom Branding
You will want to have your branding on the professional proposals.
In PandaDoc, branding includes:
- Using your logo.
- Use your colors.
- Removing PandaDoc from the proposal email.
- Customizing the email footer included when you mail the proposal.
Note: Branding comes with the Business Plan for $59/user/month and includes:
- Additional integrations
- Auto Reminders
- Approval workflows
On the right, you can drag in various field types, ranging from text, images, pricing tables, videos, and initial and signature fields.
The document editor is one of the best we have worked with.
You can easily update pricing tables by asking questions and then save them in your library for re-use.
Content Library
When working with proposal software, ensure that it has capabilities to save information like this to a central library.
The content and image library will save sellers a great deal of time.
Product Catalog
Along with re-usable components in the content library, you need to ensure your products, and the latest pricing for those products is available in your business proposal software.
PandaDoc does this.
In the image to the right, you can see that product information, such as SKU, name, pricing, currency, description, and imagery, can all be stored in PandaDoc.
This ensures that you deliver accurate and beautiful proposals every single time.
Remember, document automation is only helpful if it is:
- Easy to use — saving sales professionals time
- Beautiful — wowing prospects and closing deals
- Accurate — avoiding back and forth conversations to correct errors
If your sales teams need to look this information up every time, it will slow up your sales process and lead to errors like incorrect pricing sent to prospective customers.
We love that these tools bring standardized templates to your business — allowing you to focus on what you do, not on creating customized proposals.
Pricing Comparison
Now, you can integrate to your other systems, but this requires you to upgrade your plan to either Business at $49/user/month or $89/user/month for Enterprise.
We consider the pricing to be essentially the same between the two products.
Pandadocs comes with 26 vs. the 12 that Proposify comes with, including Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, Copper, Sugar, Nimble, Zendesk Sell, Insightly, Microsoft Dynamics, Nutshell, Nimble, monday.com
PandaDoc Premium Support
PandaDoc has a Premium Support Package which essentially provides you with a dedicated Customer Success Manager. It includes:
- Email and phone support
- A dedicated point-of-contact
- Unlimited onboarding.
- Quarterly Business Reviews.
If your business creates a large variety of proposals, this may be the right customer support option for you. Otherwise, most customers will be satisfied with the standard customer support offering.
Creating the Sales Proposal – In Proposify
In Proposify, click on Templates. I just had to upload my logo, and then it created a template with brand colors based on the logo.
Once you’ve done this, you can enter the Templates Gallery (see link in the image above) to access dozens of out-of-the-box templates. This is incredibly powerful for small businesses to create their proposal templates without time and money.
This is helpful for businesses without design talent as a starting point.
And teams lacking resources can choose to work directly with the Proposify services team to have them create a custom template.
Pricing, as you can see in this screenshot, is:
- $3000 for an up to 10-page template, and $150 for each added page beyond that price.
- If you have a template you simply want Proposify to improve upon, it’s $1000 for up to 2 hours of optimization work and $270 for each additional hour.
- And if you already have a PDF version of your template, the team can convert it into Proposify format for $2000 up to a 20-page PDF file, and $50 for each additional page.
As you work through your document process consider carefully if you have the talent or need help from professionals. Your sales documents will either make you and your sales team look better than the competition — or not.
Leave the right impression as you work to close more deals.
We will simply update the starter template that the system created for us based on our logo.
You can see that this template creates a very simple proposal with 8 pages covering:
- Cover
- Introduction
- Overview
- Services
- Your Investment
- Agreement
- Template Tips and Tricks
- Optional Services
These templates are very easy to work with using standard editing capabilities, and you can add embedded video, images, and robust formatting options.
The templates are also created with multiple tips to guide your team to take advantage of the functionality easily, very well done.
Proposify Support
Proposify includes chat support at its team pricing level. However, with the Business plan, you receive:
- Priority Email and Chat support
- Phone support
- A dedicated Customer Success Manager
- Onboarding
Your operations and sales team will likely benefit from the Business plan, as you will need assistance inserting this seamlessly into your existing sales processes.
Integrations
You can also integrate Proposify with systems like Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, Stripe, and others to pull data into your sales proposals.
However, this is only available with a paid plan. Paid plans come at $49/user/month for Team or $590 per month for Business. We have included the table below to make it easier to compare.
All but the smallest of companies will require one of the team plans as the FREE plan does limit you to 1 user and 5 active proposals.
Proposify vs PandaDoc – Who Won?
Modern sales teams will love either solution, they are both software options that are robust, easy to use and a better option than manually creating and sending proposals.
When your business is ready to invest in a digital document solution, PandaDoc comes out on top for both sales proposal management and electronic signatures.
| Capability | PandaDoc | Proposify |
|---|---|---|
| G2 Ratings | 4.7/5.0 (1547 Reviews) | 4.7/5.0 (834 Reviews) |
| Paid Pricing | $49/user/month | $49/user/month |
| Templates | 400+ | 60+ |
| CRM Integrations — Small businesses will care less about integration with CRM tools — but you will want this option as your business grows. | Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, Copper, Sugar, Nimble, Zendesk Sell, Insightly, Microsoft Dynamics, Nutshell, Nimble, monday.com | Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive |
| Usability | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| CPQ Support | Yes | No |
| Additional Add-ons | Yes | No |
| Set Signing Order | Yes | No |
| Digital Signatures | Supported in all versions, including the FREE version. | Only in Paid versions which include a 14-day free trial |
| Variables and Custom Fields | Yes | Yes |
| |
Note: If you are simply looking for an e-signature tool for business development or sales activities, go with the free version of PandaDoc.
Both of these solutions will help individual sales reps and improve your overall sales process.
Which will you use?