Once you become a sizeable team, you might be looking for proposal software that helps automate creating proposals that's tightly integrated with your CRM. There's a lot of choices in the market today for proposal software. Here's our review of their strengths and weaknesses.

This article is based on real quotes we've heard from users while we were doing our own for the last few months for our own research as we develop Beam.

Beam

Strengths

• Templates and design library: Beam comes with a detailed template library with hundreds of proposal templates. The best part is that once you import these templates into your account, the styles and colors take on what you've set up in your account.
• AI: Beam comes with inbuilt AI capabilities that allow you to generate parts of your proposal very quickly. For example, you can have your 'Scope' section automatically generated, your 'timeline' section automatically generated or 'terms and conditions' tweaked based on context from your CRM and meeting transcripts.
• Affordable pricing: Beam does not upsell features once you've bought a base plan. At $20/user/month, you get everything from CRM integration, buyer engagement analytics, a Slack integration and more listed here. The only thing you'll have to pay extra for is the AI generation capabilities.

Things that can be better

• Beam is developing at a rapid pace, and building out several capabilities. The CPQ part of the product is still evolving and for enterprise businesses that might be selling hundreds of products or variants, Beam may not be a good choice yet.
• Beam does not have a Salesforce integration yet - the HubSpot integration on the other hand is pretty solid. If you're a bigger team that's sticking to Salesforce or moving to Salesforce shortly, you'll have to consider something else.

PandaDoc

Although widely thought about as a DocuSign alternative, PandaDoc lets any business automate proposal creation. PandaDoc has a wide range of templates for you to get started with really quickly. PandaDoc also tightly integrates with HubSpot and allows your team to create proposals from within the CRM.

However there's some downsides to using PandaDoc: we've listed what we've heard from actual users we spoke to, before we started building our PandaDoc alternative, Beam.

Strengths

• Great template library: PandaDoc has thousands of templates to choose from in their template library which makes it really easy to get started (you'll still have to do some work to make your proposals designed based on your brand, though)
• Usable document editor for text-heavy documents: PandaDoc also has a fairly capable document editor that is great for documents that have text-heavy content
• Powerful CRM integration and CPQ: PandaDoc's CPQ is powerful and their CRM integration is solid - you can use dynamic placeholders from your deals and accounts, and have proposals created from right within HubSpot and other CRMs.
• Automated reminders: PandaDoc sends automatic email reminders to your customers if a document is waiting for their signature or inputs. This ensure deals get closed soon faster, and customers seem to love this feature from what we've heard.
• Other capabilities: Legally binding signatures, embeddable videos and the mobile app are some other features of PandaDoc that seem to be widely-loved.

Can be better:

• Harder to create well-designed proposals: PandaDoc's document editor makes it seamless to work with text-heavy documents, but making those documents reflect your brand is harder. We've seen businesses pay PandaDoc consultants hundreds of dollars to just have aesthetically-pleasing PandaDoc templates created. Users and consultants often use Figma or Canva to do the heavy-lifting on page backgrounds and then import them into PandaDoc.
• Gated features make PandaDoc expensive: PandaDoc can get expensive very quickly because features like Salesforce integration, etc. are charged on a per user basis - this is on top of the per user price you pay for the base plan.
• No advanced notifications: While PandaDoc sends email and Slack notifications when your customers view proposals, they are not advanced enough for the needs many customers have. For example, if you want notifications when customers spend more than a certain amount of time on proposals, you'll have to hack things together with Zapier and PandaDoc's APIs.
• Poor AI integration: PandaDoc's AI capabilities focus on helping you edit and rewrite sentences, not on helping you write winning proposals based on past proposal content or the history of engagements your customers have had with your proposals. This is a prerequisite for any modern sales automation software, but PandaDoc is quite behind here.
• No web-based quote calculator: If you want to expose a multipage experience for your customers to choose your products and get an instant quote, that's just not possible with PandaDoc. You'll have to build it on your own and use PandaDoc's APIs to create a document based on the quote that gets generated.  
• No powerful forms: PandaDoc does not have a powerful forms feature. So if you want proposals to be auto-generated based on form submissions on your website, you'll have to stitch together Zapier and Typeform along with PandaDoc to be able to achieve some of your proposal automation usecases.

Proposify

Strengths

• Good templating capabilities: For teams that never used a proposal product in the past, moving to Proposify helps create a centralized template library with approval layers. The template editor offers enough features to help create professional-looking templates.
• Salesforce integration: Proposify is known more for their powerful Salesforce integration (this is aligned with the fact that they're also trying to sell to bigger teams, which is where Salesforce is more common). You can use data from Salesforce in your proposals as variables, and users seem to particularly like the ease of setup.
• Reusable quotes: Proposify makes it easy for your team to store discounts, additional fees, and content blocks within their personal Proposify library. This makes reusing similar pricing easier and reduces the effort to create a quote.

Things that can be better

• Editor issues: Proposify's editor used to be very clunky to use - and it was historically pretty slow to load. The team had worked on this and things seem better now, but it's something to keep in mind when you're evaluating proposal automation products. You can find a lot of reviews about everyday friction that Proposify users face with the editor. Users also reported using several manual workarounds to get around the formatting issues. One person who leads Head of Sales at an enterprise business we spoke to, mentioned that such issues affected internal adoption.
• Training required: Proposify editor also isn't super user-friendly - there are also formatting issues that occur often from what we've heard from actual users and G2 reviews. Therefore, your team might require a fair bit of training to start becoming productive with Proposify.
• Past architecture rewrites: Proposify has gone through an overhaul of their internal technical architecture in the past. This required customers to migrate their templates painstakingly from the old architecture to the new architecture from what we've heard.
• Almost no AI capabilities: Just like PandaDoc, Proposify was built in the previous era. At the time of writing, they barely had any AI capabilities to help you create better proposals.

Qwilr

Strengths

• Superior visual polish: Qwilr is a good choice for businesses where proposal design matters a lot. They're particularly popular among creative agencies, real estate firms, etc. The constraints that Qwilr has placed on their editor ensure that users are steered towards creating well-designed proposal templates.
• Interactive ROI calculator: Very often in proposals, you'll have to demonstrate the value your customer is getting by purchasing your services. Qwilr lets you embed an ROI calculator within your proposals. Your customers can drag a slider along for editable inputs, and see the ROI they're getting. The calculation arithmetic is entirely configurable.
• Versatile embed blocks: Qwilr also comes with embeddable blocks that let you insert Google Maps, Google Forms, Typeform surveys, SlideShare decks, Loom videos, etc. You can also embed any web page into your proposal using iframe embeds.

Things that can be better

• Editor isn't versatile: Users have cited that Qwilr's rigid block level editing restricts customization - for instance, font style cannot be changed for some words or characters within a text block. There's also fewer font options (font sizes can be just small, medium or large but not a specific px or pt) and fewer font styles in the editor.
• Very little AI capabilities: Qwilr has excessively focused on design but has not built anything that actually improves productivity around creating proposals or automating writing scope, solution and other sections with AI. If you're looking for a forward-looking player, they may not be your best bet.
• PDF export issues: The interactive proposal layouts on Qwilr don't render well when converted to PDF. People mention that images don't render well in the PDF, on G2.
• No internal approvals: Unlike Beam, PandaDoc or other products in this space, if you'd like proposals created by your team members to go through an approval workflow, that's simply not possible with Qwilr.  

GetAccept

Strengths

• Sales engagement driven: Unlike PandaDoc, Qwilr and Proposify that have centered their product on proposal document workflows, GetAccept has centered theirs on deal engagement. Their capabilities like video introductions, chat reminders for buyers, and interactive proposals - users have told us - have helped personalize the proposals they send. `
• Reliable customer support: GetAccept particularly shines with their reliable customer support and that's something we've heard (users highlighted getting accurate answers every time they reach out). They also have a strong European footprint.
• Strong Salesforce integration: While GetAccepted started with a focus on HubSpot, we believe their focus has shifted to a tighter integration with Salesforce. GetAccept lets you sync engagement data with Salesforce, which is useful for your win predictions and other information.
• AI and analytics: GetAccept's recent AI capabilities let you edit a proposal with context from your meeting transcripts and other details. The product also scores each proposal you send out, helping predict engagement levels for your proposal.

Things that can be better

• Page style and content customizability: GetAccept's editor and pay layouts look pretty unusual so it might throw some people off the very first time. It looks less like a document, but more like a set of slides with sections. Users felt limited by how GetAccept lets them structure their content, and mention that they weren't able to create complex layouts.
• Template editing cap: This should be tablestakes and we have no idea why this is gated behind the Enterprise plan. The professional plan caps edits to your templates at three. To edit templates more than three times, you'll have to purchase GeAccept's Enterprise plan, the pricing for which is not disclosed on their website.

Which proposal automation software should you choose? Here's your framework.

• If deal rooms and tracking buyer engagement matters the most to you, you should pick GetAccept.
• If the visual nature of the proposal matters to you the most and you're on HubSpot, you should pick Qwilr.
• If you want to something that's tried and tested and the cost does not matter, you should try PandaDoc. But be ready to pay for specific features that cost more than what you're paying for the base plan.
• While Proposify has its users, just be wary of the history of product issues they've had when it comes to document editing capabilities.
• If you want a modern player that offers an excellent document editor, where it's fairly easy to create well-designed proposals at an affordable price point, choose Beam :)

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