Key Takeaways:
- When picking an alternative to Better Proposals, it’s wise to pick a tool that supports your workflow of billing and invoicing as well
- Cone - with its simple yet modern UX, customization capabilities, and more -is a great alternative for Better Proposals users looking for easy-to-use and versatile proposal software and looking to streamline billing and invoicing as well in the same platform at 8$ per user/month.
Top 10 Better Proposals Alternatives in 2024
- Cone
- Qwilr
- BidSketch
- Proposiy
- GoProposal
- Pandadoc
- Loopio
- HoneyBook
- Docusign
- Jotform
Introduction
Utilizing proposal software can garner an average win rate of 45%. From helping you draft proposals faster to streamlining negotiations with clients, there’s a lot that proposal software can do to improve the speed and efficiency of your sales team.
No wonder there’s been an explosion in the number of proposal management tools in recent years!
A popular choice—especially with small- and mid-sized businesses—seems to be Better Proposals. While it is a good option and works well for many businesses, there are many more tools that are just as user-friendly as Better Proposals but offer a lot more features.
In this article, we dissect 10 Better Proposals competitors and explain why they can be a better alternative for you.
Understanding Better Proposals
Better Proposals is an online proposal software that enables sales and other teams to design, send, and track business proposals in a more efficient and organized way. It also integrates with popular CRM software, making it easy for businesses to sync their customer data across key platforms and ensure data accuracy.
Here are some of the key features of Better Proposals:
- Draft branded proposals: Create proposals from scratch, then brand them with your company logo, colors, and more within the document editor.
- Auto-fill client details: Integrate Better Proposals with your CRM tool and automatically add client information to proposals.
- Track proposal engagement: Track when a proposal was opened, how long it was open for, and if it was printed or forwarded.
- Lock content blocks: During negotiations, you can hide parts of the document from clients and share the final version with them once everything’s decided.
- Collect digital signatures: Get your proposals signed right from the Better Proposals platform using their e-signature feature.
At first glance, Better Proposals does seem like the perfect proposal software. But dig deeper, and some limitations become visible. Here are some of the disadvantages that we came across:
- No import capabilities: Better Proposals doesn’t allow users to import documents from outside. You have to build your proposals from scratch.
- Feature limitations: You can only add one signing block and pricing table per proposal. Plus, it has only a dozen or so fonts, limiting your customization options.
- No direct integrations with accounting software: You need to use a third-party connector such as Zapier to integrate Better Proposals with your accounting software.
- Lack of streamlining invoicing and billing: It still leaves gap for better workflow around automated invoicing and billing.
- Limitations on documents sent per month: There is a limit on number of documents sent per month in the Starter and Premium to 50 and it might not be cost-effective for small businesses to pay 50$ per user/month for unlimited proposals.
Some users have also reported that they find the side navigation in Better Proposals to break the flow of the proposal, thus reducing the user experience for clients.
Another limitation with Better Proposals is its lack of a drag-and-drop editor. While a default layout and customizable templates help, users can face limitations when it comes to customizing the layout from end to end.
What to look for in Better Proposals Alternatives? Choosing the right proposal software
This brings us to the next question: What should you look for when picking an alternative proposal tool to Better Proposals? When exploring proposal management software, you'll find that they aren’t all built the same.
Some cater to small businesses and consultancies, while others cater to larger enterprises. They also come with different focus areas and capabilities. You should pick a tool that fits your goals and workflows and, at the same time, keeps your budget in check.
- Versatility: Pick a tool that comes with a flexible proposal editor that allows you to upload documents, modify layouts, add branding, and more.
- Automations: Another factor to consider is workflow automation. Check if your proposal software allows you to automate invoice and billing.
- Integrations: A holistic proposal tool must also sync with your CRM, project management software, and accounting tools to ensure data accuracy and streamlined workflows.
- E-signature and invoicing: Pick a proposal tool that makes the client experience pleasant. This includes built-in signing and payment capabilities so clients don’t have to log into multiple tools.
- Templates: You can also look for proposal tools that come with a Templates library. This can help your team get started easily, customize proposals quickly, or even take content or design inspiration.
- Number of Documents or Proposals: You can look for a proposal tool which offers unlimited proposals.
- Budget: There are few cost-effective options like Cone which offers all the features above and unlimited proposals at $10 per user/month which makes it an attractive alternative.
Top 10 Alternatives to Better Proposals to Explore in 2024
Let’s explore the ten best alternatives to Better Proposals and why they could be a better proposal management tool for your team.
Cone
The first tool on our list is Cone’s Proposal-to-Payment software. Though relatively new to the market, Cone provides an all-in-one proposal management tool that can help you do everything from drafting a proposal to sending invoices, collecting digital signatures, and even receiving payments.
And the best part—it’s not half as expensive as Better Proposals! (Only 10$ per user/month)
Here’s how Cone can help send proposals and close deals faster:
Create modern-looking proposals
Gone are the days of static proposals. With Cone, you can create a webpage-like and mobile-responsive proposal in a matter of minutes. Plus, the Cone editor makes it easy for you to customize the layouts, colors, and more to look on-brand.
In a time crunch? Simply customize one of the existing proposals in the Template Library and ship it out to your prospective clients. Review these templates for example: Video production proposal example, PPC proposal , Digital marketing Proposal template, Marketing consultant proposal.
Give clients a seamless proposal experience
Get your client to digitally sign a document and make their payment from within the proposal itself. They can open, review, and sign your proposal from any device. Plus, you get access to metrics like when they opened it, how many times, and more.
Streamline your invoicing
With Cone, you can generate invoices with just a click. Not only that, but you can also set up a workflow to create invoices automatically for recurring payments. All you have to do is approve it, and it’ll be sent to your client.
Cone’s best features
- Craft interactive proposals: Cone’s proposal editor makes it easy for sales teams to create branded proposals with interactive elements like images, PDFs, videos, and more.
- Get payment information upfront: Embed payment form into your proposals and use them to collect your clients' payment details so you can avoid back-and-forths and generate invoices quickly.
- Automated invoicing: Generates invoice automatically and syncs to accounting software after the proposal is accepted.
- Dynamic price tool or Quotes: Cone provides a robust price tool to produce detailed quotes for different pricing methods.
- Get business insights: Cone’s real-time dashboards can give you a better understanding of your cash flow and revenue projections.
- Connect your tech stack: Integrate Cone with your CRM, accounting, and project management tools to ensure data integrity.
- Streamline payment collection: Not only does Cone integrate with all popular payment getaways, but it also supports multiple payment methods like ACH debit and credit cards, making it easy for clients to make payments.
Cone’s pricing
Essentials - 8$ per user/month
Growth - 11$ per user/month
Qwilr
Qwilr is proposal management software that’s purpose-built for sales teams. It comes with a very modern proposal builder that can make your proposal into an engaging webpage complete with embedded widgets, videos, and more. It also allows clients to sign proposals and make payments right from the webpage.
While Qwilr can seem slightly expensive when compared to Better Proposals, it makes up for it with its modern UI and unique features like an interactive ROI calculator, pricing quotes, and more. Qwilr APIs also allow you to pull in data from other tools and get more insight into client behavior.
Qwilr’s best features
- Create modern proposals: Design a branded, mobile-responsive webpage for each proposal. Add custom fonts, videos, and more to make it interactive.
- Add an ROI calculator: Embed the Qwirl ROI calculator to your proposal and give clients an idea of the value they get from your services.
- Let clients pick their package: Set up flexible pricing options and allow buyers to make their own choices.
- Secure your proposal: Use identity authentication to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the proposal’s landing page.
Qwilr’s pricing
- Business: $35/user per month
- Enterprise: $59/user per month
Bidsketch
Just like Better Proposals, Bidsketch also follows a minimalistic approach toward proposal management. It follows a no-frills approach and only provides the absolute must-have features, making it easy for its users—typically freelancers and independent business owners—to navigate the product.
Unlike Better Proposals (and other proposal tools) that focus on proposal design, Bidsketch focuses on automations and making it easy for clients to read the proposal and sign the deal. In Bidsketch, creating a proposal is as simple as adding text to text boxes and clicking a button. Bidsketch will take care of the design.
It also comes with features like opt-ins, which allow clients to add optional services to the package, and approval messages, which nudge clients toward the next step once they sign a proposal.
However, Bidsketch doesn’t integrate with any payment provider, which means you need to collect payments using a third-party app.
Bidsketch’s best features
- Create webpage-like proposals: Add text to the Bidsketch editor and allow it to create a landing page for your proposal.
- Send proposals for e-signing: Ask clients to sign proposals digitally to save time and close deals faster.
- Direct clients towards payment: Send clients an automatic email with a payment link after they sign a proposal.
- Add optional services: List additional products and packages in your proposal and let clients opt in if they want to.
Bidsketch’s pricing
- Starter: $15 per month
- Solo: $29 per month
- Team: $79 per month
- Business: $149 per month
Proposify
Proposify is one of the oldest proposal software on the market today and has been around for more than a decade.
As such, it comes with a wide variety of features to help salespersons manage their proposals from end to end—right from creating a proposal to signing it and collecting payment. It is also one of the few proposal software solutions that come with a mobile app.
With Proposify, you get a flexible proposal editor, advanced customizations, and a great set of integrations. Plus, you can even add your chat app to proposals to talk to clients and answer their questions in real time.
However, Proposify is not all great and faces some of the same limitations as Better Proposals. You can’t upload documents, and the tool doesn’t provide any APIs.
Proposify’s best features
- Design branded proposals: Add your brand color and font, embed videos, and more to make your proposals engaging and on-brand.
- Set up interactive pricing: Create pricing tables with different services, tax breakdowns, and more to allow clients to create their own custom packages.
- Connect with your tech stack: Integrate Proposify with your CRM, accounting, and project management tools to centralize data and avoid discrepancies.
- Collaborate via chat: Add a chat widget to your proposals and make it easy for your clients to get in touch with you.
- Manage proposals on the go: With Proposify’s mobile app, you can view proposals and monitor activity from anywhere.
Proposify’s pricing
- Team: $49/user per month
- Business: Custom pricing
GoProposal
GoProposal is a proposal software that’s tailored toward accounting firms and bookkeeping professionals. As such, it comes with some of the strongest integrations with accounting software like Xero and Quickbooks, to name a few.
The tool also comes with other vertical-specific features, such as professional templates catering to accounting firms and user portals to allow team members to manage their client base.
While GoProposal is a great Better Proposals alternative for any accounting firm, it’s not as well-rounded as some of the other proposal software on this list. For example, GoProposal doesn’t provide proposal analytics, support notifications, or workflow automation.
GoProposal’s best features
- Generate proposals with a click: GoProposal comes with an easy proposal editor that allows accountancy firms to create proposals with just a click or two.
- Standardize your pricing: Create a pricing table with your various services and break down the costs to give clients confidence.
- Save time on negotiations: Allow clients to pick which services they require and modify your proposal accordingly.
- Integrate with accounting software: Sync all data with your accounting software to avoid manual entry and make invoice generation easier.
GoProposal’s pricing
- Solo: $75 per user, per month
- Basic: $120 per user, per month
- Standard: $150 for two users, per month
- Premium: $255 for 10 users, per month
Learn more about proposal and engagement letter software for accountants.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a document signing tool that also provides users with a pretty nifty proposal management solution. What makes PandaDoc stand out from other e-signing tools is its almost equal focus on both document signing and proposal generation.
You can see this in the proposal-specific features that PandaDoc provides, such as the drag-and-drop proposal builder, ready-to-use proposal templates, pricing tables, product catalogs, and more. All of these are features you might not find in a regular e-signature tool.
PandaDoc is also E-SIGN, UETA, SOC2, and HIPAA compliant, making it one of the most secure alternatives for enterprises exploring Better Proposals alternatives.
PandaDoc’s best features
- Write and edit proposals quickly: Upload a document, customize a template, or draft one from scratch. Add interactive elements like videos and forms to make them more engaging.
- Specify signing order: Have multiple signatories for a proposal? Set the order in which they have to sign the proposal.
- Set up custom product catalogs: Create a catalog for all your products and services, add them to folders, and even export them.
- Integrate with your CRM: Connect PandaDoc with your CRM tool to ensure real-time data sync and minimize errors.
- Visualize trends: Transform raw metrics into graphs, identify patterns, and get actionable information.
PandaDoc’s pricing
- Essentials: $35 per user, per month
- Business: $65 per user, per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Learn more about Pandadoc competitors.
HoneyBook
Honeybook calls itself an ‘all-in-one clientflow platform’ that provides a suite of tools to help with a multitude of tasks: proposal creation, invoice generation, and contract management.
Targeted at independent contractors and small business owners, Honeybook is a great tool for people who are just getting started and need a simple proposal tool.
What makes Honeybook a good alternative to Better Proposals is the additional tools you get along with the proposal software—forms, meeting scheduler, and automations. However, this ‘kitchen sink’ approach might mean you miss out on some crucial capabilities like contract renewals or access to a content library.
Also, while Honeybook doesn’t provide any default templates, you can create your own custom ones or reuse existing proposals.
HoneyBook’s best features
- Prepare an online proposal: Draft your proposal and autofill client information, location, and more right from Honeybook’s editor.
- Send reminders to clients: Schedule automated emails at specific intervals to nudge clients to open or review a proposal.
- Get notified about status updates: Get email notifications when a proposal is opened, viewed, or signed.
- Make payments hassle-free: Set up a click-to-pay payment collection process, which allows clients to pay right from the proposal view without having to log into a new app.
HoneyBook’s pricing
- Starter: $19 per month
- Essential: $39 per month
- Premium: $79 per month
Loopio
Loopio approaches proposal management in a slightly different way when compared to Better Proposals. An RFP software solution, Loopio helps businesses handle a variety of functions, such as requests for proposals (RFPs), requests for queries (RFQs), and other types of questionnaires.
If you’re a growth-stage business looking for a ‘kitchen-sink’ tool to handle multiple things—and one of them is sales proposals—then go for Loopio.
It comes with all of the basics like proposal templates, a content library, and even project management features to help your team track proposal progress.
However, you will need to integrate with an e-signing tool and payment solution for the rest of your proposal workflow—getting your document signed and collecting payment from clients.
Loopio’s best features
- Create personalized proposals: Loopio’s proposal builder comes with pre-set themes and layouts, making it easy for sales reps to draft branded proposals.
- Centralize knowledge with a content library: Set up a library of pre-approved content blocks that can be reused in different proposals to ensure consistency.
- Keep your team informed: Loopio enables your sales team to assign questions, add comments, and set deadlines so everyone knows what they should do.
- Auto-fill answers with AI: Speed up reviews and negotiations by asking AI to suggest answers based on previous proposals.
Loopio’s pricing
- Essentials: Custom pricing
- Plus: Custom pricing
- Advanced: Custom pricing
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
DocuSign
DocuSign, as the name suggests, is an online e-signature tool. The tool lets you sign documents digitally. If you’re someone who’s using a word processing tool like MS Word to draft your proposals, then you can just upload it to DocuSign and send it for signing.
This makes it a cost-effective Better Proposals alternative for freelancers and small consultancies, although it isn’t a proposal management software.
If you’re a larger team, you can also use DocuSign’s Contract Management (CLM) solution to draft your proposals from scratch and send them for review. This comes with added benefits like auto-filling data from your CRM, a library or pre-approved content, and more.
However, keep in mind that DocuSign is not proposal management or generation software, and as such, there will be little to zero templates for business proposals. Your team will have to set up your proposal workflows from scratch.
You might also miss out on some of the other proposal-specific features like pricing catalogs, dynamic pricing, and proposal analytics.
Docusign’s best features
- Sign proposals digitally: Upload proposal documents and send them for signing to multiple signatories, and even mention the order in which the proposal has to be signed.
- Collect payment directly: DocuSign also integrates with top payment gateways, making it easy for clients to make payments as soon as they sign a proposal.
- Automate your workflow: Create a pre-set workflow for the draft, review, signing, and approval to speed up the process.
- Extract in-depth insights with AI: DocuSign’s gen-AI capabilities make it easy for sales reps to dig into data, analyze risks, and discover trends that can help predict client behavior and revenue.
Docusign’s pricing
- Personal: $15 per month
- Standard: $45 per month
- Business Pro: $55 per month
Jotform
While it’s not your typical proposal software, Jotform comes with a suite of tools—PDF editor, approval workflows, e-sign, and forms—that, when combined, can work as an alternative for Better Proposals. Plus, Jotform also provides a whole bunch of proposal templates to help you get started faster.
However, as Jotform is not built to be a proposal management tool, you might not find it as user-friendly as other tools that specifically cater to proposal management. For example, you might not be able to sync this data with your accounting software or make payments right from Jotform.
Jotform’s best features
- Turn PDFs into proposals: Jotform allows you to both create fillable PDF proposals to send to clients and convert PDFs to webforms to ensure better readability.
- Set up an approval process: Enable managers to review and approve all proposals before sending them to clients by creating automated approval workflows.
- Create custom templates: Save common proposals as templates and use them for future clients in the same audience persona or ICP.
- Maintain an audit trail: Jotform tracks all proposals, their version histories, and more so you are always audit-ready.
Jotform’s pricing
- Starter: Free
- Bronze: $39 per month
- Silver: $49 per month
- Gold: $129 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Streamline proposal management with Cone
Cone is pretty similar to Better Proposals when it comes to modern UX and simplicity in feature workflows. At the same time, it also doesn’t shy away from advanced customizations and streamling you entire workflow of invoicing and billing.
Whether your priorities lie in customizable templates, seamless integration with other tools, real-time tracking and analytics, or innovative features like video embedding—it’s all possible with Cone’s all-in-one Proposal-to-Payment software.
Also, did we mention it allows you to send proposals in under 10 seconds, save up to 40 hours every month, and step up your bottom-line metrics by over 27%? How awesome is that!
Sign up for free and get started immediately.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Prospero and Better Proposals?
While Better Proposals and Prospero are two popular proposal software, they come with their own share of differences. The former is a simple proposal maker that’s better suited for smaller teams and is known for its simple UI and pay-as-you-go pricing structure that starts at $10 per user per month.
Better Proposals, on the other hand, comes with more advanced features, in-depth proposal analytics, a content library, and a lot more templates than Prospero. However, it’s slightly more expensive and starts at $19 per user per month.
What is an alternative value proposal for a project?
An alternative value proposal (AVP) is a document presented alongside the main proposal stating additional options, benefits, and limitations. It offers different trade-offs between factors like cost, time, and risk. It's used when you're not sure about the best approach or when stakeholders have multiple priorities or needs.
Is Better Proposals free?
No, Better Proposals doesn’t provide a free plan. However, it does provide a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll have to subscribe to one of the paid plans.