Layout of your proposals
Despite claiming to be moving towards a paperless world, their proposals are still designed around the concept of a piece of paper. This means you still need to adjust your proposal to sit on sheets of paper even on a computer screen.
We know that proposals get printed less than 0.2% of the time so there's just no need for that in this day and age.
With Better Proposals you're working with web pages. Your content is infinite. This means no worrying about formatting your text, resizing things, resizing pictures. Just throw in your content and let the automatic designer handle everything.
Templates
The templates Proposify provide are very weak from a sales perspective. Even if you were to use their software, I would recommend hiring a professional to write your proposal content. It's written as example content which means you need to edit every bit of it and frankly, from a design perspective is pretty weak. Their covers do look cool to be fair.
Of course, you're always going to have to tailor any proposal template to each client but every template available in the Better Proposals marketplace has won business. Not only by our customers but by us when we ran our digital agency and our close business friends.
Viewing on a phone
Over 70% of email in general is opened on phones now. This includes your proposals and highlights the fact that they need to look class on a phone. Here's a screenshot of one of our public templates and one of Proposify's. This isn't an unfair comparison. Simply a random screenshot of two pages on two random proposals.
Speed
One of Proposify's primary selling points is how fast you'll get your proposals done vs using inDesign. It's clear this isn't the case.
We've heard from hundreds of their ex-customers over the years about how it's no different to using something like Microsoft Word. They were looking for something simpler. It seems faster until you realise that everything has a setting, you can change the colour of everything and you need to manually size everything up so it fits on your page.
That's not faster than inDesign or Word. In fact, it's no different at all.
Pricing
Proposify have a successful business, there's no doubt but their pricing certainly isn't suitable for small agencies sending 1 or 2 proposals each month. They seem to hold back their best features for their higher paid plans.
Worse yet, their smallest plan at $25 per month still displays their branding and if you have more than 5 proposals in your account at all, you need to TRIPLE your payment to them to $75 ($100 if you don't commit annually).
A bit harsh to charge more money to a company that has outstanding proposals. With us, it's a sending limit each month so when we say you can send 10 proposals on our $19 per month plan that means you can have 76 drafts and 94 outstanding proposals if you like, you're only limited by what you can send.
Every paid plan with Better Proposals has all premium features from advanced reporting to integrations and being completely unbranded, and you'll find our pay as you go plan almost as good as their lowest paid plan.
This isn't an article bashing Proposify. They've done an incredible job to stay in business for the amount of time they have and they deserve credit for that. That said, the writing is on the wall and it seems if you look on review sites it doesn't take long for the same criticisms to come up again and again.
I hope they actually move to true web based proposals and improve their editor. Competition is good for everyone but right now, if you want a simple to use proposal system that saves you hours, your clients will love and doesn't need a training manual or a degree in design then consider trying out Better Proposals free.
A bit harsh to charge more money to a company that has outstanding proposals. With us, it's a sending limit each month so when we say you can send 10 proposals on our $19 per month plan that means you can have 76 drafts and 94 outstanding proposals if you like, you're only limited by what you can send.