The Truth:
PadaDoc Pricing

PandaDoc Pricing

PandaDoc's pricing looks fair and reasonable on the outside. Lots of features for not a lot of money until you realize you get no integrations until you double your original spend. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

They won't allow you to whitelist your domain until you're on their Enterprise plan which runs into the thousands. This means every proposal you send essentially comes from PandaDoc instead of you.

There are no custom domain options on PandaDoc which means you're just an advert for their service. This kind of "growth hacking" worked nicely for Hotmail in 1999 but it's not appropriate for professional business software. Every proposal you send will have "PandaDoc" plastered all over it.

Here's the trick

Assuming you start on their lowest plan at $35/month, you’ll soon see there’s a whole host of basic features missing from your plan. You get to save only five templates, you can’t have your own branding, can’t collect payments. Their Starter plan functions like MS Word, but with eSignatures.

This means if you aren’t prepared to double your payment to them, you’ll be stuck. It gets worse: if you got two users, then you’ll be $70 to $130. Ultimately though, to get the really good stuff, you need to speak to a salesperson and be sold a custom plan.

How does PandaDoc's pricing compare to Better Proposals pricing?

With Better Proposals, you start at a reasonable $19 which allows you to use your brand colors, add your logo, and customize your proposals. Want to send more documents and remove our logo? No problem, upgrade to the $49/month plan, get almost all the features we offer, and a personalized onboarding call.

Try Better Proposals free for 14 days. Yes, we have a few less features than PandaDoc but we're happy serving everyone, no matter the size of your business or your sales team.

PandaDoc doesn't produce the most exciting looking documents

Of course, design is subjective but from a visual perspective, which do you think is going to do you more good when sending to your client?

This is one of their public showcase templates

...or Better Proposals

When sending a proposal to a potential client, you want to build trust and the quickest way to do that (all things being equal) is by sending through an amazing looking proposal. If you send something that looks like a legal document with an attempt to win the business, it’s always going to be an uphill struggle.

 

Here's what they look like on mobile

Scroll through one of our proposals on the left, compare it to PadaDoc's on the right

Right now in the Better Proposals library, there are over 200 templates and 40+ integrations to choose from with more being added regularly.

Speed of sending

There’s always going to be a compromise. If you had unlimited time, you could make something look good in PandaDoc but what you really want are fast, efficient, quality proposals sent in minutes. That’s exactly what Better Proposals will give you.

You set all your branding up in one place and simply alter the content for your client each time. We have an unofficial tagline here which is ‘Just Write’. That’s all you’ll need to do - just focus on your client and their problems and explain how you’ll solve them. Let us worry about the rest.

Our Proposal Editor

Zero learning, automatically designed, lightning fast.

Price

PandaDoc is not aimed at the freelancer / small business. That is evident and they brutally punish you in their pricing. They limit you to 5 templates and having over 70% of their features not available until you pay $65/month/user. If you want their mid-range plan with 5 users, it's going to cost you $325/month compared to $145 with Better Proposals.