Alternative to Proposify

Proposify's editor

The biggest public gripe about Proposify is their editor. The thing you'll spend 98% of your time using. It's riddled with hundreds of different options, not too different from the thing they designed it to compete with - inDesign.

Better Proposals doesn't have this issue. Our Preview-On-The-Fly editor doesn't make you choose from hundreds of fonts or every available colour. No doubt, Proposify's editor has a lot of options, but if you want ultimate design flexibility, you don't need to pay money for that. You've got it for free. It's called Microsoft Word.

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 provides 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.

Speed of creating proposals

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.

You'll pay a lot more with Proposify for a lot less

Proposify is 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.

On their smallest plan at $35 per month, you only get to send 5 documents a month. If you take a look at their FAQs, you’ll see they’re also planning on charging you for going over that limit in the future. When? It doesn’t say.

What it does say is that, sometime in the future, they’ll start counting your document opens on the principle of an envelope. The moment your client opens a document, it counts towards your monthly limit. Should you go over the limit on your plan, they’ll charge you an extra $1.99 per document open.

With Better Proposals, you get a generous sending limit even on our lowest plan. For $19/month, you can send 50 documents. And even if you go with our mid-range plan, you’ll still get more features than you would with Proposify’s lowest for $6 less. That includes sending from your own domain and custom variables, which you’d need to pay Proposify $49/month for.

Bottom line

This isn't an article bashing Proposify. They have a pretty good product that just seems to be suffering in a few key areas. 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.

We 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.