Love Better Proposals! My clients are always super impressed when they get them and often ask how to set it up. Definitely one of the best investments I've made.

Mukarram Ismail
CEO of AgoraWave
Proposify is a hybrid between true web based proposals and using something like Microsoft Word. They have the basics down so if you're a professional designer and like spending time making your proposals look right then maybe Proposify is for you.
There's lots they do well and some things they don't do so well. Let's explore some key differences between Better Proposals and Proposify in terms of software, features and approach.
Proposify |
Better Proposals |
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Digital signatures | |||
Digital Signatures | |||
Ready to use templates | |||
Ready to use templates |
70+ |
250+ |
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Document analytics | |||
Document analytics | |||
Integrations | |||
Integrations |
13 |
40+ |
|
Free trial | |||
Free trial | |||
Custom domain | |||
Custom domain | |||
Custom branding | |||
Custom branding |
|
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Document tracking | |||
Document tracking | |||
Live chat | |||
Live chat | |||
Document Checker | |||
Document Checker | |||
Payment integrations | |||
Payment integrations |
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Stripe, GoCardless, PayPal |
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.
Zero learning, automatically designed, lightning fast.
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.
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.
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.
Scroll through one of our proposals on the left, compare it to Microsoft Word's on the right
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.
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.
Perfect when just starting out.
$13/user per month
$19 /user per month when paid monthly
Try it FreeCore features:
Ideal for any small business.
$21/user per month
$29 /user per month when paid monthly
Try it FreeEverything in Starter, plus:
Designed for sales teams.
$42/user per month
$49 /user per month when paid monthly
Try it FreeEverything in Premium, plus:
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.
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.