Alternative to Qwilr

Set it up once, not every time

For all the bells and whistles Qwilr offers in terms of design, it falls surprisingly short on the basics that make your proposal process smooth and efficient.

The clear lack of global settings is something you’ll notice almost immediately. Simple things like your default currency or tax rate can't be set, so you’re left manually adjusting them every time.

The same applies to products and services. While you can add them inside a Qwilr page, there’s no centralized place to manage or update them. If pricing changes, your only option is to delete the old entry and recreate it.

All of this adds up to a lot of repetitive work that simply shouldn’t be necessary. With Better Proposals, it isn't.

You get your global settings out of the way first so that they automatically apply to your documents. You don't need to keep switching from our default currency to yours. You don't need to edit a document to make changes to products.

You set things up once and it simply works in the background. And if something changes, you update it in one place.

Speaking of one...

Qwilr only lets you have one set of brand settings inside your account. On one hand, seeing that those settings are limited to colors, fonts, your logo, and brand name, it doesn't seem like a big deal.

On the other, this quickly becomes restrictive. Even if you aren’t working across multiple brands, you still don’t have much flexibility to adapt your documents for different use cases.

For example, you might want a more corporate look for enterprise clients, a simpler layout for smaller deals, or slightly different styling for contracts versus sales proposals.

With only one set of brand settings, all of this has to be done manually inside each document. Apart from slowing you down, this makes consistency almost impossible to maintain if you're working with a team.

With Better Proposals, you’re not limited to a single setup. You can create and manage multiple brands, each with their own colours, fonts, logos, and financial settings. You simply need to choose which settings to apply to which document while creating it.

Everything stays consistent by default, and your team can work from the same predefined setups. Your proposals always look the way they’re supposed to, no matter who sends them.

Our Proposal Editor

Zero learning, automatically designed, lightning fast.

Document creation

When it comes to document creation, Qwilr and Better Proposals both organize your content in blocks. Documents can be created either from scratch or from a template, and you also have the option of adding media and design elements in both of our editors.

That said, if you want to keep your Qwilr sidebar navigation out of convenience for your client, you're in for a ride. Qwilr doesn't let you group your blocks into sections.

As a result, each block of content you add gets listed in your navigation menu. No worries though - if you want to declutter the menu, all you need to do is exclude blocks from it. One by one.

What's more, Qwilr's navigation menu sits on top of the document rather than being part of it. When the menu expands, the layout you worked hard on gets pushed around and distorted.

Better Proposals has your back with blocks organized into clear sections. Your navigation stays clean and organized no matter how long your document gets. It's also a part of your document, so your layout stays exactly as you designed it.

Qwilr's navigation menu isn't the only thing you need to clean up

Since we're on the topic of document creation, it's worth mentioning what happens when you create one from a template with Qwilr.

All documents you create from the same template will keep the template name in your documents list. If you don't want to end up with a list of 20 documents all named "Sales Proposal", you'll need to rename them manually.

There’s no proper setup stage when creating a document, so you can’t assign a client or pull in key details at that point. There are also no document type labels to help you differentiate between proposals, contracts, and other documents.

With Better Proposals, this is all handled upfront. When creating a document, you assign the client, pick the document type, and set the key details. Your documents are named properly from the start, and your list stays organized without you having to go back and fix things later.

Bringing in your existing templates

If you already have a template you love, both Qwilr and Better Proposals let you bring it over and modernize it. With Better Proposals, it's as simple as using our free document importer. Just upload your doc and it's converted in a few clicks.

While Qwilr also lets you import your own template, they take a different approach by leaving it up to AI. In theory, you upload a PDF and AI converts it into a Qwilr page.

In reality, the results are inconsistent and need a lot of cleanup before you have a usable template. To be fair, they do say so themselves. Their terms point out that AI-generated content can contain errors and that it's up to you to review everything.

What their terms don't point out? How exactly the content of the document you upload is handled within that AI workflow. If you're working with sensitive data, that's definitely something you don't want to take guesses on.

Structured manual work or automation?

Qwilr’s account tokens give the impression of automation, but they’re essentially placeholders you have to fill in yourself. When using tokens, you'll be prompted to fill in the values even for basic details the platform already knows - like your own name.

Some of this comes down to the lack of global settings we mentioned earlier. As there's no central place for these values to live, you’re left filling them in over and over again.

With Better Proposals, variables are actually connected to your data. Your details, your client’s information, expiry dates, and other key fields are pulled in automatically.

You can also use our Merge Tags in more than just your documents for fast and easy personalization. They work in all customizable messages, on cover pages, in client emails, and inside your Onboarding flows. And yes, they also work with our CRM integrations.

Pricing

Last but not least, it’s time to talk about value for money. Qwilr offers two plans: Business at $39/user/month and Enterprise at $59/user/month.

The catch is, if you want to remove all mention of Qwilr and go for a fully branded look, you'll need to go Enterprise. Qwilr's Enterprise plan is billed annually and has a 10-user minimum.

Better Proposals offers three plans: Starter at $19/user/month, Premium at $29/user/month, and Enterprise at $49/user/month. For all three plans, you can choose to pay on a monthly basis or get the annual subscription that includes a discount. In addition to that, there are no minimum user requirements, even on our Enterprise plan.

Our Starter plan is designed for freelancers who are just starting out. Since Qwilr doesn’t offer a similar plan for up-and-coming businesses, we’ll stick to comparing their Business plan to our Premium plan and both of our Enterprise plans. For the sake of fairness, we’ll also stick to annual pricing since Qwilr doesn’t offer a month-to-month payment option on their Enterprise plan.

Qwilr’s Business plan vs Better Proposals Premium plan

At $35/user/month billed annually, Qwilr’s Business plan will cost you $420 a year. In addition to standard features such as eSignatures or analytics, you get to send unlimited Qwilr Pages (documents), set passwords on documents, and integrate with HubSpot. What you don’t get is a Salesforce integration or the ability to set your custom domain and remove Qwilr branding.

At $29/user/month billed annually, Better Proposals’ Premium plan will cost $249 a year (annual subscription discount applies). Along with standard features, you’ll also get to have multiple brand settings, set a custom domain, and remove all our branding. On top of that, both HubSpot and Salesforce integrations, as well as our API, are included in the price.

What you won’t be able to do on our Premium plan and can do on Qwilr’s Business plan is set passwords to your documents. However, in Better Proposals, you don’t need to. Since every client you send a document to through Better Proposals gets a unique, encrypted link, password protection is just an added layer of security, not a necessity.

With Qwilr, document sharing works like sharing any link - you set it to live and it’s available to anyone who has access to it. You or anyone on your team can accidentally share the wrong link with the wrong person, so password protection is necessary for data security.

Qwilr’s Enterprise plan vs Better Proposals’ Enterprise plan

At $59/user/month billed annually, Qwilr’s Enterprise plan will cost at least $7080 a year. And before you say the math isn’t adding up, let us remind you that the minimum number of users is ten. Now that we got that out of the way, you might be wondering what you’re getting.

For a minimum of $7k a year, Qwilr lets you use a custom domain and remove their branding. You’ll also be able to integrate with Salesforce and set team permissions. That said, you still won’t be able to have multiple brand settings. You also don't get access to their API - it's a paid add-on.

While you can get the Better Proposals Enterprise plan even as a single user, we’ll take ten as an example in the interest of a fair comparison. So, at $49/user/month billed annually, Better Proposals’ Enterprise plan will cost $4990 a year for ten users (annual subscription discount applies).

Compared to Qwilr’s pricing, that’s 2k less right off the bat. What’s more, you don’t have to pay extra for the API with Better Proposals - it’s included in the plan. You also get to set team permissions, set passwords on documents for an added layer of security, and completely customize your branding. And on top of that, you get access to our advanced HubSpot and Salesforce integrations that let you launch Better Proposals directly from your CRM.

Final thoughts

The bottom line is simple: Qwilr looks great on first impressions, but Better Proposals is the platform built to work better, scale easier, and cost you less as you grow.

If you want completely branded online documents with a modern website feel, you can get them at $29/user/month with Better Proposals. If you want the same with Qwilr, you’ll have to pay $59 times ten users, for 12 months, plus give them a cut for each payment you take.

Both tools give you modern, great-looking documents, so you’re not really sacrificing design either way. The biggest difference is what happens once you actually start using the system day to day.

Aside from your revenue, Qwilr will also chip away at your time by having you manually adjust things like currencies and document details over and over again. Better Proposals lets those settings work for you in the background instead.