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 value for money. For the sake of fairness, we’ll stick to annual pricing since Qwilr doesn’t offer a month-to-month payment option on two of their three plans.

Qwilr's Starter plan will set you back $420/year, plus a 0.09% fee on every payment you take from a client. Just to be clear, this is a fee going directly to Qwilr in addition to Stripe's processing fees and the subscription you're already paying for.

Qwilr's Starter also limits your analytics history to 60 days and doesn't include live chat support. That said, it does allow you to add more than one user and includes unlimited manually created documents.

Better Proposals also offers a Starter plan, but it’s designed for one person sending up to ten documents a month. You get human live chat support, analytics without a history cap, and payments through Stripe, PayPal, or GoCardless. We won't take our own cut of your payments, and the annual pricing is $149.

If you do need more document sends as a single user, Better Proposals' Premium has it - for $171 less than you'd pay for Qwilr's Starter.

Our Premium plan is $249/user/year and includes custom branding, a custom domain, CRM integrations (including Salesforce), and the API usage is unlimited.

To get the fully branded look with Qwilr, you'll need their Growth plan. Qwilr's Growth plan is billed annually and has a five-user minimum. In practical terms, this brings your subscription costs to $3,300/year.

For that price, you still don't have access to a Salesforce integration, and separate usage costs apply to creating documents through their API. To get access to Salesforce with Qwilr, you're looking at their highest plan, Scale. With a ten-user minimum, Scale is at least $9K a year, and the API usage is still not unlimited.

While you can get the Better Proposals' highest 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 $4,990 a year for ten users (annual subscription discount applies).

Compared to Qwilr’s pricing, that’s 4K less right off the bat. What you can do on all Qwilr's plans and can only do on our Enterprise 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.

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 $55 times five users, for 12 months.

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.