The MasterControl Quality Excellence suite bundles a number of products supporting work quality and compliance including training and exams, incidents and corrective actions (CA), documents and change, and other modules.
$25,000
per year
Tungsten Power PDF
Score 9.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Tungsten Power PDF (formerly Kofax) is a solution to manage PDFs for businesses
and individuals available with a one-time purchase with no subscription fees. It has a built-in eSignature integration with SignDoc and DocuSign for a complete end-to-end document…
$129
one-time fee per license
Pricing
MasterControl Quality Excellence
Tungsten Power PDF
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Power PDF Standard
$129
one-time fee per license
Power PDF for Mac
$129
one-time fee per license
Power PDF Advanced
$179
one-time fee per license
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per year per seat
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Pricing Offerings
MasterControl Quality Excellence
Tungsten Power PDF
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Desktop licenses are buy once, own forever. No subscription fees.
Business server licenses are term-based or perpetual with optional maintenance & support contract.
Volume and upgrade discounts available.
This system has made it very easy to keep our records straight and cleaned up. We have the choice to make them released or leave them in draft. If used appropriately, there is only one of each document that can be constantly revved up instead of having so many different versions of a PDF on our company's server that could even be corrupted. The history of each version is tracked, and you can see all the changes in one area. It is hard to see if there are copies in the system, and that can be hard. I have trained my end users to search before putting in another document, but that doesn't always happen. If they are not writing why they have something in the system or the changes from each revision, you will have to do more searching yourself or have to ask that person. So sometimes it's an end-user error.
It is well suited for all scenarios that you would use Adobe. It is especially useful and a terrific option for small to medium businesses who need the functionality of a PDF creator/editor/writer without having to spend the exuberant costs of Adobe Acrobat reader/writer/editor. It has saved us time and money. There is no learning curve in switching to it, our staff was able to switch seamlessly.
Typewriter functionality is great, although can take some time to load. This allows you to fill in text wherever applicable without turning the rest of the pdf into editable text.
Fast load times
Has autogenerated text feature so anything in the pdf can become editable
Their new report writer is not user friendly yet. MasterControl has listened to its clients and have been making small changes to assist reporting. There is still room for improvement though.
Rapid company growth means many new staff. Some tech support staff know less than the customers they are supporting.
I find that quickly editing text within a document or adding a line of text is clunky and can snowball into things popping out of place. I prefer to export text, and then work on it elsewhere.
Sometimes it seems that text recognition is trying too hard and throws me paper punches as "O"s and wrinkles as shapes, so I have to get rid of those artifacts.
The "Update Available" popup which is usually not an actual update announcement but rather an offer to sell me something is annoying.
During the past five years, we expanded our business and its quality control, and we hadn't had any issues even when we grew the company's size around five times. The software has proved itself during these years, and now we rely on it heavily and don't think we need to switch to any other similar product in the near future.
This program can do everything that acrobat can do. Kofax PDF is priced so that we can afford to purchase for more employees when we need to. Since we are hoping to grow exponentially in the next few years, this product will be the one we go with. I'm very happy with Kofax Power PDF
MasterControl Quality Excellence is easy to use when you dedicate the time. However many companies do not have that bandwidth to learn the system and will not use the system until they have to. Unfortunately creating errors, mistakes that are hard to fix.
It is fast and easy to get the hang of. It really didn't take a lot of effort to learn how to use this program and I appreciated that it was pretty "plug and play" and there wasn't a long learning curve.
Other that a PDF partially disappearing if left up for a long period of time - no issues. (If you close it and reopen it, it is all there. We have some PDFs that are 400-600 pages long.)
Pages nearly always load at the expected rapid speed. Some documents that print quickly from Adobe Reader print much more slowly from Power PDF. I have never generated a report - that's a feature I didn't know existed until now and do not know what it's for
The Technical Support team has grown exponentially over the last couple years. Some front line support staff are new to the system and so know less than the clients do. Back line staff are more seasoned and provide immediate assistance to the front line staff. They have an extensive knowledge bank to assist them as well as client access to most KB articles. Annual user group conference gives us chance to meet the support staff an also to resolve any outstanding issues. Any critical vendor notices are emailed immediately when found and a patch offered at the same time. These are rare, but quickly resolved.
I have used it for 15 years and have only needed support once: a simple update that allowed me to use the software as intended. The support team was attentive and responsive, and I was on my way very quickly.
I got an overview of the product from my predecessor who was about to retire from the job I now hold. He did not go into very many of the features and probably only knew about the ones he used most frequently.
We watched the training videos and tested out the features and functionality side by side. Some features are not used on a regular basis is it is convenient to go back and review training on that particular functionality when needed.
Easy and quick, with no problems or support needed. Worked as intended right out of the box. E-signing was the only area that implementation was dificult and required support
Hands down, MasterControl Quality Excellence worked a million times better than SmartSolve. While SmartSolve was definitely cheaper, we struggled with that system immensely and it only had documents and training for corporate functions because after implementation, it was clear that it would be a difficult solution for our old Lotus Notes based systems. MasterControl Quality Excellence has been a great solution and enabled us to retire all but one of our old Lotus Notes databases (out of hundreds).
I think Adobe Acrobat is very slow and does not perform well with large documents. I often have documents that are thousands of pages long and with Adobe it's very difficult to open and load the document, let alone make changes. Kofax Power PDF, on the other hand, responds and performs well regardless of the document size.
Not really familiar since I'm the only person who uses it. But in the past it has been my understanding that Power PDF was offered only on a single-license basis, so it's been expensive for me to use it at home and at work because I had to pay for it on my own. In my current position management supports it so I at least only have to pay for it once.
We have been able to whittle down the number of databases that our documents are kept in from well over 50 to a single location in MasterControl.
We've been able to convert paper training records into electronic training records when using MasterControl, which is saved a lot of time on the production floor keeping track of training.
By having the same tool and format across multiple places in the business it has helped the organization become more efficient.
Saved time and paper putting together binders of documents or Affidavits electronically, not to mention very functional when working from home!
It's one price, no monthly or yearly payments. I loved Kofax Power PDF so much that when I moved to a smaller firm I recommended it as a good purchase for the company to invest in.