Nitro PDF Pro vs. Square 9 Softworks

I run a professional services business from home. I need to edit documents quickly and easily and with minimal subscriptions to minimize overheads. I love that Nitro is a one-off payment to get a license to the software, and you can simply upgrade to the latest version if that's what you want, but you're not obligated to. I've been using the same version of Nitro for 7-8 years now. Despite the fact the upgraded versions have a lot of great, nice-to-have features, the version I'm on still does the job.

Incentivized

Great for automating invoice processing where you want to set it and forget it. Also works well for document storage where you need things organized and easy to find. If you have complex requirements and need flexibility, this platform can handle it.
Not ideal if you expect a lot of exceptions or manual intervention since troubleshooting misrouted documents can be tricky. Also not the best fit if you want something that works out of the box with zero setup. You get the most out of it when you invest time upfront to build workflows.

Incentivized

• Ability to combine files SEAMLESSLY and order them around as necessary (so underrated)
• Signing not only for yourself but for others. Helpful for those who have been granted the authority to sign for VPs and directors
• Much easier to use than some other PDF viewing services

Incentivized

• The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
• While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
• Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
• The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.

Incentivized

• Converting from PDF to Microsoft Word can be complicated at times. Some parts of a document such as tables are not converted properly.
• Sometimes it appears to be easier to save MS Word documents to PDF rather than using NPS to convert. It can be a bit slow to convert at times.
• In my view, it wasn't user friendly at the beginning.

Incentivized

• GlobalSearch could use some enhancements in layout - THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalSearch could use external sharing of documents THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalForms could have better formatting tools to enhance the fields and text formatting

Incentivized

We will definitely be renewing the Nitro Productivity Suite. Saves the company a lot of money for something we use everyday

Incentivized

We are definitely renewing our SmartSearch. This is the only place all of our companies contracts and regulatory filings are kept. Our company would lose track of all expiring contracts if we did not renew. We would also need to spend many hours figuring out a new organizational system for all of our files, as well as savings the documents from SmartSearch onto the computer.

For the most part, the entire software is extremely easy to navigate and use. You won't need to follow tutorials or anything for the bulk of the core features, as it's all pretty seamlessly designed.

Incentivized

The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.

Incentivized

Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.

It works as advertised.

Incentivized

With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.

Nitro checks all the boxes for what we need. It is fairly priced, it allows us to read and edit PDF documents, convert PDF to MS Word and convert MS Word to PDF. It allows us to combine multiple files and do all the post processing like adding page numbers and adding headers and footers

Incentivized

We had one "production down" incident that took about a day to get help on. I think that's a bit too long. The support people seem confident but not that friendly. I feel like I'm bothering them when I get help, but they get the job done.

Incentivized

It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.

I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.

Incentivized

Every 1-2 years will do a check on current PDF options to include trialing the software. Have tried Foxit and several that seem to have failed in the marketplace. Over the last 4 years, I have always stuck with Nitro. Unfortunately, we still need to keep Adobe Acrobat (free version) installed to view a small percentage of some PDFs we receive.

Incentivized

Comparatively, both of these applications are used for different aspects of the department, but they’re both useful. But overall, Square 9 Softworks is used for a more complex section of our day-to-day work, and with that being said, Square 9 Softworks is the application that brings us to excel in our everyday work. OptiSigns is mostly used for our digital signage.

Incentivized

The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.

• Positive - Cheaper than Adobe
• Positive - Allows us to modify PDF documents from our clients to submit our proposals.
• Positive - Allows us to convert PDF documents to MS Word to share with our consultants and others without a PDF editor who contributes to our proposals.
• Negative - Need to upgrade to get the latest features/versions unlike something like MS/Office 365 where we just get updates automatically and free for the monthly fee. Maybe they will or need to move to a subscription solution versus a product price.

Incentivized

• Reduction in human error through manual data entry process now being automated
• Reduction in cost due to automation allowing the function to not require a full time employee
• Reduction in time spent performing the previous manual tasks. Example: on our consolidated shipment days, it could take doc clerk 2-3 hours to prepare master document package. This has been reduced to 30 minutes or less (depending on size of shipment and time needed for OCR to complete)

Incentivized