PandaDoc headquartered in San Francisco offers their eponymous electronic signature platform for sales teams, containing sales proposal automation and CPQ (configure, price, quote) features, and integration with CRMs.
$35
per month per seat
Windward Core
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Windward’s low-code document generation solution embeds into any application, enabling users to populate data-smart documents within the familiar landscape of Microsoft Office. It's a solution from PDFTron since the April 2021 acquisition.
$190
per month
Pricing
PandaDoc
Windward Core
Editions & Modules
Starter
$35
per month per seat
Business
$65
per month per seat
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Windward Hub Standard
$19.00
Per User, Per Month (10 user minimum)*
Windward Hub Premium
$49.00
Per User, Per Month (10 user minimum)*
Windward Core Pro
$547.00
per month*
Windward Core Flex
$605.00
per month*
Windward Hub Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PandaDoc
Windward Core
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
PandaDoc offers a free eSign plan and 3 paid packages for eSigning and document automation. All plans include unlimited documents and eSignatures. Evaluations start with a free 14-day trial. Up to a 46% discount for annual pricing.
*Pay annually: 15% discount
10% discount for quarterly payment of Windward Core.
As an alternative to other electronic signature mechanisms, I can't recommend PandaDoc more highly. It works, plain and simple. It is less costly - by a lot - than most alternatives, stores signed documents online for easy access, is simple to use by both our staff and our clients, and makes our lives far easier.
Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository. Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.
Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.
The reason I gave it a rating of 7 is because it's probable, but not for sure. This is because there are a few little things we don't love about pandadoc. Mostly that there is not conditional logic such as: they must either fill this field out OR this one. Also it's a little pricey. But we'll probably stay because it's good enough and a pain to switch to something new
Once you get the hang of it, it's very easy to use. There can be a slightly steep learning curve to get fully in on the system. The new editor v2 has really improved usability and allows us to collaborate on documents simultaneously. Once the templates and library items are set up, a new document, whether it be a sales or HR document, takes very little time to complete.
For the most part, the Windward report designer is intuitive for our users; but there are a few areas where it is less intuitive. In these cases, our users need to search Windwards support wiki site, or even contact their support technicians. This can also be due to the short time we've had Windward and our lack of knowledge.
The documents load quickly for the most part but sometimes if there are larger documents with a high number of variables it could take a bit longer to get the document to show up. Most of the time the document comes on the screen relatively quickly allowing for quick access to documents to be edited and sent out.
Recently I could not upload a pdf to a contract - support was very responsive and easy to work with. They got back to me the next day with an apparent fix - however when I opened the document nothing had changed. I then could not respond to the rep who was helping me because it was a "no-reply address", the problem still has not been solved and we had to make alternate arrangements to get this to the client. Never had it happen before and was only with this one contract.
Support is something they take pride in. Once an issue is raised, they are quick to respond and provide details on a fix. No complaints on support here.
We used Dropbox back when it was still HelloSign. At the time, new templates were very hard to create. We had to upload a PDF and then add the fields from there. With PandaDoc, we are able to drag and drop the text, images, logos, and fields we need easily. This has saved our team an immense amount of time.
We evaluated several other products to integrate with our new software, but Windward Studios was an obvious standout above the majority. Other applications required some level of software development knowledge and experience to create templates and a much steeper learning curve. After consideration of ease of use, as well as a cost-comparison between different products, Windward Studios was the most suitable product to meet our needs.
