Good but missing at least one key feature
Updated April 30, 2021

Good but missing at least one key feature

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PandaDoc

We use it to send out proposals and/or contracts to potential clients. We are integrated into our CRM (HubSpot) to make this whole process a little easier to use and keep track of. Currently, we are mainly using it with just our sales team, but we have a few other different team leads who need access to it in order to review contracts in HubSpot. The main reason we went with PandaDoc is because one of our employees used it in their last company and he liked how he could send combo proposal contracts.
  • Lets you combine proposals and contracts.
  • Lets you create templates in order to maintain contract uniformity.
  • Integrates into HubSpot.
  • PandaDoc needs Conditional Logic! For example, allow us to make it required that a customer fills out EITHER section A or B.
  • Sometimes it's kind of glitchy when creating new templates.
  • Sometimes it's hard for our sales guys to know how to adjust it. I have to do it for them...so be even more user friendly I guess.
  • It gives our contracts uniformity.
  • It is easy for an sales guy to just whip up a contract in no time.
  • It allows us to see more of what the sales guys are doing on the back end dashboard.
It's cool that you can make it look nice, create templates, and put videos in there. Like I said earlier, it could be a little more user friendly and sometimes the editing tools are a little bit glitchy. But overall, the features we have used have worked pretty well for us.
We haven't really used much of the features above other than real-time notifications and mobile friendly eSignature capabilities (I'm assuming). However, this does remind me of one big problem that I forgot to mention before and that's with PandaDoc contracts sometimes going directly to potential customer's spam folders. Idk if this could be fixed, but it's kind of frustrating to send over a contract and have your potential client never get notified.
It is a lot more professional to be able to format nice looking templates with videos embedded and testimonials and pictures and such. So the professional look is better than what we had before, with each Account Executive creating their own proposals in Microsoft Word.
  • It was cool to imbed videos into proposals.
  • Combining proposals with contracts gets people to sign faster sometimes.
  • A lot more uniformity and quicker turnaround of wanting to get a proposal out to actually getting it out.
  • Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)
We have not used other PandaDoc-like products before. We just used Word documents, which is not very comparable if you ask me. So in this instance, PandaDoc is a lot better because it has capabilities that Microsoft Word doesn't have. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but it's the only one that I have to make.
It seems pretty well suited for the Software as a service industry that I am in. We mainly use it to immediately send out proposals that have different pictures, videos, and testimonials in them. Often times we even include a contract in the proposals just in case the potential client likes our product so much, that they sign right away.

PandaDoc Experience

We have not used pandadoc at all in a non-selling context. Unless you count our billing team reading the contracts that have already been signed, so that they know when to start billing them and how much to start billing them. But other than that, we solely use it in our sales team to send contracts and to send proposals.
I give it this rating because it's overall pretty simple to use. I wish there was more functionality on the backend when creating the templates, but for our sales guys to go in and send out a proposal or contract quickly and easily...it works perfectly for that. It does what it needs to without much problem.
From when I spoke to account managers and stuff, they're always friendly and as helpful as possible. But like usual, the real problem only lies within the software functionality itself. There's only so much support to be given when there are certain things that the software just cannot do. Aside from that, they were nice and even helped us adjust our payments.
I only have pandadoc integrated into Hubspot for now. I know there's other payment processing type of integrations that can be done, but we haven't even attempted those because it just doesn't make much sense for the way we structure our business. Hubspot was easy though. The hardest part was just figuring out how to connect all the "tokens" to auto pull into the contract.
While pandadoc usually works pretty well, I've noticed it struggle in a few specific instances. First, when I am creating contract templates, sometimes the editing tools just don't work properly, or get glitchy. Secondly, I had some contracts that were pulling Hubspot tokens perfectly fine for like a year just stop working, so I had to go in and redo everything to make them work again.
I don't really know what I should be rating this question right here on how easy it was to work with the vendor after the sale. We didn't have a ton of interaction. It was mostly just a lot of info up front. They created some templates for us to use that we didn't like. And then I just had at the software myself after that.

Using PandaDoc

10 - 8 out of 10 of those people who use pandadoc do so in the sales capacity, meaning they actively send proposals and contracts out to clients using the software. Then I am the ninth, who creates the templates and fixes isssues they have. The 10th is the head of customer success, who shares his password with all the other AM's so they can go in and read all the contracts linked to pandadoc in Hubspot.
1 - In our case, it's just me who is over pandadoc support when we're strictly looking in house. Luckily there's never any huge problems that I have to fix, but every now and then, something stops working properly for some reason...or a tutorial video needs to be sent out to our sales guys, but overall it's not too bad
  • Sending out proposals
  • Sending out contracts
  • doing the two above things quickly, uniformly, and easily from the sales side of things
  • We may want to integrate payment through the documents at some point
  • We want to continue to refine our templates and make them even cooler
  • Probably start looking deeper into the analytical data pandadoc provides
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

Do you think PandaDoc delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with PandaDoc's feature set?

No

Did PandaDoc live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PandaDoc go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PandaDoc again?

Yes

Evaluating PandaDoc and Competitors

Yes - I don't really know if I'd consider this another product just because what we were using before was google docs. Since google docs isn't a competing software like docusign would be, then I don't know if that counts. But Pandadoc is definitely better than google docs since it makes us look more uniform and professional
  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
One of our current sales guys used pandadoc at his last job before he came to our organization. He liked it, so he convinced the boss to implement it. The features we were interested in were easy to use, quick, and professional looking proposals/contracts right at our fingertips. All the other features it is missing are less important to us
If I had to do it again, and reevaluate what contract signing software to implement, I would look deeper into if any other software allowed for conditional logic to be implanted within a contract. That is the biggest (though still pretty small deal) struggle that we have with PandaDoc at the moment

PandaDoc Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
We did not purchase premium support. I'd say the main reason is because we ourselves are a pretty advanced software company. So if this sounds cocky, I apologize, but this software isn't that complicated. Definitely not too complicated for us to figure out any questions we have on our own. So more money for more support is a waste
Yes - We were able to resolve it ourself pretty quickly. It was just annoying to do so. Basically what happened was with one of our contracts, the tokens that have been pulling from hubspot perfectly fine for a year just stopped working. But I redid all the tokens and it started working again
I don't really know if this counts as support, but I had a scheduled call with our account manager a few months ago and we were haggling with price. We laid out a case as to why we shouldn't pay the high price they were offering for a renewal. They met internally and came back to us rather quickly and agreed to our terms.

Using PandaDoc

ProsCons
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Familiar
Do not like to use
  • Creating templates were easy to do
  • Managing what my team members had access to was easy
  • viewing draft contracts is simple
  • copying and pasting from word documents sometimes just doesn't work
  • tokens from hubspot sometimes stop working properly
  • sometimes the platform is slower than I'd like to load