1. Home
  2. Grant Management Software
  3. Submittable Reviews
  4. User Review of Submittable
Not perfect but really freaking good
February 26, 2022

Not perfect but really freaking good

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Submittable

Managing and organizing our grants and fellowship application processes. Collecting interim and final reports from longer-term projects, including data and outcomes in order to report back to our own funder.
  • Professional look and feel
  • Standardized experience for users
  • Organized materials that are easy to find for everyone on the team
  • Reporting is a bit complicated
  • More collaboration option needed for submitters after a submission is accepted
  • Table question fields are a bit clunky
  • quickly adapt to new requirements from directors
  • Streamlined reviews
  • easier team collaboration
Learning to use and deploy submittable was super easy. We loved the drag and drop form builder and even our less than tech-savvy team members were able to quickly pick up on creating new projects. Especially useful is how intuitive the review system within the submittable is. Our external reviewers tend to be busy clinicians and since our switch to submittable, we have had a reduction in the number of incomplete reviews.
Using Submittable has allowed our team to get more (and better) information from our grantees. We make frequent use of the additional forms to get intermittent updates on funded projects but also data and outcomes in order to report to our own funders. The only downside is that only one account can manage a funded project so when a team of people is working together, they may not all have equitable access to submittable to report back to us.
We selected to go with Submittable because it had a faster onboarding. The learning curve with Blackbaud seemed very steep and they also required additional products in order to do all the functions we needed. Submittable was a more inclusive system. Additionally, some of our colleagues had been on the submitter side of Blackbaud and found it looked less professional than Submittable.

Do you think Submittable delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Submittable's feature set?

Yes

Did Submittable live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Submittable go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Submittable again?

Yes

I've noticed the submittable is used by a lot of literary journals and art coops. From my experience, a submittable is great for collecting one-time submissions or registrations. The forms building tool is easy to use and the review features are great. The workflows allow every member of our team to be notified when it's time for them to either review the submission or move it along our internal process (like contracting). However, we also use submittals to fund and track grants that we award, and sometimes the longitudinal nature of those submissions can make the system a little messy. This is especially true for reporting, where initial forms have to be set up just right to be able to collect the data we are looking for in reports. But in the end, even for longer-term award management, the submittable has proved to be very useful and we have received great feedback from our funders.

Evaluating Submittable and Competitors

Yes - We used formstack as it was a free software provided by our institution. Formstack was fine to collect the initial submission but didnt help us organize and manage grantees and required us to complete our reviews using email. This resulted in a lot of people forgetting about their reviews and missing our deadline. We also lost submission any time we update our forms which was very frustrating.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability