While creating professional proposals, customization holds the key to ensuring that your documents stand out and really resonate with your clients. Among two popular proposal software options are Bidsketch and Proposify, which have both brought innovation to the table in making creating proposals quicker, easier, and more polished. However, offering customization features of proposals calls for distinctions between the two platforms and could be well suited for different business needs.
In this blog, we are going to compare the options and ensure that we can customize with Bidsketch vs Proposify. Which of these options feature rich and easy to use in comparison to price, in order to assist you in choosing which is best for your needs to customize proposals to your unique style and business needs.
What Makes Proposal Customization So Important?
It is sometimes just the case of changing font and color in proposal software. Rather, it is more a case of ensuring that your proposals depict your brand experience, the uniqueness of your client, and provide reflections on certain needs of the project. What usually differentiates the winning clients from the not-winning ones within this competitive market is a well-crafted, personalized proposal.
Among the most common customization factors are
- Branding: Insertion of logos, colors, and fonts associated with your business on proposals
- Content Flexibility: Custom inclusion of sections, pre-written templates, and blocks of content to make proposals reflect your service and the needs of your client.
- Design Elements: Layouts images, and other visual elements can be adjusted to make compelling easy to read documents
- Integration and Automation: Possibility of integrating with other tools and automating repetition of tasks such as pricing calculation.
Both Bidsketch and Proposify feature robust customization abilities, though they go about it in different ways. Let’s dive in a little deeper on how each software approaches the following elements.
Bidsketch Customization Features
Bidsketch is clean and simple, primarily designed for freelancers and small businesses. It allows users to customize their proposal to ensure that it looks professional and reflects the brand.
A. Branding Customization
Since Bidsketch supports customization, you can easily personalize the look and feel of your proposals. You can do this in the following ways:
- Upload custom logos to personalize your proposals.
- Select from many templates, or you can create proposals from scratch.
- Use different fonts to match your brand.
While Bidsketch offers strong branding customization, it is not as flexible in overall design as Proposify. The choices of layouts are limited, and advanced controls over design are not available unless custom coding is performed beyond the application.
B. Content Customization
It is good at content blocks providing custom content.
- Proposal Templates: they contain pre-built templates for a variety of industries: design, development, consulting. They are easy to fill in with project-specific needs.
- Custom Sections: This is the area where you can include custom sections to your proposals, depending on specific requirements. This might include adding specific service offerings, pricing details, or any other critical content that needs to flow through the proposal.
- Reusable content: the ability to save your content blocks in a proposal so that you can go back and use them again saves standard rework on specific proposals.
However, Bidsketch cannot be customized in regard to layout or making minor adjustments such as image placement being moved.
C. Design Elements
Proposify is far more flexible than Bidsketch when it comes to design. You can, for example, change text styles, insert images, and even manipulate the layout to some degree; however, it does not have any of the advanced design tools like custom page breaks or column layouts, nor does it make use of particularly sophisticated image placement.
D. Integration and Automation
This integration also goes well with several popular platforms, such as PayPal, Stripe, and QuickBooks. However, it does not come even remotely close to Proposify in terms of integration options, especially on the part of CRM and marketing automation tools.
Proposify Customization Features
Proposify is known for its comprehensive design and customization capabilities, making it ideal for businesses that want more control over the look and feel of their proposals.
A. Branding Customization
Proposify offers advanced branding features, allowing you to:
- Upload and brand templates with logos, colors, and custom fonts.
- Choose or build custom templates that align with your brand.
- Set up default styles, so every proposal you create automatically reflects your brand guidelines.
This level of customization is perfect for companies looking for a more personalized client-facing experience. Proposify offers a higher degree of flexibility in how proposals are styled, ensuring consistency across all documents.
B. Content Customization
One of Proposify’s standout features is its custom content blocks. Here’s how it compares:
- Editable Content Blocks: Much like Bidsketch, Proposify allows you to add custom content blocks. But, it goes a step further with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easier to rearrange and modify your content.
- Dynamic Data Fields: Proposify offers dynamic fields that allow you to automatically populate details like client names, project descriptions, and pricing from CRM or database entries.
- Proposal Library: You can store and reuse proposal content, creating a library of text, images, and other media that you can pull into proposals at any time.
The ability to quickly insert and modify text, data, and multimedia content makes Proposify’s content customization very user-friendly and flexible.
C. Design Elements
Proposify excels when it comes to design flexibility:
- Custom Layouts: You can adjust the layout of each page to your liking, including adjusting margins, page breaks, and sections.
- Advanced Styling: Add custom colors, images, and backgrounds to different sections of the proposal. Proposify also provides design tools that allow for more precise image and text formatting.
- Interactive Elements: You can embed interactive elements like checkboxes, tables, and pricing calculators directly into proposals. These features are particularly useful for clients who want more engagement and clarity on deliverables.
D. Integration and Automation
Proposify offers extensive integrations with tools like CRM systems, accounting software, and eSignature platforms, which makes it an excellent choice for businesses looking to automate the proposal process. It also integrates with platforms like Zapier, allowing you to connect Proposify with hundreds of other business tools for seamless workflow automation.
Pricing: How Customization Affects Costs
This area should seriously be given thought, primarily due to its influence on large budget schlepping, which mainly accountable businesses face.
- Bidsketch: It’s beginning from an affordable price point, compared with Proposify, making it suitable for freelancers and small businesses. Not as sophisticated in terms of customization and design and integration options, although the software is fine.
- Proposify: More expensive, although it does allow a much more comprehensive set of customization options, so better suited to bigger businesses or agencies that may need to produce highly bespoke proposals on a regular basis.
Which Software Offers Better Customization?
Bidsketch and Proposify offer incredible customization for creating proposals; however, Proposify has more flexibility in terms of design, content customization, and integration. If, however, you need to have control over the presentation of your proposals and have a frequent need for dynamic elements, such as interactive pricing tables, Proposify is the best option for you.
But Bidsketch is really fantastic for freelancers and small businesses that are in dire need of simple, easy-to-use proposal software with more content customization than with advanced design and automation.
It all depends on what you need for your business, your budget, and the extent of customization needed in the proposals. Bidsketch is great for simple, clean proposals that require minimal design manipulation to be done. If a company wants full control over creativity and even more advanced features about their proposal, Proposify is the clear winner.
Also Read Business Proposal vs Contract: What’s the Difference?
Conclusion
Now, comparing Bidsketch and Proposify on the criteria of customization, it stands to reason that each has its place, though there is reason to suspect some of the most thoroughgoing customization can be found in Proposify, particularly for companies that are looking for more involved design tools and integration with their other business systems. So, if your business requires a lot of flexibility with design-oriented proposals, Proposify is the way to go.
If, however, you’d like to get down to business, Bidsketch still produces well-crafted proposals free from superfluous design elements. It really comes down to the level of customization of your proposal in how it would reflect your brand and, of course, impress the client.
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