Privia (discontinued) vs. Proposify

Privia is well-suited for project / proposal management in terms of working on a live proposal or massive document of sorts. However, it is not ideal from a business analytics standpoint. If you are looking for graphical representations and/or snapshots of your project / proposal at a glance, Privia is not for you.

We use proposals for client contracts. They are several pages long with a lot of legalese. We also use them for NDA contracts with clients. Mainly we use Proposify for client project proposals. The proposals include description, main project points, price, timing, scope, process, cost, and everything the client can expect. I like that we were able to design a custom cover for our proposals. Proposify does one thing very well and that is proposals. I like that it doesn't try to be everything

Incentivized

• I liked the structure of breaking down the RFP.
• I liked the way it allows comment bubbles.
• I liked the security of locking it down so that certain portions were kept internal while others could be released externally.

• So our favorite feature is the huge time savings. If anybody's ever done proposals on Word or Excel; it’s a head wreck. Proposify is great because there are beautiful templates there ready to go, it saves you a ton of time, and they are visually appealing. We get lots of feedback from our clients when we send them out proposals that our proposals look amazing.
• There are great, sneaky metrics that we absolutely love. You get notifications on your phone via the app when somebody opens the proposal and when they've signed off on it. But you can also go into the app and see how much time people are actually spending looking at your proposal.
• Because you send out the proposals and you can have automated reminder emails, there’s communication back and forth within the proposal that you can have-- the clients can actually write notes back and forth. It just makes the whole thing super smooth and it integrates with most of your CRMs out there.

• Burn to CD directly from Privia
• Being able to do a "save as" from the web version to save on my desktop
• Search functionality
• Email directly from Privia if Outlook is not used

• The text editor is slow, buggy, and the Achilles heel of the Proposify platform. It got worse with the launch of their new UI.
• The new interface was launched way before it was ready for prime-time. As a result, there are still quite a few bugs Proposify has yet to fix. Once you upgrade to the new interface, you can't go back.
• It's not uncommon to have sections of a proposal disappear entirely from the PDF version.
• Depending on the browser, formatting can be far different that the creator intended.

Incentivized

Privia has proved, uniformly, to be an asset. I look forward to my next experience with it. While, as I stated, users can feel advance trepidation when using Privia, those problems evaporate immediately when Privia is activated.

We require a fair amount of back and forth of editing so this tool while helpful is not ideal for us

Incentivized

It is very intuitive and I found it very easy for my decidedly non-technical users to work with. Training was quite easy even for technophobes or complete newbies. I have a team of about 500 users on this system who are primarily writers and project managers, frequently not computer savvy at all.

Overall it's great. There's definitely a learning curve, and I wish that some things were easier to use. For example, changing images isn't the easiest thing to do in it, but I'd love to be able to quickly add and change header images in my proposals. So far I've figured it out, but each time I do it I forget how it's done since it's not intuitive.

Incentivized

We rarely, if ever, had unplanned outages when we were using Privia. When we did, our support staff were attentive and quick to resolve the problem no matter the hour.

Each company is assigned an account manager whom you can contact directly with any questions, comments, and/or concerns. You may contact them directly via email and they will submit a ticket via their system for you or you can submit a ticket through their system and they will contact you immediately. All issues are resolved in a highly timely manner, and the customer service is impeccable. All accounts folks are well-trained from a customer service and technical standpoint and will escalate the issue as necessary depending on their expertise - though, that is rarely a necessity. Should they be unavailable, you will be notified prior to their leave / departure and assigned a secondary contact in the meantime. Overall, I was beyond impressed with Privia's customer support services.

I've actually never used Proposify support, so I'm unable to speak about it. I suppose that's a good thing. If I did need to use it, I would hope that they'd be responsive and intelligent, but, again, since everything has worked smoothly I don't really know how the support functions or how good it is.

Incentivized

It is critical to plan your implementation carefully and take the time to understand the product. You have to make sure you get the initial set up and design correct so that the tool supports your business practices. If you do this up front, you can have a very successful and easy implementation.

Privia works quite well for developing workflows and processes within the Proposal Development process. It allows you to work offline with your documents without Web access. It allows security to be controlled on a very granular level. It allows you to quickly secure your workspaces and documents without having to work on an individual user basis.

We looked for a solution after we spent countless hours and years maintaining a MS Word Template system. Proposify takes many features and streamlines them, mak[ing] them interactive and clean. It's nice to digitally deliver a proposal that a customer can view online- it ads a "creative expectation" for a design agency to fulfill this approach facing a client. It's expected rather than a MS Word doc sent via email or printed and hand delivered. The export to PDF is a nice feature if you need to print.

Incentivized

• Significant employee and team efficiency
• Faster review process allowing more team members to participate
• Much improved customer service for our users, who are mostly non-technical writer and managers

• The use of templates within Proposify has empowered our sales team to reduce the amount of time it took to send out a proposal by almost 50%!
• The ability to add user-selectable "add-ons" to a proposal saw a 10% increase in overall sale price.
• Developing the templates within the somewhat limited parameters that Proposify's design interface offers did require some significant time from our design team.

Incentivized