Knowledge Base

When you’re shopping for new tech, you just want someone to tell it to you straight. 

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But Google searches, marketing materials, and even reviews can be misleading. What do you get? Where does the tool fall short? What should you know before you sign on the dotted line?

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Every company claims to be the best. Yet, not every company can claim a whole suite of workflow tools in one platform. You could hunt for individual products that help you capture data, generate documents, sign electronically, and automate your office workflows. However, each tool requires its own implementation, training, login, payment, and upkeep. Isn’t extra work what you’re trying to avoid?

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Tools like Jotform, FormAssembly, Conga, Titan, and Docusign are good at helping you accomplish specific tasks like building forms, generating documents from Salesforce data, or signing contracts online. 

Jotform is an online form builder that primarily serves nonprofits, educational institutions, small businesses, and enterprises. 

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Jotform is great for small companies or businesses that are just starting out. They’re known for releasing new features frequently and supporting customers with extensive education tools like YouTube videos, help documentation, and webinars. Jotform even offers a free version for up to five forms, 100 fields per form, and 100 monthly submissions. 

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But beware—“free” can be costly. Once you reach your submission limits, all new submissions are disabled. And what can you do with your data after you’ve captured it? Without a document generator, you’re forced to feed it into yet another platform. 

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Features are great too, but not at the expense of UI updates. You need a partner that will listen to your users’ feedback to simplify your entire workflow automation process.

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Plus, only Jotform’s top-tier subscription comes with HIPAA compliance, causing problems for healthcare organizations. 

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Bottom line: Jotform solves for the now. But if you’re planning on growing your business, you’ll need something that can scale with you.

FormAssembly offers data collection software for companies across multiple industries.

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FormAssembly is a forms-only product that provides integrations and analytics so you can “not only collect data, but leverage it.” 

For Salesforce customers, FormAssembly may describe a ‘native integration’, but that means native to FormAssembly, not Salesforce - so this means an integration that requires manual field mappings between forms and Salesforce fields and the complexity of managing and troubleshooting a bi-directional data sync between disparate systems. 

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Bottom line: FormAssembly offers a single solution to a growing data capture and usage problem.

Conga is a revenue lifecycle platform that offers CPQ, document automation, and contract management.

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Conga made a name for itself in the contract lifecycle management space. But is a name more important—or a solution that will solve for your broader use case? 

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Conga excels at redlining functionality within contracts. It’s best to consider how much redlining your organization requires in contracts and weigh that against other functionality you’ll need. If you’re not in insurance or legal and your organization doesn’t use redlining heavily, it may be best to look for a more complete solution. 

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Conga also requires a minimum of 10 users, increasing your starting costs and prices based on users, which can lead to excessive costs not aligning with the value you get from the software. Conga is also known for gating key features such as automation that will lead to expensive upgrades down the road. Conga’s focus on other areas around the revenue lifecycle has taken their eye off the ball for document automation use cases, which often translates to difficulties  getting support for these use cases. 

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Bottom line: Conga is a popular name in the contract lifecycle game and offers the “bells and whistles” of contract software. It’s also known for complex implementation, lengthening the time it takes your team to get up and running.

Titan is a zero-code platform for Salesforce forms, document generation, web applications, surveys, flows, and more. 

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Like Formstack, Titan understands the importance of uniting data collection, document generation, e-signature, and workflows in one ecosystem. Titan places particular emphasis on scale and Salesforce acceleration with no-code tools. New users can also try the product free for six months.

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While six months free is nice, renegotiating or finding a new provider after your team has become ingrained in the product can be maddening. Also, look out for renewals without warning and sudden price increases. 

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Bottom line: Titan and Formstack both tout no-code software—but we really mean it. If your team isn’t used to terms like “HTML building,” “debug mode,” or “if not found run,” you may need to hire someone to interpret and run the program.

Docusign is a platform for sending, signing, and managing contracts in one place.

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DocuSign was one of the first companies in the e-signature game, so it’s well-versed in contract management. But signing is only one part of a much larger workflow that includes data collection, document generation, e-signature, and digital workflows. That means your data is never siloed. You can use it again and again to re-engage your prospects, customers, and other audiences.

Docusign’s cost structure is also designed around “envelopes,” or digital containers that hold one or many documents for signing. But if you exceed your envelope limit, you’ll pay extra just to continue your workloads. Once you’ve used the platform for about a year, be prepared for your “custom price” to change (sometimes considerably) based on your company’s regular usage.

Bottom line: Docusign is really good at one thing. But it leaves your data trapped in PDFs instead of in flexible workflows that serve multiple purposes.