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Conga Composer vs Windward Core comparison

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Conga Composer
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Document Management Software (2nd), Document Automation Software (1st)
Windward Core
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (19th), Document Generation Tools (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

KS
Salesforce Application Support Specialist at Vectra AI
Document creation has become faster and more accurate but complex templates still need improvement
In terms of improvements for Conga Composer, we did start seeing a lot of requests related to customization, which were initially difficult. As people got to know that it's very easy to customize it, we started to get those more and more, and we saw fewer errors. Earlier, there were many requests to manually adjust the contract value, which was not possible with the CPQ quote documents. With Conga Composer, we can customize it to some level. For exception cases, we can modify the template and generate the contract in a way they want it. While we did not record any metrics, looking at the overall tickets and the reduction in errors we used to see, I think it has improved efficiency by a lot, and our stakeholders agree. However, I would say that despite being easy to set up these templates, there are limitations around looping. Some functionalities break when dealing with large templates, around 30 to 40 pages long. We jumped on their support, but we could not come to a resolution, so we ended up reducing the overall complexity of our template. I think Conga Composer could improve its adoption for Conga Composer Sign. Right now, the adoption is not very great. People use Conga Composer mainly for document generation and then go separately for DocuSign. To get a better hold of the market, Conga should definitely invest more into Conga Composer Sign.
CH
Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting
The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It's quite simple."
"Conga Composer is easy to use, especially for C-level executives, as it simplifies the contract signing process."
"I find the Conga email template creation and the document template creation features very useful."
"What I like about Conga Composer is that it's much easier than Salesforce's native templating. It's simple to add merge fields, write queries to pull data and access up to four levels of related objects. This makes it very comfortable to get all the needed data into templates."
"In my 2.5 years of experience with Conga Composer, I can say that it was one of the best document generation tools that I have used in a very long time."
"The initial setup of Conga Composer is easy."
"Conga Composer is very easy to use. It's easy to debug if you have an issue."
"Using Conga Composer helps us send proposals much faster—within minutes instead of hours—thus improving our sales cycle by roughly twenty to thirty percent."
"The integration with MS Office is an advantage, creating a better user experience."
"It's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly... they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training."
"For me so far the Windward document generation software is the preferred solution for creating documents."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."
"Their customer service is quite good."
"AutoTag is valuable because it integrates with MS Word and makes it easy for our users to create template documents and reports. It allows our users to design the templates based on differing needs."
"​A useful, ​easy to use product, which has a lot of features for designing reports."
"You can use Microsoft Office as your designer interface. There is very little programming. You can have nontechnical people create reports."
 

Cons

"The query builder could use some updates."
"If there could be a preview option available directly in the application for testing templates instead of having to download and test them manually, it would save time."
"The biggest area where Conga needs improvement is its documentation. The documentation is good but not up to par with other platforms like Salesforce, which has extensive documentation and a helpful community."
"However, I would say that despite being easy to set up these templates, there are limitations around looping; some functionalities break when dealing with large templates, around 30 to 40 pages long, and even after working with support we ended up reducing the overall complexity of our template."
"The debugging skills could be improved as we need to stay alert for issues."
"The initial setup is at an intermediate level of difficulty since understanding Conga Composer for the first time can be confusing."
"It would be better to have a custom button that automatically sends a document to the client's email and sends it for a signature with a single click."
"Conga is getting more and more expensive."
"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive)​ into data."
"Requires some work on page numbers (footer) in Word, as it places the page number in the center, when output in PDF page number is more to right than center."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."
"Autotag can be a little confusing for new users, however doing the training webinars will get them on their feet in no time."
"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."
"​AutoTag needs to be web-based, so our customers can create reports from our web.​"
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the tool costs around six dollars per user."
"Regarding pricing, I believe it’s around fifty dollars, but I’m not entirely sure. Overall, I find the pricing reasonable and am quite satisfied with the product. The value we get from it justifies the cost, as it requires minimal maintenance and is straightforward to use. The functionality it provides aligns well with the investment."
"It's not cheap, but it's not overly expensive either."
"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."
"I can't advise anybody about pricing and licensing, but it was competitive. A lot of things we did look at were all volume-based, so it was a case of you buy a license to generate this many reports a year, and that's not something that I'm particularly interested in because it doesn't give you any idea - if we have future growth, or if we have a lean year - for budgeting reasons it's more difficult. With Windward it's a straight out license fee, whether we generate one page or we generate a million, it makes no difference."
"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."
"​They are fair and flexible. They are willing to work with your current architecture to make sure you have the best deal.​"
"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."
"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."
"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."
"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
12%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Conga Composer?
Not Sure, As i implemented the Quote Documents as per business need but client directly buy it for salesforce
What needs improvement with Conga Composer?
In terms of improvements for Conga Composer, we did start seeing a lot of requests related to customization, which were initially difficult. As people got to know that it's very easy to customize i...
What is your primary use case for Conga Composer?
One of the main use cases for Conga Composer would be to generate quote documents. We had different types of quote documents in our business process, so we used different kinds of Conga Composer te...
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Also Known As

Conga
Windward, Windward Studios
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Arkus, CollegeTracks, Colorado Creative Industries, Davies Office, Delta Air, Depersico, Diagnostic Innovations, Digital Dolphin, Finnzymes
HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt