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Conga Composer vs Windward Core comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
20
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 (20th), Document Generation Tools (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Zaid bin junaid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Flash
Automation has transformed document workflows and has eliminated manual data entry errors
Conga Composer is a very good product and it heavily excels in any kind of complex and high-volume scenarios. It is very well-versed with handling dynamic content such as charts, nested tables, global currencies, and it can execute asynchronously, putting it well ahead of a basic PDF generator. It also offers many additional features. The user interface is my personal favorite, as the interface is largely very developer-friendly, and it is a custom front end we built. Additionally, it utilizes familiar tools like Microsoft Word and Excel. Setting it up involves a complex API deployment and JSON payloads. Initially, it requires some technical heavy lifting compared to drag-and-drop and no-code tools. If you are from a technical background, then it is not a challenge. My personal favorite features are headless execution, which helps us to trigger the document generation in the background from the buttons, workflows, or external systems without requiring the user to navigate through an interface. This gives us all the options within a single click from the UI. The second feature I love is that it supports multi-format. Generating a Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML can be done from a single source and a single, central data source. The third feature which I love is that the REST API is not locked exclusively into Salesforce. It can ingest JSON data from virtually any ERP or system of record. Additionally, the seamless add-on to the sign API has helped us to create an uninterrupted, automated contract cycle.
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

"We have seen a major return on investment after we implemented Conga Composer into our workflows and the organization."
"Once you understand how to build the templates, it's a pretty straightforward process. It allows you to create both Word and Excel documents."
"Conga Composer is very easy to use. It's easy to debug if you have an issue."
"I find the Conga email template creation and the document template creation features very useful."
"The initial setup of Conga Composer is easy."
"Conga Composer offers extensive customization and flexibility, that allows us to create documents that perfectly align with our branding and specific business requirements."
"The most valuable feature of Conga Composer is its user-friendly interface, which allows professionals to handle the product easily."
"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."
"For me so far the Windward document generation software is the preferred solution for creating documents."
"Overall, we don't have any problems with Windward, and that's why we've had it for eight years; otherwise, we would have changed it."
"One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place."
"Working with Windward has probably increased our revenue by at least 200 to 300 percent."
"It has the ability to easily integrate into existing apps with little code. If you know how to use MS Office, you can create a report."
"We really could not have started our business, quite honestly, without a document generation engine like Windward."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."
"Technical support is ​very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions.​"
 

Cons

"The query builder could use some updates."
"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."
"The initial setup is at an intermediate level of difficulty since understanding Conga Composer for the first time can be confusing."
"I had only one minor issue, which was resolved quickly due to their prompt assistance."
"The debugging skills could be improved as we need to stay alert for issues."
"For newcomers to the platform, the removal of certain suggestions in recent releases can be a pain area."
"When setting conditions, it doesn't work as expected, requiring us to rework the code."
"The only improvement I'd like to see is the ability to hide a single column within a grouped table, which I couldn't figure out how to do."
"It really hasn't improved our organization at all."
"The workstation deployment and license allocation was a pain, but the server component was easy."
"The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment."
"AutoTag improvements: does not support dynamically changing headers and footers on Microsoft Office Word templates."
"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."
"Some drawbacks we have come across are getting the output formatting to match exactly how it is implemented within Word."
"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."
"The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the tool costs around six dollars per user."
"It's not cheap, but it's not overly expensive either."
"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."
"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."
"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."
"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."
"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."
"CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%."
"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."
"The cost is reasonable."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
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?
Since we bought Certinia, we got Conga Composer for free.
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Conga Composer vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.