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Best RFP software: buyer’s guide

Written by
Aaron LaVigne
Aaron LaVigne
Updated on
  12 min read
rfp software

“Do more with less!” You’ve likely heard that mantra a lot in recent months and even years. Executives hear it from shareholders and investors. Team leaders hear it from executives. Workers hear it from team leaders.

It’s an understandable mindset. If your response team is like most we meet, they’re already stretched to their limits. B2B buyers are operating with increasing scrutiny, asking more questions and expecting faster responses. At the same time, many companies are operating conservatively, approaching economic uncertainty with caution.

So, how does an organization enable its time-strapped RFP response professionals to do more with less? How does it empower them for success? As with nearly every job role, the answer is to arm them with the proper tools — which in their case, is RFP software.

Several options are out there, making it difficult to find the best RFP software. So, we have scoured G2, the world’s largest software review site, for objective product reviews. Below you will find the pros and cons for each option, even for Responsive.

In this buyer’s guide, we’ll compare some of the best and newest RFP software products on the market today. We’ll talk about pricing, standout features, user reviews, and more to help you make an informed decision. Whether you’re looking to improve your response rates, reduce time spent on proposals, or enhance collaboration across teams, this guide will provide the insights you need.

A quick note about AI

Before diving in, we should consider that AI is trending in the RFP software space. While it might seem relatively new, the best RFP software products are far from AI newcomers.

The most sophisticated AI-driven RFP software solutions go beyond GenAI, enabling workflow automation, collaborator identification, project management, content selection and management, document shredding, language translation, and more. Generative AI (GenAI) capabilities assist in writing and editing.

In this post, we will cover the following RFP software products:

  1. Responsive 
  2. RocketDocs
  3. Loopio
  4. Qvidian
  5. Tribble
  6. QorusDocs
  7. Ombud
  8. PandaDoc
  9. RohanRFP/Rohirrim RFP
  10. AutogenAI

Responsive

Pricing: Custom

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.5/5 (1,000+ reviews)

G2 has named Responsive the leader in global RFP software for six consecutive quarters. The platform ranks #1 in 16 of G2’s Grid Market reports. Responsive has thousands of customers worldwide, including 20 percent of the Fortune 500. Its customer list includes companies such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Adobe, ADP, and Adobe.

Responsive’s vision is to transform how organizations share and exchange information through RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, DDQs, security questionnaires, risk assessments, and other types of complex information requests.

Responsive leads the way in AI. Among its standout products is its AI-powered Content Library, which includes intelligent content generation, a recommendation engine to locate the best previous content, and advanced search capabilities such as LookUp. The platform paves the way with seamless collaboration, workflow automation, built-in analytics, and industry-leading native integrations.

Responsive customers have impressive outcomes, including 15X returns on investment, 10X faster response times, and dramatically improved win rates.

User reviews

Great tool for our lean team

“Responsive is an excellent solution to store and look up previous responses for RFP Q&A. The Projects setting allows multiple stakeholders to collaborate on specific projects seamlessly while accessing suggested responses from previous RFPs, and the AI Assistant feature allows my very lean team to create responses from questions that do not already have a response based on previous Q&A pairs we have. These features allow for great efficiency – team members aren’t recreating the wheel for each response, and AI Assistant works as a wonderful base for members to then personalize the response.”

Kristina A. Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

Best tool for answering tenders and questionnaires

“We use this every day in my company. Our product teams are responsible for managing Q&A about our capabilities and we can easily add new ones for them to moderate with the integrations into our email and messaging tools. I answer RFPs at such a quick rate than I used to and getting help for content we don’t have answers for is so easy with the comment functions. I recently found out our sales team use the browser extension to quickly get answers to questions they get during meetings, and that just further drives our use of this product. Looking forward to all the new features that keep coming!”

Davila T., Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

Powerful, intuitive and flexible

“We initially procured Responsive several years ago after a thorough review process of it and a competitor. Not only did the tool outshine the competitor, but the sales person/process did as well. We were looking for a tool that would help us find content for reuse quickly and efficiently. The option to use Responsive as a content library AND project management tool makes it flexible and efficient for many different uses. The user interface is clear, easy to use and understand. The tool is robust – I feel like we have barely tapped the surface of what it can do. When we onboarded, they were thorough in their support and made implementation a breeze.”

Kristen P., Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

RocketDocs

Pricing: Custom

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.2/5 (96 reviews)

RocketDocs began its journey back in 1994, primarily as a sales enablement platform, under the name PMAPS Proposal Software. The company rebranded in 2018 and today, they position themselves as an RFP solution.

While there aren’t a tremendous number of reviews, customers are overall happy with RocketDocs’ document creation capabilities, templates, and questions library. However, there isn’t enough data to determine customer satisfaction for many key features, including AI and document generation. Some customers complain about limited features, inaccurate responses, and a need for manual uploads.

User reviews

A comprehensive platform with minor technology annoyances

RocketDocs is incredibly helpful for our RFP process. I am able to save all past responses, categorize each question to a certain area of our business, and indicate when each question will need a legal review. My primary frustration with RocketDocs is that each question needs to be uploaded manually, one by one. I would prefer to be able to upload an entire word document and then separate each section or question and assign it to its respective area of our business. Additionally, there are often times issues with RocketDocs and our internal computer software when it comes to viewing past responses on my local computer.

Sarah B., Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

Loopio

Pricing: Custom

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.7/5 (587 reviews)

Loopio is an RFP software that can also assist with RFPs, RFIs, security questionnaires, and more. Like Responsive, Loopio automates the response process with workflow management and collaboration. Loopio leverages AI to find and auto-populate relevant content from your content library and auto-fill first drafts.

Loopio’s primary strength is in RFPs and offers limited functionality for other types of questionnaires. It also lacks many customization features. Loopio states that it has over 1500 customers, including Businessolver, Netskope, and Collective Health. Overall, G2 reviewers are happy with the platform, but some find it “cumbersome to use” and lacking integrations.

User reviews

Save time and increase collaboration

“The increase in team collaboration helps to streamline the RFP process and makes sure everyone’s on the same page. With Loopio, we’re able to complete projects much faster than with our previous processes.”

Verified user in computer software, Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

Content library limitations

I hope the tool could improve its content library import entries function. As of today, we could only use the Loopio Excel template to import entires per defined stack. So we need to break up a completed questionnaire into several spreadsheets and import them one by one into the library. We found this process time-consuming and hope the tool could be enhanced to allow one time import into multiple stacks in one go.”
Verified user in computer software, Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

Qvidian

Pricing: Custom

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.3/5 (111 reviews)

Qvidian is owned by Upland Software and focuses on the financial services industry. The tool specializes in RFP responses, although it also helps with RFIs, RFQs, DDQs, sales proposals, etc. The software uses generative AI to help create responses. Its most popular features include its content management system, AI-led search, and automated workflows.

Qvidian’s integration and automation capabilities are limited, and it lacks some of Responsive’s features, such as in-app collaborative content editing, content translation, and analysis. Users write that Qvidian is powerful but not user-friendly and the tools aren’t always helpful.

User reviews

Peace of mind for proposal content

“The Qvidian content library is what we use the most. Our proposal contributors no longer have to remember which previous proposal they wrote certain content and where to find it. It is “all” in one place, searchable, editable, formatted and now accessible from MS Word or a browser.”

Manon J., Small-Business (50 or fewer employees)

Requires extreme technical knowledge

“Document architectures for different document types and templates are extremely technical to establish and require very detailed knowledge of the nuances and features of Microsoft Word. It’s a rare occurrence that we need to set up a new document architecture so by the time we come back to do it we have forgotten how and require the support of the Qvidian team.”
Brett S, Enterprise (>1000 employees)

Tribble

Pricing: Custom

G2 Crowd Rating: 5/5 (30 reviews)

Tribble is a relative newcomer to the RFP software space. It’s somewhat difficult to assess Tribble because even their website is light on specifics. However, we can confidently say that Tribble is an AI-powered Chrome extension for RFPs and InfoSec questionnaires.

Tribble lacks deep AI capabilities and customization options, limiting scalability, especially for larger organizations with diverse tech stacks. Tribble’s limited reviews are excellent, but there aren’t enough of them for G2 to accurately gauge time to implement, return on investment, or ease of setup. Some state that Tribble is essentially still a work in progress and lacks functionalities such as in-tool collaboration.

User reviews

No more outdated answers

“As an administrator, it’s incredibly important to me that any solution we use provides responses based on the most current, accurate information sources. Tribble enables my team to quickly replace policies, questionnaires, and documentation in the corpus without the need to update hundreds of Q&A pairs. We know that the next time a questionnaire is filled out Tribble will use the most up-to-date information source automatically and disregard any previous response that relied on the previous version of the document. This reduces our team’s administration of our RFP platform from weeks to hours a year.”

Christopher M, Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

QorusDocs

Pricing: No available pricing information

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.4/5 (159 reviews)

QorusDocs is a proposal management software that generates RFP responses and sales pitches. Its QPilot AI assistant, built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI, suggests content, tracks completion, and positions itself as having powerful search functionality.

Overall, QorusDocs does what it says, but its content recommendations and AI functionality might not support larger organizations. Some customers feel there should be more support, especially during onboarding, and that the interface is “clunky.”

User reviews

Enhancing bid response efficiency with Qorus

“It saves my team so much time when responding to bids because creating pursuits happen faster, the search retrieval process is accurate, customization happens automatically, and task management is no longer manual. I LOVED the well-laid out implementation and training process my team had with Qorus and the continued customer support we get. With SharePoint as the backbone and its availability in all MS applications, Qorus fits into our daily lives so perfectly and seamlessly allowing us to use it all the time.”

Sham S. , Enterprise (>1000 employees)

Ombud

Pricing: No available pricing information

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.7/5 (25 reviews)

Ombud positions itself as a content collaboration, project management, and machine learning tool that helps create client-facing sales and business development documents by providing “context-aware” intelligent support.

While there isn’t a lot of data on G2, customers like its ease of setup while acknowledging its simplicity. With simplicity comes some sacrifice, however. For example, its chat, comment, and user interface functionality are not very intuitive, and its search and reporting features are less advanced than some.

User reviews

Better document management and collaboration

One reason I like Ombud is its simplicity and the best user interface. The software offers many features that make it easy to secure business content. With Ombud, handling collaboration and content management is easy.

Alex B., Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)Not too sophisticated but does its job

“The tool serves its purpose well. Easy enough to navigate between workspaces and see all assignments.”.

Roy A., Mid-Market (51-1000 employees)

PandaDoc

Pricing: Starts at $19 per month for document creation and $49 per month for integrations

G2 Crowd Rating: 4.7/5 (2,400 reviews)

PandaDoc positions itself as an “all-in-one” tool for creating, edging, sending, tracking, and eSigning documents. It is primarily used as a sales process software.

Many of the G2 reviews are focused on PandaDoc’s eSignature and contract drafting capabilities. In fact, a search for “RFP” resulted in just two reviews and neither was specifically about RFPs.

User reviews

PandaDocs software takes the pain out of contract drafting

“I love the organization behind PandaDocs. You log into the platform, and all of your documentation is there. Along with helpful content libraries, PandaDoc makes finding information easy for sales reps and marketing. Sometimes customers or prospects can feel wary about a PandaDoc email arriving in their inbox rather than from our business email. This forces sales reps to prepare a prospect for receiving a contract, RFI, or RFP.”

Schuyler B., Small-Business (50 or fewer employees)

Rohirrim

Pricing: No available data

G2 Crowd Rating: No reviews

Several RFP software newcomers have emerged since AI became mainstream. One such company is Rohirrim. Established in 2022, Rohirrim offers GenAI writing assistance. However, there’s little in the way of a proven track record and there are currently no RFP management tools such as collaboration, project management, and content management.

Rohirrim mentions no integrations, meaning it may not work with your tech stack and moving in and out of the app to access your CRM, communication, and collaboration applications can be burdensome.

No customers are listed on their website and there are no product reviews or testimonials.

AutogenAI

Pricing: No available data

G2 Crowd Rating: No reviews

AutogenAI, also founded in 2022, is another of the RFP software newcomers. So far, it appears to be a writing and editing tool and lacks some significant features, such as project management. They have a form of content management but users have to contact AutogenAI employees to add to their content library. There is no mention of integrations, so the user experience may be cumbersome.

What really sets an RFP management platform apart?

When searching for RFP software, it’s important to keep a few factors in mind, starting with a word of caution. Some small RFP software providers offer free trials. Unless you have a very small organization with a minimal tech stack, we advise against them because even free trials require setup, configuration, and user adoption — all of which requires time and support.

Think of RFP software as a long-term partnership. Choose a platform that will scale with you, encourage user adoption, and integrate with your existing tech stack.

More specifically, ask yourself:

  • What pain points are you looking to solve?
  • What types of questionnaires will you need to respond to?
  • Are you currently leaving potential deals on the table because of a lack of time and resources to generate proposals?
  • How many stakeholders are involved in your response process?
  • Do you require a robust content management system?
  • How much time will you save?
  • What is your budget?
  • What is your expected ROI?
  • Will you need onboarding and ongoing support?

Every business has its sights set on growth. To do this as fast as possible, you’ll need an RFP software solution that scales with you. Look for more robust software, such as a Strategic Response Management (SRM) platform to quickly and accurately respond to a wide array of information requests.

Responsive is the breakaway leader in both RFP software and SRM. Here are just a few reasons why:

  • Intelligent content management — A single place to find and manage all company content in just a few clicks. Responsive LookUp enables users to access the Content Library from anywhere.
  • Unmatched AI functionality — Responsive’s AI Assistant pulls from previously vetted Q&A pairs to generate a first draft. Update and perfect answers with just a few clicks. AI Assistant even knows your company’s brand voice.
  • Leading integrationsAccess all your favorite tools, including collaboration, communication, and productivity tools, without leaving the platform.
  • Proposal Builder — Let sellers sell by enabling them to generate captivating proposals in minutes.

Professional Services — Whether you need help onboarding or a knowledgeable consultant, Responsive’s Professional Services is dedicated to arming you for success.

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