30% of your revenue happens while you sleep
Founders don’t buy software during business hours, they buy software when it’s most convenient for them. That often happens after hours at 9 pm, 12 am, or even
You’ve agreed on terms, pricing is set, and the scope is crystal clear. But somehow, the deal still isn’t done… why? Deals get stuck in legal reviews, finance reviews, and endless back-and-forth emails. The most successful teams speed up the final stretch – getting deals closed when they should be.
We’re going to take a look at six CPQ platforms that help speed up the quote-to-contract process. From tools that get startups up and running in days to enterprise solutions that handle global complexity, we’ll show you which platforms can make the difference between losing time and closing faster.
The CPQ Software Shortlist: 6 Tools That Make Quoting Easy
The right CPQ tool can drastically cut down the time it takes to move from a verbal yes to a signed contract. Here are six top tools:
- Salesbricks: Best for early-stage B2B SaaS startups.
- Salesforce Revenue Cloud: Best for enterprises standardized on Salesforce.
- Oracle CPQ: Best for large, global enterprises.
- Conga CPQ: Best for document-heavy Salesforce workflows.
- DealHub: Best for mid-market SaaS scaling up.
- PandaDoc & Qwilr: Best for proposal-led teams with simpler needs.
Why Does Stripe Stop Being Enough?
Stripe is fantastic for payment processing and basic billing, but it’s not a full-fledged CPQ. If you’re creating custom quotes, negotiating terms, or managing anything more than simple self-serve checkouts, Stripe won’t cut it. If you have a sales-led motion, you’re probably buying 3-4 tools to sit on top of Stripe. For sales teams that customize deals, they’ll need a dedicated CPQ platform to streamline quoting, enforce pricing rules, and manage approvals effectively, before the payment process even begins.
1. Salesbricks: Best for Early-Stage B2B SaaS Startups
When you're a startup between $500K and $2M ARR, every minute is precious. We get it – you’re juggling a million things at once, and the last thing you need is a slow, complicated sales process. Salesbricks is built to help you close deals faster without the issue of enterprise-level systems and implementations. It gives you a unified quote-to-cash solution, so you can create dynamic checkout URLs with bespoke offers for each customer – allowing buyers to review, sign, and pay in one smooth, hassle-free motion. No more jumping between tools or losing time in back-and-forth emails and redlines.
For founder-led teams and lean RevOps functions, Salesbricks offers all the benefits of CPQ (contract workflows, pricing rules, and professional proposals) without the administrative burden of traditional enterprise systems. Implementation takes just days, and you can get your first quotes out in hours with straightforward pricing models.
With Salesbricks, you’re giving a clean, frictionless buying experience to your customers. Buyers can adjust pricing in real time, sign electronically, and pay immediately, while your system automatically provisions access!
2. Salesforce Revenue Cloud: Best for Enterprises on Salesforce
For enterprise-level companies already embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem, Salesforce Revenue Cloud is great. Built natively on the Salesforce platform, it unifies CPQ, billing, and contract lifecycle management to streamline the revenue process from start to finish.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is packed with advanced configuration capabilities, deep integration with CRM and ERP systems, and strong discounting and approval workflows. However, it requires a months-long implementation and often substantial consultant support and deep pockets for complex deployments. If you're already running Salesforce and have dedicated admins, it can be a powerful option.
For early-stage SaaS businesses, though, this complexity and the time-to-value may outweigh the benefits. While it's good at handling large-scale configurations, its deep customization requirements and high implementation costs can be more than most startups need.
3. Oracle CPQ: Best for Complex Global Enterprises
Oracle CPQ is designed for large enterprises that require deep product configurations and complicated integration with ERP systems. It’s a good choice for businesses with global operations, large SKU catalogs, and established IT teams. Oracle CPQ connects with over 20 leading ERP systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite and Microsoft, providing AI-driven pricing optimization, deal comparisons, and margin analysis.
Its ability to handle complex pricing models, like usage-based and tiered pricing, and its advanced guided selling features are a nifty bonus here. However, it's a heavyweight solution that comes with long implementation times – typically requiring several months of setup and significant consultant support for custom deployments.
For most startups still refining their pricing fit, Oracle CPQ may be a bit over-the-top. While it offers deep functionality, the cost and time required for implementation make it more suitable for large enterprises than smaller, fast-moving teams.
4. Conga CPQ: Best for Doc-Heavy Salesforce Workflows
Conga CPQ is also designed for enterprises already deep in the Salesforce ecosystem, particularly those with complex, document-heavy workflows. It integrates with Salesforce, offering advanced features for subscription management, automated renewals, and contract generation. With over 500 APIs, Conga gives users access to vital revenue lifecycle data, empowering teams to automate processes from quote creation to contract renewal.
For companies that need to manage a high volume of documents and complex subscription models, Conga CPQ is a strong contender. It’s particularly beneficial for those already using Salesforce and seeking a CPQ solution that ties in directly with their CRM. However, it comes with enterprise-level complications: longer implementation times, ongoing admin overhead, and a separate billing layer that can slow things down.
While Conga CPQ is great in detailed document management, its heavier, more intricate setup makes it less suitable for startups or smaller businesses that need a simpler, more streamlined approach to quote-to-cash.
5. DealHub: Best for Mid-Market moving to enterprise SaaS that are monetizing subscriptions
DealHub is a solution that combines CPQ, CLM, and billing, all while providing guided selling features to streamline the quoting process. It’s a no-code platform, meaning sales ops teams can make updates without relying on developers, making it an efficient choice for mid-market SaaS companies with growing RevOps functions.
With an implementation time measured in months, DealHub offers a moderately lengthy setup time compared to legacy enterprise CPQ systems. Its Digital DealRoom centralizes all buyer-seller communications in one workspace.
While it’s an decent fit for mid-market teams moving up market, DealHub might be a bit too heavy for smaller teams under $10M ARR. It’s best suited for those scaling up and in need of more than just basic quoting, but it can still be a complex platform for smaller SaaS companies.
6. PandaDoc & Qwilr: Best for Proposal-Led Teams Without Full
Quote-to-Cash Needs
PandaDoc and Qwilr are great solutions for teams focused on proposal creation rather than full quote-to-cash processes. PandaDoc integrates natively with HubSpot and Salesforce, offering guided selling features to simplify proposal creation. Qwilr, on the other hand, creates interactive, web-based proposals with real-time analytics, providing a more dynamic experience for buyers.
Both platforms are great at streamlining front-end document workflows, allowing teams to create professional, branded proposals quickly. However, they don’t handle the back-end complexities like billing and subscription management. These tools are an excellent step up from static PDFs, but once you need to manage amendments, complex subscriptions, or generate board-ready ARR numbers, you’ll quickly hit their limits.
For teams that need more than just proposal management, you’ll need a full quote-to-cash solution.
Choosing a CPQ That Matches Your Stage
Choosing the right CPQ tool depends largely on your business’s stage and needs. For early-stage SaaS, a tool that’s easy to implement, flexible, and aligned with your sales motion is key. Traditional enterprise CPQ platforms may be too complex, expensive, and time-consuming for startups that need a quick setup and scalable solution.
Traditional Platforms and SaaS Pricing
When choosing a CPQ, look for pricing rules, approval workflows, and subscription management features that integrate with billing. Many enterprise CPQ tools generate quotes while leaving billing systems to maintain separate product catalogs, which can create issues when trying to sync pricing and configurations.
For SaaS companies, managing usage-based billing can be particularly cumbersome with traditional CPQ. Multiple steps, manual syncing, and rigid systems often prevent you from experimenting with flexible pricing models as you search for the right product-market fit. This rigidity makes it hard for early-stage companies to adapt pricing strategies quickly.
What CPQ Platforms Cost
Traditional CPQ platforms typically charge on a per-user, per-month basis, but the upfront costs don’t stop there. You’ll also face implementation fees and ongoing costs for consultant support, especially when you need to make complex updates to pricing rules or product catalogs.
Base pricing may seem affordable, but keep in mind that SaaS pricing models often require deep configuration work, and adding customizations to your CPQ system can drive up the total cost. While quick-start packages can get you up and running on standard setups, for fully functional enterprise CPQ deployments, you could be looking at several months of setup and substantial implementation fees.
By the time you factor in consultant fees and the long implementation cycles, license fees are only a fraction of the total cost of ownership.
Why Technology Order Matters
When choosing a CPQ, the implementation timeline, administrative burden, and system integration quality are crucial factors to consider. Many startups make the mistake of buying billing systems first, only to realize they need a contract workflow earlier in the process.
By the time you realize this, you’ve already migrated your data and set up pricing rules in your billing system. This creates a "migration tax" when you add CPQ later, requiring you to rebuild workflows and reconfigure pricing rules to align with your new system.
Starting with a unified quote-to-cash platform means that all your systems, from CRM to CPQ to billing, stay aligned from day one, minimizing administrative overhead and integration annoyances.
Revenue Thresholds for CPQ Investment
CPQ platforms are suitable for businesses of all sizes, but how they’re used differs greatly between small businesses and large enterprises. Enterprise suites are designed to handle global complexity, while modern CPQ platforms are optimized to help early-stage companies scale from basic invoicing to a more efficient quote-to-cash process.
If you’re under $500K in annual revenue, basic invoicing and proposal tools may suffice for now. But once you hit the $500K-$2M ARR range, you’ll need a contract workflow that’s more structured than simple invoicing but without the overhead of an enterprise CPQ solution. Beyond $10M in revenue, an enterprise CPQ platform may start to make sense as you require more global scalability and advanced features, though the cost and complexity will also grow.
Why CPQ and Stripe Billing Still Leave Gaps
Stripe is fantastic for processing payments and handling basic billing, but when it comes to sales-led deals, it only takes you so far. Think of Stripe like a card reader – great for single payments, but you need the full point-of-sale system for contract workflows, approvals, and quoting.
Sales teams using spreadsheets to build pricing models often face issues when packages change or pricing structures grow more complex. As data remains scattered across disconnected tools, it becomes impossible to provide accurate, real-time reports, especially for board-level discussions about ARR. For this reason, Stripe alone can’t fully support a sales-led process, and that’s where a dedicated CPQ tool fills the gaps.
Signals Your Current Process Is Breaking Down
Still quoting with spreadsheets? Your current process is probably throwing up red flags louder than a disco ball at the office. Signs your sales process is staging a slow-motion collapse:
- Quarter-end deal volume spikes stall your manual quote-to-contract process, causing delays.
- High-value renewals break because invoicing systems can’t handle complex amendments.
- Your sales team abandons the official process and returns to offline spreadsheets, causing inconsistencies.
- Pricing discrepancies show up weeks after deals close, requiring labor-intensive corrections from finance.
How Unified Quote-to-Cash Eliminates the Handoff
Salesbricks fundamentally changes the way deals move from quote to cash by integrating quoting, signing, billing, and provisioning into a single flow. No more juggling between tools, no more version control issues with PDFs, and no more delays waiting for approvals across separate systems.
With Salesbricks, a dynamic checkout URL is created for each deal, allowing buyers to review the quote, adjust pricing in real time, sign, and pay, all in one place. Changes sync instantly, like Google Docs for contracts – no need to regenerate or resend documents. What used to take days or weeks can now be completed on the same day, reducing friction and speeding up your deal cycle.
Your Sales and Finance Teams See Identical Pricing
Salesbricks solves the age-old problem of mismatched pricing between sales and finance. By using a unified catalog – Products, Plans, and Bricks – your sales team works directly with the same pricing structure that finance relies on.
When a sales rep adds a component to a quote, it flows smoothly to billing, ensuring accurate treatment and no discrepancies between quotes and invoices. Pricing updates are applied universally, preventing the frustrating scenario where finance and sales teams are looking at different numbers. No more errors from disconnected systems, and no more manual updates across tools.
SaaS Pricing Models Work Natively, Not as Workarounds
One of the main challenges for SaaS companies is managing usage-based pricing, but with Salesbricks, that’s built into the core of the platform. There’s no need for complicated manual setups or relying on consultants to configure new pricing tiers.
With Salesbricks, you can launch new pricing tiers in minutes and instantly update subscription models, without waiting days for support. Automated entitlements ensure customers get access right away after the deal closes, eliminating delays that can cost your company valuable time and revenue. Implementation takes days, with your first quotes ready within hours, making it a perfect solution for straightforward pricing models.
Built for Teams Graduating From Basic Billing
Salesbricks is designed to sit between your CRM and billing systems, aligning with the correct order of operations in your sales process. For companies processing between $500K and $2M in annual revenue, Salesbricks offers the ideal balance: a strong, unified system that’s not as complex or costly as enterprise-level tools but more powerful than basic billing systems.
Salesbricks integrates with Stripe for payment processing (see, we told you we love it!), handling the critical contract workflow that basic invoicing tools can’t provide. It’s perfect for businesses moving beyond simple billing but not yet ready to take on the overhead of full enterprise CPQ systems.
Turn Your CPQ Choice Into Faster Revenue
The right CPQ tool depends on where your business is today and where you're headed over the next 18 months. For early-stage companies between $500K and $2M ARR, you need a contract workflow that’s fast to implement and requires little ongoing support. Solutions like Salesbricks get you live in days, without the months of implementation or consultant fees that come with traditional systems.
If you’re still using spreadsheets with Stripe, it’s time to look for platforms that unify quoting and billing. Adding a CPQ system after building pricing logic elsewhere can create significant friction, with the need to migrate data and rebuild rules.
Ready to close deals faster and drive revenue growth? Book a demo with Salesbricks and see how your team can go from quote to signed contract to payment in one checkout process.
