If proposals are how you win work, pick PandaDoc. Its editor, its templates, a quote builder a client can tick options in, its CRM connections and the payment step inside a signed document are all ahead of RunwayDue, and several of them we do not have at all.
RunwayDue is the PandaDoc alternative to pick if the proposal is the easy part and the months after the signature are the hard part: the dated instalments, the invoices they become, the chasing, the books, and a forecast of the months ahead. PandaDoc hands the collecting to a payment gateway and, on its Business plan, the invoice to QuickBooks Online. RunwayDue is that half, with a plainer proposal in front of it.
At a glance
| PandaDoc | RunwayDue | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid plans | Starter $19 a seat a month billed yearly, $35 monthly; Business $49 billed yearly, $65 monthly | Pro $15 a month billed yearly, $17 monthly, two people included; Business $50 billed yearly, $60 monthly, ten people; $6 a month per extra person |
| Two people, billed yearly | Starter $456; Business $1,176 | Pro $180 |
| Free plan | $0: 60 documents a year with e-signature, 2 recipients each, 5 templates | $0: one person, 3 clients, 5 invoices and 3 proposals or contracts a month; signing only by pack, $2 for one document or $1 each in a pack of 25 |
| Building a proposal | Drag-and-drop editor from Starter; simple quotes rolling out to Free and Starter; the full quote builder, product catalogue and content library on Business | Fixed sections and priced line items, or your own PDF |
| Client picks options | On Business, in the quote builder: optional items, quantities, a choice of sections; the simple quotes on Free and Starter offer none | No |
| Templates | 5 on Free and Starter, unlimited on Business | None |
| Payment inside the document | On Business, through Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net or QuickBooks Payments, in full or in instalments; the help centre also lists Stripe on Starter, rolling out, though the pricing page does not | No; payments are recorded by hand |
| After the signature | A Payments page lists each request as pending, due soon, overdue or paid; Business can create the invoice in QuickBooks Online | Dated instalments on the contract, each opened as a pre-filled invoice with one button |
| Payment reminders | On Business, by default: 3 days before each payment or instalment is due and on the due date, then up to four more at 7, 14, 21 and 28 days after; plus reminders you send by hand | On Pro, once switched on: by default 3 days before the due date, on it, then 7, 14 and 30 days after, with any that fall on a weekend sent on Monday, on a schedule you can change |
| Forecast by month | Not described in its help centre; reports on Business show document value by status | Six months, starting with this one, on every plan |
| Books | None; QuickBooks Online, or Xero through Zapier, on Business | Expenses, bills, profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet, aged receivables on Pro |
| CRM integrations, Zapier | HubSpot, Pipedrive and more on Business; Salesforce as an add-on; Zapier on Business | None |
| Mobile app, two-factor sign-in | Yes, on every plan | No |
PandaDoc's figures are from its own help centre and pricing page, RunwayDue's from its own plan table, all checked 25 September 2026.
Who each one is built for
PandaDoc is a document platform built around the moment a deal closes: build the proposal or contract from a template, pull the client and the products in from your CRM, route it for approval, send it, and collect the signature and, with a payment step, the money. It is shaped for teams that send a lot of documents and need each one to look right.
RunwayDue is a deal-to-cash tool for a small services business with lumpy revenue, and the proposal is its first step, not its product. The category question underneath this comparison is whether one tool or several suits your pipeline.
Where PandaDoc is better, and it is not close
Worth being specific, because a comparison that lists only its own strengths is worth nothing.
- The proposal. A drag-and-drop editor with design themes from Starter, by the help centre's plan comparison and the pricing page's table, though the pricing page's Free card also lists the editor. On Business, the full quote builder, a product catalogue and a content library of reusable sections; Free and Starter are getting a simpler inline quote in place of the old pricing tables, rolling out now, with no product catalogue. A RunwayDue proposal is fixed written sections (summary, scope, deliverables, timeline, terms) around an investment table of priced line items. It is clear, and there is no designing it.
- Templates. Unlimited on Business, five on Free and Starter, and a public library of more than 400. RunwayDue has none: two built-in starting agreements with merge tokens, an eight-section one for a new contract and a six-section one that takes in a converted proposal's scope, deliverables and terms, each edited contract by contract, a Duplicate button, and whatever PDF you upload.
- The client's choices. In the quote builder on Business, a PandaDoc client can tick optional items, change quantities and choose between sections; the simple quotes on Free and Starter give the client no options. RunwayDue shows optional items that the client cannot select.
- Payment at signing. A signed PandaDoc document can collect the money through a gateway, in full or in up to 99 instalments: on Business through Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net or QuickBooks Payments, where the quote builder can also start a Stripe subscription. The help centre lists Stripe on Starter too, still rolling out, though the pricing page shows payments on Business only. RunwayDue processes no payments.
- Integrations. HubSpot, Pipedrive and other CRMs, Zapier and QuickBooks Online on Business, with Salesforce as an add-on. RunwayDue has no public API, no Zapier and no integrations beyond Google sign-in, your own mail server and a payment link.
- Signer security. On Business: passcodes, email codes, SMS codes with an included allowance, and knowledge-based authentication (US citizens only) and government ID checks, which PandaDoc's pricing page lists as including up to 12 verifications a year and its help centre prices at $2 an attempt. Qualified electronic signatures are on Business too, and here PandaDoc's pages also disagree: the pricing page marks them annual plan only with up to 10 certificates a year included, while the help centre charges $5 a signer and gives included credits, monthly or yearly, only on Enterprise. The pricing page's recipient verification row, which covers passcodes and SMS, also says annual plan only, while the help centre includes 10 SMS codes a month on monthly plans (all checked 29 September 2026). On every plan, a seal on each completed PDF that Adobe Acrobat checks for later changes. RunwayDue has no identity verification, its only extra check being an optional access code on its Business plan, and it does not seal its PDFs.
- Team and mobile. Inline comments (from Starter in the help centre's plan comparison, on every plan including Free on the pricing page), approval workflows on Business, redlining as a paid add-on on Business annual plans and included on Enterprise annual plans, and on every plan a mobile app and two-factor sign-in by authenticator app. RunwayDue has no comments, no redlining, no mobile app and no two-factor sign-in.
- Track record. RunwayDue launched in August 2026. If you need a vendor with a history and references, that counts for PandaDoc.
If any line above is why you are shopping, buy PandaDoc. Nothing further down changes that.
The part after the signature
PandaDoc does not stop dead at the signature, and it would be unfair to say it does. Instalments keep their own due dates after signing, a subscription started from the quote builder is charged by Stripe from then on, and a Payments page lists every payment request as pending, due soon, overdue, paid or failed. On Business, PandaDoc's help centre describes payment reminders three days before each payment or instalment is due, on the due date, and up to four times after it, at 7, 14, 21 and 28 days; you can send more by hand, and a payment made outside the document can be marked as paid. The QuickBooks Online connection, also on Business, can create the invoice the moment a document completes. That is more automatic than RunwayDue, which never raises an invoice from a contract by itself.
Its reporting, on Business, is a document funnel: how many were created, sent and completed, how long each stage took, and the value sitting in each status. What neither the Payments page nor the reporting does, as the help centre describes them, is set the months ahead side by side: which months the signed money falls in, next to the proposals still out and how likely each is to close.
In RunwayDue the signed contract and its billing schedule is where that view starts. Converting an accepted proposal is one button: choose the billing type, the start date and the term. A monthly or quarterly contract splits the value into dated instalments that add up exactly to the proposal's subtotal, a one-time contract carries it as a single payment, and milestones you enter yourself. Once the contract is signed, an instalment that falls due is flagged as ready to bill, and "Bill it" opens a pre-filled invoice that you check and send. The invoice shows your bank details and, if you add one, your own payment link. Payments are recorded however they arrived, part-payments included. Once reminders are switched on, on Pro, a sent invoice is chased on a default schedule from three days before its due date to thirty days after, which you can change. That is about as persistent as PandaDoc's payment reminders, not more, and what it chases is an invoice rather than a payment request inside a signed document.
The dashboard's revenue outlook runs six months ahead, starting with this one, before tax and in layers that are never added into one headline: collected, invoiced, contracted (signed, not yet billed) and pipeline (sent proposals, weighted by their win probability and placed in the month they are expected to close). The method is explained in our guide to forecasting revenue that arrives in lumps. Behind it, on Pro, sit expenses, bills, vendors and the financial reports: profit and loss, cash flow, a balance sheet and aged receivables. There are no bank feeds, and the balance sheet says on its own page that it is built from your documents rather than a full ledger of journal entries.
Our proposal and our signature, said plainly
A proposal in RunwayDue is a numbered document with narrative sections, priced line items, a valid-until date and a win probability. The client accepts or declines on an unlisted link by giving their name. That is a click, not a signature, and it neither creates the contract nor takes a deposit: the conversion button does the first, and a deposit is a row you add to the contract's schedule and bill like any other.
Signing comes in two kinds, and they are not equal. A PDF signature request handles several signers, in order or all at once, asks each to agree to sign electronically before filling anything, and appends a certificate of completion: who signed and when, in UTC, from which network address, when they consented, the audit trail, and the SHA-256 fingerprint of the original. An agreement written in RunwayDue's own editor is signed on its share link instead, with a typed name and a ticked box, and gets no certificate and no consent screen. If you want the certificate, send the agreement as a PDF signature request: a contract sent on its share link, whether written in the editor or uploaded as a PDF, is signed with no certificate. More on how a RunwayDue PDF signature request works.
PandaDoc's signature is the more complete product: a certificate with verified email addresses, IP addresses and location, a sealed PDF, and identity checks on Business. What a certificate should record is set out in what a signing audit trail has to hold, and whether either signature would hold up is a question for how US law treats an electronic signature.
What it costs for this job
PandaDoc, from its help centre's plan comparison and its pricing page, checked 25 September 2026: Free eSign $0; Starter $19 a seat a month billed yearly or $35 monthly; Business $49 a seat a month billed yearly or $65 monthly; Enterprise by quote. The 14-day trial starts on Business Monthly by default.
The structural point, which will outlive those figures: the full quote builder, the product catalogue, the content library, CRM integrations, automatic reminders and QuickBooks Online all begin on Business. If proposals are why you are shopping, Business is the plan to compare: $588 a person a year billed yearly, $1,176 for two.
RunwayDue Pro is $15 a month billed yearly for two people, $180 a year, with e-signature, the books, every report and reminders included, for up to 25 clients and 250 documents a month; the rest of the price list is on RunwayDue's pricing page.
If you only need signatures, PandaDoc Free sends 60 documents a year, two recipients each, with unlimited users, and RunwayDue Free has no e-signature beyond packs, at $2 for one document or $1 each in a pack of 25. PandaDoc Free is the better deal. A reader who only needs signing should go on to the DocuSign comparison, which weighs RunwayDue against a signing specialist.
If you sell as a team from a CRM, PandaDoc Business.
If you also invoice, chase and keep books, compare PandaDoc plus your invoicing and accounting tools against RunwayDue on its own.
One point for PandaDoc in a lumpy year: its help centre says a monthly subscriber can move up to a paid plan in busy months and back to Free eSign in quiet ones, though the content library is out of reach on Free. Stop paying RunwayDue and the workspace drops to Free with nothing deleted: invoices, proposals and contracts stay usable within the Free caps and bills and expenses stay readable, but reports, reminders, recurring invoices and self-service export switch off, and signing is by pack only.
The honest summary
PandaDoc is the better tool for writing, sending and signing a document that sells, and for taking the money as it is signed. RunwayDue is not built to compete on the editor, the templates, the integrations or the payment step.
What it does is keep the signed agreement attached to the money afterwards: the dated instalments, the invoices, the chasing, the books, and a forecast that keeps signed work apart from hoped-for work. If that is the half you keep losing track of, one tool that holds it beats a better proposal tool with a spreadsheet behind it. If it is not, buy PandaDoc.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a cheaper alternative to PandaDoc?
For proposal-to-invoice work, RunwayDue Pro is $15 a month billed yearly for two people, against PandaDoc Starter at $19 and Business at $49 a seat a month billed yearly, Business being where PandaDoc's full quote builder, product catalogue and CRM integrations begin (all checked 25 September 2026). It is a different product: a plainer proposal with no templates, integrations or payment processing, but with invoicing, a billing schedule, a revenue forecast and books. For signatures alone, PandaDoc's Free eSign plan costs less than either.
Is there a free alternative to PandaDoc?
PandaDoc has its own: Free eSign sends 60 documents a year for signature, two recipients each, with five templates and unlimited users (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue's free plan does a different job: one person, 3 clients, 5 invoices and 3 proposals or contracts a month, and the revenue forecast. It includes no e-signature; signing is sold in packs, from $2 for one document.
Does PandaDoc do invoicing and bookkeeping?
PandaDoc can send an invoice as a document, number it automatically on Business, collect payment through a connected gateway on Business (its help centre also lists Stripe on Starter, rolling out, though its pricing page does not), and track what is pending or overdue on its Payments page (checked 25 September 2026). Its plan comparison has no books: no expenses, bills, profit and loss or aged receivables. For accounting it connects to QuickBooks Online on Business and Enterprise, which can create the invoice when a document completes, and to Xero through Zapier, which needs PandaDoc Business and a paid Zapier plan.
Can PandaDoc collect payments?
Yes. A PandaDoc document can carry a payment step that collects once it is signed, in full, in up to 99 instalments with their own due dates, or, through the quote builder, as a recurring Stripe subscription. The gateways are Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net and QuickBooks Payments, with a bank-transfer option for US customers still rolling out, and the gateway, not PandaDoc, processes the payment. PandaDoc's pricing page lists payment collection on Business and Enterprise; its help centre also lists Stripe alone on Starter, still rolling out (both checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue processes no payments: an invoice can carry a Pay now button to any payment link you paste, such as Stripe, Razorpay or Cashfree, and you record what arrives by hand.
Does RunwayDue have proposal templates like PandaDoc?
No. There is no template library. There are two built-in starting agreements, one for a new contract and one filled from an accepted proposal's scope, deliverables and terms, each edited contract by contract rather than saved as your own template, with 11 merge tokens for names, addresses, the contract number, dates, value and terms; default proposal terms saved for your workspace; a Duplicate button for proposals and invoices; and the option to upload your own PDF. PandaDoc has unlimited templates on Business and a public library of more than 400 (checked 25 September 2026).
How do I export my data from PandaDoc?
Documents come out by bulk download, on every plan: select them in the document list and PandaDoc emails you a .zip file, whose link expires within a week. Attachments and files collected through a Collect files field are left out, and the help centre suggests batches of 200 to 300 documents. Single documents and templates download as PDFs, or as Word files on Starter and above. On Business the product catalogue exports as a CSV, while contacts come out only by asking PandaDoc's support team (all checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue has no import, so for each agreement still running you upload the PDF, enter how it bills, delete any instalments already billed elsewhere, mark it sent without emailing, which uses one of your monthly documents, and mark it signed; clients are added by hand.
Can I use PandaDoc and RunwayDue together?
Yes, by hand; there is no connection between them. Sign the proposal in PandaDoc, then upload the signed PDF to RunwayDue as an agreement with its billing terms and mark it sent without emailing (which uses one of your monthly documents) and signed. The instalments, invoices, reminders and books run from there. You pay for both, and the handover is a manual step each time a deal closes.