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PandaDoc recently rolled out a bi-directional CPQ integration for Pipedrive, supporting line items and making the CPQ process more streamlined.
It’s polished. It’s powerful.
But here’s the kicker: for most Pipedrive teams, SmartDocs already does the job faster and cheaper—without adding another subscription.
Why This Matters for Fast-Scaling Teams
Pipedrive is tailored for agile sales teams that need lean, simple solutions—the faster and easier something can be done, the better.
SmartDocs in Pipedrive is already a powerful CPQ tool. It is limited, sure, but you can pull off a lot combining it with other tools in pipedrive and make.com.
Let’s see when PandaDoc works great and how it’s advanced features can be covered without another subscription.
What PandaDoc Gets Right
We’ll give credit where it’s due. PandaDoc itself is very well designed, easy to setup and use. PandaDoc’s integration with Pipedrive offers:
- Real-time, bi-directional sync between quotes and deal records. No friction.
- In-CRM quote creation with branded templates and product libraries. Those templates look sweet and sassy.
- Approval workflows and discount guardrails without custom code. This one is unique and is not achievable in SmartDocs alone.
- Full quote-to-signature-to-payment flow in one environment. Their integration with Stripe is very easy to set up.
For smaller teams of 1-2 SalesReps and complex quoting, PandaDoc is reasonable, with about 50$/mo per user additional cost.
PandaDoc pricing as of September 2025. 50$ per seat on top of every other subscription you’re already paying for.
For bigger teams, PandaDoc can quickly snowball to a huge yearly extra cost. You’ll be paying 5.9K$ extra per year for 10 sales reps. At that point, one might consider a custom solution.
The big features in favor of PandaDoc:
- Easy to set up quoting and discount logic. Is your quoting rather complex and dependent on many factors that impact the total amount?
- Easy to set up payments. Do you need the payment link in your quote while invoicing is rather secondary?
If the answer to both questions above is a definitive yes, then checking out PandaDoc is worth it.
Read on if you want to cover those features in Pipedrive directly.
The Smarter, Leaner Alternative
Here’s the thing: SmartDocs covers quoting and e-signatures—right out of the box.
No extra logins. No extra cost.
SmartDoc templates can be documents, spreadsheets or presentations, which covers 90% of all use cases.
Especially if the quoting is straight forward and doesn’t involve complex discounting rules, SmartDocs is a no-brainer.
Here’s a quick list of feautres SmartDocs covers:
- Personalized quoting/contract templates
- Documents, spreadsheets and presentation formats are supported
- Full support of deal line items
- Fully customizable by users: change anything within the quote before sending out to prospects
- Simple to use: its regular documents, spreadsheets and presentations
Let’s see how PandaDoc’s killer features can be covered in Pipedrive: payments and quoting guardrails.
How to Add Payment Links to Quotes in Pipedrive
Here’s some quick ways to get paid.
QuickBooks Invoice directly in Pipedrive
If you use QuickBooks: just create an invoice with online payment option and send the link together with your quote. Powerful feature, takes 10 seconds to get that payment link start to finish.
Quickbooks is natively supported with the best integration one can get. If you can use Quickbooks - we highly suggest it.
Accounting App’s Payment Link
Similar approach can be used with your existing accounting app. This is usually a make.com or zapier situation and we build these custom invoicing scenarios every day. Once running, the invoice is issued automatically and you can just paste the link to the invoice in the quote or email.
A payment link is saved to pipedrive, which can be quickly pasted in the quote or the email with the quote. Most accounting apps have an option to pay the invoice online.
Payment Links in Quotes (Stripe, Paypal)
For standardized pricings, a payment link can be copy-pasted in the quote itself. If your retainers or the service is sold without adjustments - just add the payment link to your quotes for faster payments.
This can also be a combination of the previous technique: a custom payment link is created automatically for a deal, which you then paste into the quote or email.
How to Add Quoting Logic in Pipedrive
The idea is to sort out the logic before you generate the quote document.
The first step is to add all the information and products to the deal.
Products are a requirement for quoting, invoicing and good and reliable reporting
The second step is to build a make scenario that checks the deal once its ready for quoting and automatically adjust it.
Tools like make.com enable very sophisticated logic that is automatically applied to the deals before quote is created
This definitely takes a bit more work and is not as user-friendly as PandaDoc’s tool, but the cost is way less compared to running subscription cost in bigger teams.
How to Add Pitch Decks and Presentations to Quotes in Pipedrive
There are two ways to spice up your quotes in Pipedrive:
- Add a static pitch deck describing your services to an email template. This can be a Powerpoint or Google Slides or PDF attachment. Email attachments are saved with email templates.
Email attachments are preserved in email templates
- Add additional pages to your proposal template: a cover page, personalized messages, testimonials, etc. Any additional info — whole paragraphs — can be stored in custom fields on the deal itself.Keep in mind that a proposal template can be a document, a sheet or a presentation too.
Pipedrive does push one to keep things simple though, which is a beautiful limitation to embrace. The easier the process, the faster your sales team will be.
Final Take
New PandaDoc integration is great, no doubt. Just be aware that most of it’s functionality is already available in Pipedrive’s SmartDocs, at a fraction of the cost.
Most important aspect to keep in mind: if you’re already using an accounting app, it makes a lot of sense to leverage it’s capabilities for payments. Especially since you’ll be creating invoices there anyway.
Want to see how SmartDocs might work for your business case or would like to explore a custom, fully automated solution? Let’s chat.
