Top 7 Loopio alternatives & competitors

Key takeaways

Legacy tools like Loopio and Responsive require managing heavy static libraries, whereas design-focused alternatives like Proposify lack deep automation capabilities. SiftHub stands out as the top alternative for 2026 by replacing manual maintenance with AI that connects directly to your live data. This eliminates the "librarian tax," allowing revenue leaders to drastically increase deal velocity without adding headcount.

The most painful deals aren't the ones you lose to a competitor. They are the ones you have to turn down simply because you don’t have the bandwidth to answer them.

As a revenue leader, you are constantly balancing a difficult equation: You need to increase the volume of RFPs you compete for, but you can’t afford to hire more support staff to handle the load linearly. You need throughput, not just headcount.

Currently, you might be facing a bottleneck that is artificially capping your growth. Your AEs and SEs are maxed out, not because they are in too many closing meetings, but because they are stuck in the "RFP black hole."

This creates dead time.

Every day an RFP sits in drafting, review, or approval is a day that the deal isn't moving. It’s a day your competitor, who responded 24 hours faster, is spending building relationships with the stakeholders, while your team is still formatting spreadsheets.

For years, Loopio was the default answer to this problem. The promise was that centralizing content would unlock speed. But for many enterprise teams, that promise has hit a ceiling.

Instead of a force multiplier that allows you to 10x your output, legacy tools often just shift the bottleneck. You trade the chaos of email for the drudgery of "library maintenance." If your software requires a full-time administrator just to keep it usable, you haven't automated the process; you've just given it a new home.

If you want to remove the operational drag that forces you to say "no" to RFPs, you need to look beyond the legacy players. The market has shifted toward AI-native intelligence, tools that don’t just store answers, but actively help your team close the quarter stronger by drastically reducing the time between "Received" and "Submitted."

This guide analyzes the top Loopio alternatives for 2026 that are built to scale your capacity without scaling your overhead.

Downsides of Loopio as an RFP tool

Loopio defined the category of "RFP response management" for a decade. But as deal velocity increases, its architecture has become a limiting factor for agile teams.

Here are the specific reasons why modern sales VPs are migrating away from it:

1. The "maintenance tax" kills scalability

Loopio relies on a strictly curated library. It works well only if you have a dedicated team constantly tagging, updating, and retiring content.

• The impact on revenue: You cannot scale your RFP volume if your "source of truth" requires manual labor to maintain. As your product evolves, the library lags. Your team stops trusting the tool, reverts to tapping experts on the shoulder, and your capacity to handle more deals flatlines.

2. It slows down deal velocity

Legacy tools often feel like a "walled garden." To answer an RFP, your reps have to leave their workflow (CRM, Slack, Email) and log into a separate portal that feels disconnected from the deal.

• The impact on revenue: This friction adds hours or days to the turnaround time. When ease-of-use is low, adoption drops. Instead of a rapid response engine, you get a tool that reps use grudgingly and slowly, extending the "dead time" of the deal.

3. Search that misses context

Loopio’s search functionality is heavily keyword-dependent. If an RFP question is phrased differently than your library entry (e.g., "Data Sovereignty" vs. "Data Residency"), the system often returns zero results or the wrong answer.

• The impact on revenue: Your team wastes expensive hours hunting for answers that already exist. This inefficiency drains the time your SEs should be spending on strategic, high-value deal architecture.

4. Long time-to-value (The "empty box" problem)

Because it requires a structured library to function, implementation is front-loaded with heavy lifting. You often start with an empty box that needs to be filled before it provides value.

• The impact on revenue: You are looking at weeks or months of "ramp up" before the tool starts impacting your bottom line. In a fast-moving fiscal year, you need immediate impact, not a six-week data entry project.

8 Loopio alternatives

1. SiftHub - #1 AI RFP software

Best for: Revenue teams who want an AI partner, not just a database.

If Loopio is a "Library" where you store books, SiftHub is the "Librarian" who has read every book and instantly gives you the answer.

For a sales VP, the biggest friction point in the RFP process is the disconnect between where knowledge lives (Slack, Drive, SharePoint, Salesforce) and where the RFP happens. SiftHub solves this by being AI-native, not just AI-enabled. It doesn't force you to manually curate a static library of Q&A pairs (which rots the moment you create it). Instead, it connects to your live data sources and acts as an intelligence layer on top of them.

How it scales capacity: Because it pulls from live data (like a fresh case study in SharePoint or a technical answer in Jira), you don’t need a full-time admin to "feed the beast." Your team can handle 2x the RFP volume without hiring a dedicated proposal manager.

Key Features:

• AI-native search: It doesn't just keyword match; it understands the intent of the question and synthesizes an answer from multiple sources (e.g., combining a pricing sheet + a security doc).
• Work where you work: Unlike Loopio, which forces you into a portal, SiftHub works as a sidebar in the tools your team already uses (Word, Excel, Google Docs, Salesforce, and Browser-based portals).
• Zero-maintenance library: It auto-updates its knowledge base by "reading" your approved documents, eliminating the need for manual tagging.

Pros:

• Drastically faster implementation: Connect your data sources and you are ready in days, not months.
• Higher Adoption: Sales reps love it because they don’t have to learn a new tool; it just sits inside their email/browser.
• Reduced Overhead: Eliminates the "Librarian" role, freeing up budget for revenue-generating hires.

Cons:

• Newer player: While rapidly growing, it has a shorter track record than legacy giants like Loopio.
• Focus: It is laser-focused on Sales/Pre-Sales velocity, so it may have fewer "procurement-style" features than older, heavier tools.

2. Responsive (Formerly RFPIO)

Best for: Global Enterprises that need a "Command Center" for complex compliance.

If SiftHub is the agile speedster, Responsive is the aircraft carrier. It is big, powerful, and designed for war, but it takes a long time to turn.

For a CRO at a massive organization (think 1,000+ employees), Responsive is often the default choice because it ticks every box for IT and Security. It excels at governance. If you have a deal that requires input from Legal in London, Product in San Francisco, and Security in Mumbai, Responsive’s project management tools are unbeaten.

How it scales capacity: It scales by structure, not necessarily speed. It allows you to process massive, 2,000-question RFPs by slicing them up and assigning them to an army of SMEs with strict deadlines.

Key Features:

• Heavy-duty project management: It creates a Gantt chart for your RFP. You can see exactly which SME is holding up the bid.
• Risk Analysis: It has a "Go/No-Go" module that helps you decide if an RFP is even worth your time before you start writing.
• Wholistic content management: Beyond RFPs, it attempts to manage all sales content (security questionnaires, DDQs, SOWs).

Pros:

• Granular permissions: You can control exactly who sees what down to the field level, critical for banking/defense sectors.
• Import handling: Users report it handles complex, broken Excel files better than almost anyone else.
• Deep analytics: You get detailed reports on which SMEs are the bottlenecks in your organization.

Cons:

• The "overkill" factor: Users frequently complain the interface is "busy" and "click-heavy." For a sales rep just trying to find one answer, it feels like flying a spaceship to go to the grocery store.
• Maintenance heavy: It still relies on the "Library" model. If you don't have a dedicated full-time administrator, your content will get stale, and the AI suggestions will degrade.
• Steep learning curve: New hires often need formal training sessions to navigate the UI effectively.

Also, read about Responsive’s alternatives. 

3. Inventive AI

Best for: Teams who want "context-aware" answers, not just copy-paste.

Inventive is attacking the biggest flaw of legacy tools: generic answers. Most RFP software uses simple keyword matching. If the RFP asks about "Data Sovereignty," legacy tools might paste your "Data Residency" blurb. Inventive’s AI is built to understand the nuance of the question and rewrite your existing content to fit the specific context of that prospect.

For a Sales Leader, this solves the "Generic Proposal" problem, where you send a technically accurate but boring response that loses to a competitor who actually answered the prospect's specific pain point.

How it scales capacity: It reduces the "edit time." Usually, AI gets you 60% of the way there, and humans do the rest. Inventive aims to get you 90% of the way there by style-matching your previous winning proposals, so your team spends less time rewriting the robot.

Key features:

• AI style-matching: It learns your company's "voice" so the output doesn't sound like ChatGPT; it sounds like your best Sales Engineer.
• Sales enablement focus: It’s built more for the sales user than the proposal manager, meaning the UI is cleaner and faster.
• Conflict detection: It flags if you have two different answers for the same question in your library (e.g., an old pricing model vs. a new one).

Pros:

• High-quality drafts: The "first pass" draft is often usable immediately, drastically cutting down review time.
• Modern UI: It feels like modern consumer software, not a legacy enterprise ERP.
• Customer support: Recent user reviews highlight hyper-responsive support, often directly from the founding team.

Cons:

• Integrations: As a newer player, it may have fewer native integrations with obscure legacy systems compared to Responsive or Loopio.
• Formatting: Some users note that exporting to highly complex, custom Word templates can sometimes require manual cleanup.

4. AutoRFP.ai

Best for: Teams who hate "library maintenance" (The low-friction option).

AutoRFP.ai has a bold promise: No library management. For the revenue leader, this is music to your ears. The number one reason RFP software fails is that nobody has time to tag and update the content. AutoRFP.ai skips this step. It simply "reads" your past 50 RFPs and your security documents, and then uses that to answer new ones.

It creates a "virtuous cycle"; every time you submit a new RFP, the AI gets smarter automatically. You don't have to stop and "teach" it.

How it scales capacity: It has the lowest barrier to entry. You can be up and running in days. This makes it perfect for lean teams (e.g., a Series B/C startup) who need to act big but don't have a Proposal Department.

Key Features:

• Traffic light system: It marks answers Green (high confidence), yellow (Needs Review), or Red (unknown). Your team only needs to look at the Yellows and Reds.
• Library-less architecture: It indexes your historical documents instead of forcing you to build Q&A pairs manually.
• Multilingual: Strong capabilities for translating answers on the fly for global teams.

Pros:

• Fastest time-to-value: You can literally upload your documents and start answering RFPs the same week.
• Low operational cost: You don't need to hire a "Loopio Admin." The software largely runs itself.
• High user adoption: Because it requires very little training, sales reps actually use it.

Cons:

• Less control: Because there isn't a curated "Master Library," some control-freak organizations (like highly regulated MedTech) might feel uneasy relying purely on indexed history.
• Limited project management: It lacks the heavy-duty Gantt charts and complex role assignment features of Responsive.

5. Proposify

Best for: Sales teams who lose deals because their proposals look amateur.

If the tools above are about filling out the RFP (the Q&A part), Proposify is about the presentation (the "Proposal" part).

For a VP of Sales, there is a nightmare scenario: Your team does all the hard work to win the deal, but then sends the prospect a messy Word doc with broken formatting and a pixelated logo. It looks cheap. And in enterprise sales, "cheap" kills trust.

Proposify fixes the "Closing Experience." It ensures that every document your team sends out looks like it was made by a design agency, without your reps needing to be designers.

How it scales capacity: It removes the "formatting bottleneck." Your reps stop wasting 2 hours fighting with Microsoft Word margins and page breaks. They drag, drop, and send.

Key features:

• Design-locked templates: You (or marketing) build the master template. Reps can change the text and pricing, but they can’t break the branding.
• Interactive pricing tables: Instead of a static PDF, the prospect can tick boxes (e.g., "Add Premium Support") and the price updates live in the document.
• Snapshot analytics: You can see exactly when the prospect opened the proposal and how long they spent reading the "Pricing" section vs. the "About Us" section.

Pros:

• Brand control: Eliminates the risk of reps sending off-brand or ugly documents.
• Closing speed: The built-in e-signature means you don't have to bounce between a document tool and Docusign.
• Marketing alignment: Marketing loves it because they can update a case study in the central library, and it auto-updates in everyone's templates.

Cons:

• Not a heavy RFP tool: It is not designed to shred a 500-question Excel RFP and auto-answer it. It is for the proposal document itself.
• Glitchy editor: Heavy users sometimes report that the web editor can lag if the proposal is 50+ pages long.

6. Qvidian

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Best for: Regulated industries (banking, healthcare) where "risk" > "speed."

Qvidian is the grandfather of this space. Owned by Upland Software, it is built for massive scale and rigorous compliance.

If you are a CRO at a global bank, your biggest fear isn't "speed", it's a lawsuit. You need to know that the answer your rep pasted into that RFP was legally approved by Compliance yesterday at 4:00 PM. Qvidian provides that audit trail.

How it scales capacity: It doesn't necessarily make you faster in the agile sense, but it allows you to handle massive complexity without breaking. It supports thousands of users and millions of content records without crashing.

Key features:

• Audit trails: Every single edit, view, and export is tracked. If a regulator asks why you promised a certain security feature 3 years ago, you can find the log.
• Complex workflows: You can build logic like "If the deal is over $1M, route to the CFO; if it mentions 'GDPR', route to Legal."
• Microsoft Office native: It plugs very deeply into Word and Excel, which is where 99% of procurement teams still live.

Pros:

• Unmatched security: It checks boxes for IT security that lighter startups simply can't touch.
• Handling scale: It won't choke on a 200MB Word document.
• Deep automation: For power users, the "Auto-fill" features for Word are very robust.

Cons:

• Dated interface: It feels like software from 2010. Using it can feel like a chore compared to modern tools like SiftHub or Inventive.
• Expensive implementation: This is not a "plug and play" tool. It requires consultants and a long setup time.

7. Qwilr

Best for:  Revenue teams who want to eliminate proposal drag after the RFP is won

Not every deal dies in the RFP. Many stall later, during proposal revisions, approvals, or follow-ups that drag on far longer than expected.

Qwilr focuses on that phase of the sales cycle. Instead of treating proposals as static documents, it turns them into web-based pages designed to be easy for buyers to review, approve, and sign without friction.

For a revenue leader, this solves a practical problem: proposals that look fine, but slow everything down. Formatting breaks, version control issues, and unclear buyer engagement all add quiet delays that compound across the pipeline.

How it scales capacity:
Qwilr reduces the time reps spend building, sending, and tracking proposals. With reusable templates and deep CRM integrations, sales teams can move quickly and at scale without adding process or headcount. 

Key features:

• Web-based proposals: Shared as live links instead of PDFs or Word files, so formatting stays consistent across devices, proposals are interactive and engaging.
  
• Reusable templates: Marketing can control layout and branding while sales focuses on content.
  
• Engagement tracking: Visibility into when a proposal is opened and which sections receive the most attention.
  
• E-signatures and payments: Buyers can approve and pay within the same proposal, reducing handoffs.
  

Pros:

• Shorter sales cycles: Real-time engagement data tells reps when to follow up and what to talk about.
  
• Zero formatting overhead: No PDFs, no Word exports, no margin battles.
  
• Modern buying experience: Feels closer to a product demo than a document, which builds trust with modern buyers.
  
• Strong mid-market to enterprise fit: Especially effective for SaaS, services, and consultative sales motions.
  

Cons:

• Not a traditional RFP engine: Qwilr won’t auto-answer a 500-question Excel RFP the way Loopio or SiftHub can.
  
• Mindset shift required: Teams used to static documents may need time to fully adopt a “proposal-as-a-web-page” model.
  

8. PandaDoc

Best for: Mid-market teams who want the "RFP" and "Contract" in one flow.

PandaDoc is not a traditional RFP response tool. It is a document workflow tool.

For a revenue leader in the mid-market, you might not be getting 1,000-question security grids. You are getting shorter RFPs, followed immediately by a quote and a contract. PandaDoc combines these steps. It treats the RFP response as just another document in the closing cycle.

How it scales capacity: It consolidates your stack. Instead of paying for Loopio (RFP) + DocuSign (Sign) + CPQ (Quote), you do it all in PandaDoc. This reduces "toggle tax" for your reps.

Key features:

• All-in-one workflow: You can create the proposal, negotiate the terms, and collect the signature in the same URL.
• Content library: It has a "Smart Content" library where you can store snippets (like your security answers) and drag them into the doc.
• Payment collection: You can actually collect a credit card deposit right inside the document signature page.

Pros:

• User experience: It is arguably the easiest tool to use on this entire list. Reps require almost zero training.
• Mobile app: You can track and even approve deals from your phone, which is great for traveling sales leaders.
• Cost-effective: It bundles multiple tools into one license.

Cons:

• Weak on complex RFPs: If you receive a massive Excel spreadsheet with 500 technical questions, PandaDoc cannot help you auto-fill it. You will have to do that manually.
• Limited "AI" brains: It doesn't have the deep "contextual rewriting" AI that tools like SiftHub or Inventive have.

How to choose the right Loopio alternative

You are reading this because you have outgrown Loopio. But not all alternatives solve the same problem. Some offer more of what Loopio does (heavier governance), while others offer less (simpler design).

To make the right switch, you need to identify exactly which part of the "Loopio fatigue" you are trying to cure.

1. The "governance" switch (Responsive, Qvidian)

• The scenario: You don't mind the manual work of Loopio; in fact, you want more control. You are in a highly regulated industry (banking, defense) where the primary goal is risk mitigation, not speed.
• The trade-off: You are essentially trading one heavy system for an even heavier one. You get deeper audit trails and project management, but you will still be stuck with the "maintenance tax." If Loopio felt slow, these will feel slower.
• The verdict: Move here only if your compliance team demands it and you have the headcount to manage it.

2. The "presentation" switch (Proposify, PandaDoc)

• The scenario: You realized you don't actually need a heavy RFP tool. You aren't answering 500-question security grids. You are sending SOWs and Quotes, and you just hated how "clunky" Loopio’s document builder felt.
• The trade-off: You get beautiful documents, but you lose the "Brain." These tools are great specifically for formatting, but they cannot read a complex question and auto-generate an answer like Loopio or SiftHub can.
• The verdict: Move here if your main friction point is "Design," not "Content."

3. The "velocity" switch (SiftHub)

• The scenario: You liked the idea of Loopio (centralized knowledge), but you hated the reality (manual tagging, stale answers, and low adoption). You want a tool that actually automates the work so your team can close more deals.
• The unfair advantage: SiftHub is the only alternative that fixes Loopio's core design flaw: the static library.
  
  • Instead of forcing you to manually update a database (like Loopio and Responsive), SiftHub connects to your live data to keep answers fresh automatically.
  • It gives you the enterprise security you need, without the administrative burden that slows you down.
• The verdict: If you want to graduate from "managing a library" to "accelerating revenue," SiftHub is the modern standard.

Your best path forward

Loopio defined the first generation of RFP software. It taught us that centralizing content was important. But for the modern Revenue Leader, the "Library" model Loopio built has become a bottleneck, not a solution.

Continuing to pay for a tool that requires hours of manual maintenance every week is no longer a strategy; it’s an operational leak.

When you look at the landscape of alternatives, the choice comes down to a simple philosophy:

• Responsive and Qvidian double down on the old "library" model, adding more features but more weight.
• Proposify and PandaDoc side-step the problem entirely by focusing on simple documents.
• SiftHub solves the root cause.

By shifting to an AI-native architecture, SiftHub removes the maintenance tax that made Loopio frustrating in the first place. It allows you to keep the control and accuracy you need, while finally unlocking the speed your pipeline demands.

The best alternative to a digital filing cabinet isn't a bigger filing cabinet. It’s an intelligent partner. Try SiftHub today.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Loopio alternatives

1. What is the best RFP software? 

There is no single "best" tool, only the best tool for your specific constraints.

• For Speed & Revenue: If you want to automate responses without hiring a full-time admin, SiftHub or AutoRFP.ai are the top choices.
• For Enterprise Governance: If you need complex audit trails and risk analysis for a 10,000-person bank, Responsive or Qvidian are the standards.
• For Design: If you need your proposals to look like magazine spreads, Proposify is the leader.

2. What is the difference between Vanta and Loopio? 

They solve two different parts of the same problem.

• Vanta is a compliance automation platform. It helps you get compliant (e.g., monitoring your servers to ensure you pass your SOC2 audit).
• Loopio is a response management platform. It helps you answer the questionnaires that ask if you are compliant.
• The Bottom Line: You use Vanta to earn the badge; you use Loopio (or SiftHub) to tell prospects you have the badge. Many teams use both.

3. What is the difference between 1up and Loopio? 

Think of 1up as the "Lightweight Automator" and Loopio as the "Heavyweight Library."

• 1up is a newer, AI-first tool designed for quick adoption. It focuses heavily on "reading" your documents and automating answers instantly, often starting at a much lower price point with a self-serve model.
• Loopio is a legacy enterprise platform. It focuses on structured project management and manual library curation. It is better suited for massive teams that need strict approval workflows, but it comes with significant operational drag.

4. How expensive is Loopio? 

Loopio is an enterprise investment, usually starting around $20,000 to $25,000 per year for their base "Foundations" package.

• The Hidden Costs: The license fee is often the smallest part of the expense. You must also factor in:
  
  • Add-ons: Critical features like Salesforce integration or Single Sign-On (SSO) often cost extra.
  • The "Librarian Tax": Because Loopio requires manual library maintenance, the real cost is the 20-40 hours per month your team spends updating tags and cleaning up old content—time that could be spent selling.

5. How long does it take to switch from Loopio to a new tool? 

With legacy alternatives like Responsive, expect a 4-8 week migration and training period. With modern AI-native tools like SiftHub, you can often ingest your historical data and be operational in less than a week.

6. Will AI really replace my proposal manager? 

No. AI replaces the retrieval and first draft process. Your proposal manager stops being a "search engine" and starts being a "strategic editor," refining the message to win the deal rather than hunting for files.

7. Is my data safe with AI tools? 

This is the most critical question. Ensure any vendor you choose is SOC2 Type II compliant and does not use your data to train public models (like generic ChatGPT). Enterprise-grade tools like SiftHub use isolated instances so your data stays yours.