The 8 best RFP Software features of 2025 

Bid and proposal professionals across industries and throughout the globe rely on RFP software to get work done and win more deals. Responding to RFPs takes a lot of time and effort but is a critical part of any organization’s revenue-generating sales cycle.

Due to the growing demand for RFP response software, there are many different products and services out there all designed to improve the response process. Finding the right software involves drilling down on a product’s core features, analyzing their best offerings, and solidifying on one solution for your entire organization.

While the work might be tough, it’s worth it! With the right RFP software, professionals can take back their weekends, their evenings, and even their sanity. In fact, across all industries and geographies, the most effective sales and proposal professionals rely on automation and RFP software to create higher-quality proposals—fast.

To make your job a little bit easier, we’ve compiled a list of the top features of RFP software that any organization needs to consider to improve their response process.

What are the top features of RFP Software?

Any RFP software worth its salt will contain a suite of features designed to make life easier for professionals. When trying to choose the best RFP software, make sure your team invests in a platform that does more than simply store content. Modern platforms contain several different features from broad automation systems to granular user controls. That’s why it’s important to thoroughly review and inspect each software to see which best fits your organization’s needs. 

1. General automation features

The bread and butter of any RFP software are its automation features, since professionals rely on them to reduce time-intensive and manual tasks. Typically, RFP software will contain multiple types of automation. It might include features for automatically answering questions, selecting relevant content, or formatting documents. Combined, these features help professionals save hours’ worth of time on each proposal they create.

Some general automation features include:

• Tracking user activity automatically.
• Automating version control by recording content updates.
• AutoFill capabilities that suggest the best answer based on previous content.
• Automatically answering questions.

Here are more specific automation and AI features that organizations should consider when investigating RFP software solutions.

2. Automatic questionnaire answering

If you’ve been in the bid and proposal industry long enough, you know how exhausting and time-intensive questionnaires can be. Customers routinely ask companies for a long list of due diligence, technical, and security questions that must be answered when responding to an RFP. Often these types of questions are standardized, appearing across industries and companies, meaning proposal writers will often answer the same questions multiple times a week.

To make this process less time-intensive, most modern RFP software contains some form of automatic questionnaire answering. How this process works is simple:

• A customer posts an RFP complete with a list of questions that must be answered.
• Bid and proposal professionals upload this list of questions to the RFP software.
• The RFP software uses machine learning to scan the document and identify key questions and headings.
• The RFP software scans the content library and pulls out the best-fitting answers for each identified question.
• The bid and proposal professional chooses to accept this answer, select another, or write their own.

By automating the answering process, teams can save hours of time usually spent searching and manually inserting content. With this extra time, they can get back to the more exciting parts of the RFP response process: customizing and personalizing.

3. AI features

The top RFP software companies invest and integrate the latest technologies into their platforms. While most companies have already been using some sort of artificial intelligence (AI) to power their automation efforts for some time, generative AI’s emergence has dramatically shifted the landscape as the technology is implemented within more software platforms. Organizations that infuse generative AI into proposal processes are seeing the difference, and they’re winning more business.

4. Machine learning AI features:

• Identifying questions
• Suggesting relevant responses and answers
• Identifying top-performing questions and responses

Generative AI features:

• Revising and rewriting content for tone, length, grammar, style, and more
• Drafting new responses in seconds from existing content
• Pre-built and custom-crafted prompts to get work started faster
• An easy-to-use conversational interface
• The ability to query documents to extract key information and details
• Automatically flagging AI-generated answers for human review

5. Central content library

Central content libraries help teams manage all of their content with a user-friendly and customizable structure. By storing and tagging the content they use daily in their library, every professional can use the same pieces of content when crafting their next RFP response or proposal. 

Additionally, by pulling from the same source of information, teams can ensure that all of their responses remain accurate, consistent, and up-to-date.

6. In product messaging threads

Many pieces of RFP Software or proposal management software offer in-product messaging threads as a collaboration feature. This helps teams asynchronously work on a sales proposal or RFP response, leave suggestions, edits, and feedback on presentation slides, and keep in constant communication during the entire process.

7. Professional style templates

Branding is key to making your company stand out. Since many customers receive hundreds of well-formatted and persuasive proposals for each RFP posted, the difference between a winning proposal and a losing proposal could come down to design and appearance. 

Great RFP Software will offer a robust set of professional style templates, allowing you to quickly enforce brand guidelines, create branded proposals and presentations, and format and style all your content in seconds.

8. Robust analytics 

Your RFP software should deliver plenty of reports, dashboards, and key insights into the success and potential of your proposal strategy. This is because the best proposal software won’t stop working for you after the document is created – it will continue to gather meaningful data and metrics to better inform you and your team on what content works, and what doesn’t. The more visibility into your proposal process, the more bids you will win. The right software will help you with that.

How to choose the best RFP Software

When choosing the best RFP software, you’ll want to compare lots of different features to see what fits best for your company’s needs. As mentioned above, you’ll first want to consider the features each piece of software offers. After you’re done analyzing the features, you’ll want to consider some bigger-picture questions as well.

Dive deeper into each piece of software to see how it will ultimately improve your overall workflow. You might ask yourself questions like:

• What does it integrate with?
• Does it offer granular user roles?
• What are its collaboration features?
• What are its core automation features?
• Does it offer a searchable content library?
• How is its customer service? 
• What technical support or training does the company provide?

All these questions can help you narrow down your options and ultimately land on the best piece of software for your company’s unique needs.

What does it integrate with?

The best proposal software will integrate with the tools you are already using to drive success. For example, the browsers the software supports, an effective integration with Microsoft Office, and working seamlessly with Salesforce are a few of the integrations that are going to play a critical role in choosing software. Make sure that the software you are evaluating works flawlessly with your existing tech stack. If your organization uses Microsoft Office, for example, be sure to verify the software integrates with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This way, authorized content managers can edit and format content with the full power of Office at their fingertips, instead of trying to use a watered-down editor that’s built into the software. 

Does it offer granular user roles?

While many of the best proposal software solutions out there will show you all the bells and whistles up front, only the best of the best really have what you need to succeed both in responding to RFPs and in proactively proposing to businesses. One key feature to ensure productivity and success is user roles. Granular user roles will give each team member exactly the permissions they need and nothing more. This reduces data security concerns while keeping your team productive.  

How does it improve collaboration?

Especially when working with a remote team, you need software that supports virtual collaboration. In-application workflows and comment threads go a long way. Also, look for software that allows you to work together in real-time through Office Online, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint. (Ideally, you’ll get these integrations at no extra cost.) 

Additionally, you will want to ask yourself: how easily can you collaborate with others, and what visibility do you have into the finished proposal? Many proposal software solutions limit your view to only one question at a time. But when you are limited in this way, how can you ensure that you are answering RFPs in one consistent tone?  Instead, you want a software solution that gives you insight into the entire, completed proposal.

Does it have a searchable content library?

Finding a solution that enables simple search and customization processes should be a top priority when evaluating options. Does the software you are considering offer flexible search options with custom metadata? Or does searching for the right content piece feel like operating within a straitjacket? The best proposal software will make your life easier by helping you find what you need, when you need it.  

Make sure you can organize content by folders and tags. 

Content expiration dates and review reminders can help you keep content current. 

Look for the option to link related content.  

How helpful is the company offering the product?

Many times, when people start looking for an RFP software they focus on all the bells and whistles of the product without thinking about the company supporting it. However, what company you choose to partner with is just as important as the software itself. 

A great company will offer more than top-notch RFP software. They should be able to provide you and your team with industry and technical expertise along with expert customer service. You want a company that understands the unique needs of bid and proposal professionals and can help ensure your ultimate success. You’ll also want to investigate what onboarding support they offer to new users. Many companies offering RFP software will offer also technical services and support to help you migrate your existing content or efficiently setup up your initial content library for success.

An additional plus is partnering with a company that offers robust training options for all your team members to learn the ins and outs of their software.

RFP software helps teams win more and respond faster

The bottom line of RFP software is that most companies will find it a vast improvement over a traditional manual process. By using the content management, automation, and generative AI tools that come standard in most modern pieces of RFP Software, teams will save time on every response they generate. With less time spent on tedious manual tasks, teams can devote more energy to other aspects of their business, such as personalizing responses, building stronger connections with potential customers, and finding new and exciting opportunities for their company.

However, like with any piece of technology, picking the right provider or partner makes all the difference. Choose an RFP software that’s flexible enough to help your team respond to RFIs, RFQs, DDQs, and software that gives you the tools needed to craft jaw-dropping sales proposals and responses.

By choosing an industry-leading RFP software, your team and company will be able to cut down on long sleepless nights responding to RFPs and get back to doing what you do best: winning more business.