Conga Composer API

We are using Conga Composer  as a document generation and automation tool, which is allowing our teams to embed the document creation directly into the custom application, website, workflows, and using the APIs and REST APIs, instead of manually copying and pasting data from one to another.

It is also helping us to pull the information directly from the CRMs and the ERPs, from the system record via JSON payload, to create contracts, invoices, and structured reports for our customers.

Conga Composer  is a very good product and it heavily excels in any kind of complex and high-volume scenarios. It is very well-versed with handling dynamic content such as charts, nested tables, global currencies, and it can execute asynchronously, putting it well ahead of a basic PDF generator. It also offers many additional features.

The user interface is my personal favorite, as the interface is largely very developer-friendly, and it is a custom front end we built. Additionally, it utilizes familiar tools like Microsoft Word and Excel. Setting it up involves a complex API deployment and JSON payloads. Initially, it requires some technical heavy lifting compared to drag-and-drop and no-code tools. If you are from a technical background, then it is not a challenge.

My personal favorite features are headless execution, which helps us to trigger the document generation in the background from the buttons, workflows, or external systems without requiring the user to navigate through an interface. This gives us all the options within a single click from the UI. The second feature I love is that it supports multi-format. Generating a Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML can be done from a single source and a single, central data source. The third feature which I love is that the REST API is not locked exclusively into Salesforce . It can ingest JSON data from virtually any ERP  or system of record. Additionally, the seamless add-on to the sign API has helped us to create an uninterrupted, automated contract cycle.

Conga Composer is doing pretty well, but if I have to give a suggestion, the only suggestion is that they can improve on the AI features which they may release in the future. This will help not only tech users but also non-tech users to make sure that they are able to use it effectively using the AI chatbots or AI agents within the application.

We have been using Conga Composer in our organization for two and a half years.

Conga Composer is definitely a stable solution. We did not face any kind of downtime, bugs, challenges, or mishappenings with this software so far.

Conga Composer is definitely a scalable solution. It can scale to as much as 100,000 users, from what I have heard from their support team.

The customer support was really excellent. I interacted with them three months back. There was some update from their end, and after that update, we were facing some problems. They resolved that query within 45 to 50 minutes. I love the customer support which the team provided.

We did not use a previous solution. This is the first time we implemented a document generation and automation tool.

The deployment went really well. It was not that tough, as it does not require heavy architecture planning or any heavy technical requirements from the system. We implemented it within two to three weeks. From the time we had the conversation, the team purchased it and it got deployed within three weeks.

The configuration went really well. It did not take that much time. It was easy and straightforward to understand.

We have seen a major return on investment after we implemented Conga Composer into our workflows and the organization. We have seen manual entry and data entry eliminated, and we have saved at least 90 to 99 percent of time, as it has helped to get these things automated through it, and which has helped us to save a lot of time and resources.

Second, it has helped our teams to collaborate better, which has helped to increase the team productivity by 68 percent. As things went better, they were able to deliver more than they were expected to deliver, as they had more time and used that time in a productive way. Third, we have saved at least 40 to 45 percent in cost, as we have saved thousands of labor manual hours annually by removing the manual input. It also eliminated the errors that were occurring from copy-paste mistakes by human workers. The error frequency has dropped from at least 30 to 40 percent to essentially zero. This has improved the turnaround time by at least 67 percent and significantly accelerated the quote-to-cash cycle for our revenue teams.

Team collaboration improved because they were having clear, structured data and directly eliminated the manual data entry, which helped them to save a lot of time. That time went into other team-building exercises and greater work opportunities within the organization. This impact has been tracked globally for the organization by the quote-to-cash cycle from our revenue teams.

Pricing, setup cost, and licensing are really good, as we got the support of the AWS  team. We got a discount, the pricing is good, the setup cost is good, and with the licensing, the renewals are seamless with the AWS Marketplace .

Before choosing Conga Composer, we definitely did some good market research. Apart from Conga Composer, we evaluated solutions such as PandaDoc , Nintex DocGen, and S-Docs based on usage. Conga Composer turned out to be the best for our needs.

Anyone who is looking for a game changer and headless content editing without needing any code, top-tier, top-notch, API composer, and which can actually work with your Word or Google Docs, should definitely go ahead for Conga Composer. I would rate this solution as a five out of five.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)

One of the main use cases for Conga Composer  would be to generate quote documents. We had different types of quote documents in our business process, so we used different kinds of Conga Composer  templates for those. Basically, there was one template for the initial quote to give them an idea of how the price structure is going to work. Once they finalize, we have a different template, so when the deal is finalized and everything is in place, they would be able to see how much they would be paying, including the tax. That was the main use case around it. But as I mentioned earlier, we also used it for other custom objects that we had, such as POV, and to generate and print basically the invoices as well.

We used Conga Composer mainly for generating the documents, but we did not use Conga Composer Sign functionality. Instead, we opted for the DocuSign  functionality. Once the document generation process was completed by Conga Composer, we integrated DocuSign  into our system. Once the document is generated, it moves to a DocuSign envelope. We are able to send the document to different contacts mentioned there. DocuSign was mainly for sending the document to get it signed, and once it comes back signed, we also had an automation in DocuSign that updates some fields at the quote level. It lets us know that the document has been signed and things around that.

I would say the process of setting up those templates for different quote stages with Conga Composer is extremely easy. You do not need a lot of development knowledge for that. Even if you are just proficient with Microsoft Word, then you can definitely go ahead and customize this according to your needs. It's very simple and very straightforward. In my 2.5 years of experience with Conga Composer, I can say that it was one of the best document generation tools that I have used in a very long time. For maintenance purposes, it's very easy to maintain the existing templates or to create new ones.

Conga Composer has positively impacted my organization, and I have noticed improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction since using it. Earlier, we used to generate all these documents with the native CPQ  functionality that allows you to create templates and generate documents via Visualforce. Those were difficult to maintain because you needed to check the tables and manually enter width and height. They were not very easy or friendly to configure and maintain. With the introduction of Conga Composer, we see a lot of changes on a day-to-day basis. There are a lot of requests to customize our templates, and we can meet those customization requests very easily. It offers greater flexibility in terms of formatting and the data we want to show to our customers. This is where it plays a major role, so there has been a lot of improvement, and the efficiency has also improved.

In terms of improvements for Conga Composer, we did start seeing a lot of requests related to customization, which were initially difficult. As people got to know that it's very easy to customize it, we started to get those more and more, and we saw fewer errors. Earlier, there were many requests to manually adjust the contract value, which was not possible with the CPQ  quote documents. With Conga Composer, we can customize it to some level. For exception cases, we can modify the template and generate the contract in a way they want it. While we did not record any metrics, looking at the overall tickets and the reduction in errors we used to see, I think it has improved efficiency by a lot, and our stakeholders agree. However, I would say that despite being easy to set up these templates, there are limitations around looping. Some functionalities break when dealing with large templates, around 30 to 40 pages long. We jumped on their support, but we could not come to a resolution, so we ended up reducing the overall complexity of our template.

I think Conga Composer could improve its adoption for Conga Composer Sign. Right now, the adoption is not very great. People use Conga Composer mainly for document generation and then go separately for DocuSign. To get a better hold of the market, Conga should definitely invest more into Conga Composer Sign.

I have 2.5 years of experience with Conga Composer.

I would say Conga Composer is mostly stable. In my 2.5 years of experience with it, I faced one or two instances where it was down, likely due to major AWS  services being down. The downtime was significantly low, and they were able to restore services quickly, typically within an hour or two. I am happy with that responsiveness and the seriousness they take in their work.

I believe Conga Composer is very scalable. We have around 3,000 to 4,000 internal users, and it handles all that workflow and simultaneous contract generations without any issues.

We found customer support to be helpful, but there were instances where we faced issues with flags that allow you to hide or show tables. In cases where your contract is complex, using many formulas or spans 30 to 40 pages, those flags do not reliably function. When we consulted support, they advised reducing the complexity of our contracts instead of proposing a fix, leading us to ultimately cut back on the number of contract documents.

As I mentioned earlier, we used to use CPQ quote document functionality, which was native and free with the Revenue Cloud. However, it was not very easy to maintain, requiring developers to create and maintain those templates, which lacked flexibility compared to Conga Composer. Seeing those challenges and the need for more customization, we opted for Conga Composer.

The initial setup for Conga Composer was not very difficult; it was very easy. As for pricing and licensing, back then we had a very good budget. We looked for a good replacement for the CPQ standard functionality we had to generate documents. We found a very good replacement in Conga Composer and were glad to pay the price they showed back then. It was not very much, but now with a lot of new tools and freeware available, the cost factor becomes a reason to consider whether we should renew our subscription.

Earlier we had a team of CPQ developers maintaining those documents in CPQ, but with the introduction of Conga Composer, certain stakeholders now have knowledge of how Conga Composer works and can go ahead and create and customize templates. Most of the time, they know the requirements themselves and can work on that without needing external help.

Before choosing Conga Composer, we evaluated DocuSign. However, there were internal questions about whether the initial setup and long-term maintainability would be as easy as with Conga Composer, leading us to decide to go with Conga Composer instead.

I don't think we did anything unique with Conga Composer, but we did use a lot of templates on a single object. As I mentioned, on the quote object itself, we had a couple of templates, including an initial contract template and a finalized contract template. We used it for different templates, and we also built different Conga Composer queries to pull in the data for the merge field that actually gets printed in the document.

I don't think the automation part of Conga Composer is really that good, but the template creation part is extremely easy. It allows me flexibility to send the documents. We have that flexibility for DocuSign, so there's Conga Composer Sign that you can utilize, and it very closely integrates with Conga Composer. Once your document is generated, you can send it via Conga Composer Sign to any customer. The integration part is, of course, very easy and native with Salesforce . Within Salesforce  itself, you have the managed package application from where you configure different things about Conga Composer, so it's very easy there as well.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Conga Composer a seven. The reason I say seven is that there are a lot of freeware tools right now that offer the same functionality for free. There are many LinkedIn posts talking about people coding their own composers in Salesforce that allow document generation similar to Word templates we have in Conga Composer. That same functionality is being offered for free, although it's not as scalable or foolproof as Conga Composer. There are many new developments in the market, so they should work on the cost aspect.

I have provided enough improvements and given a lot of suggestions, which you can find in my previous answers. There is a lot of scope for improvements there. My overall rating for Conga Composer is seven out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

We have integrated Conga Composer with Salesforce. What I like best about Conga Composer is how it simplifies document generation and its performance, making it efficient for our team. In our project management setup, we use it for project sizing and estimating different parameters, and it helps us quickly generate structured Word documents like PSR reports. This saves a lot of manual effort and ensures consistency in reporting, giving us the best ROI. It also makes it easier for the team to track expenses and key project metrics in one place, which improves overall visibility and decision-making.

What do you dislike about the product?

One thing I feel could be improved in Conga Composer is the time it takes to generate reports at times, especially for something like PSR reports, which can feel a bit slower than expected. Also, while customization is possible, I think there’s room to make it more flexible and user-friendly. It would be great if end users had more control to easily enhance the look and feel of the generated reports, so teams can customize them better according to their specific needs without too much effort.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Conga Composer is solving the problem of manually creating complex project sizing reports. These reports pull data from multiple Salesforce objects, so doing it manually would mean going through different datasets and compiling everything, which can easily take hours.

With Conga Composer, this entire process becomes much simpler and faster. Instead of manual effort, we can generate the complete report with just a click of a button. This saves a lot of time for the team and ensures the reports are consistent and accurate.