Adobe Acrobat DC is the current version of the well-established document / PDF management solution, part of the Adobe Document Cloud (the other part being Adobe's eSign services based on technology acquired with EchoSign in 2011).
$29.99
per month per seat
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
For document-intensive companies looking to improve business efficiency, Square 9 Softworks develops solutions for process automation that aim to drive increased productivity across all business applications.
$250
per month 5 users
Pricing
Adobe Acrobat
Square 9 Softworks
Editions & Modules
Acrobat Pro for Individuals
$19.99
per month
Acrobat Pro for Teams
$23.99
per month per user
Acrobat Studio for Individuals
$24.99
per month
Square 9 Process Automation Essentials
$50
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Digital Transformation Essentials
$68
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Enterprise Essentials
$75
per month per user (10 User Minimum)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Acrobat
Square 9 Softworks
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
Offered via a three-tier pricing model that allows customers to scale their solution up or down based on the changing needs of their organization.
Pricing excludes professional services and implementation fees
The main thing we liked was the ease of use of GlobalSearch. Also, the people doing the demo were able to answer somewhat technical questions without having to get back to us a day later from one of their more technical people.
We chose to leave ImageSilo and go with Square 9 Softworks because 1) ImageSilo was inconsistent and buggy and 2) Square 9 Softworks was streamlined and had a lot of helpful features. It seemed easier to maintain.
Our company has been using this product for 20+ years. Since it was Fortis, then SmartSearch, to GlobalSearch, and for every transition the Square 9 team has been a great asset to making the change go smoothly
When given a very creative mind, Adobe has solutions that are tailored for you, and it has spent a great deal of time in end-user focus groups and surveys to consistently improve its products. In other words, someone is thinking at Corporate! Continue to make the quality of the product a major focus, as well as SMB pricing.
Pros: Scan, Search, Retrieve - GlobalSearch does this well Capture workflow, extracting data- GlobalCapture does a great job Webforms, getting data and placing it on company PDFS - Globalforms does an excellent job. Process workflows, being able to see where the document is in the process - GlobalAction does a great job. Cons: Not being able to share documents with people outside the organization. Legal vertical - Square 9 isn't the best fit, Lawyers like folders
For the business account, the Adobe Acrobat rep assigned to your account will actively look for ways to save you money.
We have found that our rep from Adobe Acrobat Business Account reviews our usage and related apps and has offered helpful tips on better ways to complete tasks we historically undertake with their software. They have saved us a great deal of time and money. They make us efficient.
The apps they offer that combine with the primary program are relevant to the tasks our business performs, and they function at a high level and never fail. It's really quite remarkable.
The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.
Overall, it is not as stable as other software. Some errors could not be fixed, such as a form going forward without approval because a user pressed "enter" twice in a row.
I probably only use 20% of the functionality. Beyond that, I'd have to pay for development. We did that once, and the project that we paid for never was implemented. They allowed us to request a design before my time that was so complicated that they never got it to work. Once I came on board, I implemented a much simpler solution.
Our upgrade took much, much longer than expected, and was disrupted by so many software issues.
Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.
We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.
The features on the desktop version are all toolbar based, which makes it a little more cumbersome on a smaller device (and much simpler on a large screen). The web forms adjust well to different screen size so work well on mobile, tablet and computer
The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.
We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages
One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.
With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.
For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.
Support is always extremely helpful and responsive. Whenever we have a question, it is simple contacting them and also setting-up an appointment, if necessary. Scheduling the appointment is easy and they are willing to talk on the phone, which is not always true with software companies. Their report support tools are also really east to use.
It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.
I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split
I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.
Adobe Acrobat integrated fully into our human resources processes and effectively helped consolidate multiple variations of employment documents which helped decrease HR costs and simplified recruitment. We can track the status of documents which means greater security and with the ability to sign HR documents electronically, anywhere and on any device, it gives us the speed and efficiency to process everything more quickly.
Laserfiche could not even complete their installation. Square 9 Softworks was able to come in and rescue the failed project. We have hardly scratched the surface of what we believe we can do in terms of more implementations of the Square 9 Softworks program in other business processes in our company. Square 9 Softworks was demonstrated to our procurement management team while they were struggling with the Laserfiche implementation, and they were ready to abandon Laserfiche immediately upon seeing the Square 9 Softworks program demonstrated. We abandoned Laserfiche even though we had financial investments with them already. This is testimony to how clearly Square 9 Softworks is a better solution than Laserfiche.
I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.
The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.