Quip Review: Is It Good Enough?
In today’s work world, employees can be anywhere and everywhere.
Still, whether they’re working at home, at trade shows, at customer sites, or in the actual office, they need to be able to communicate effectively with each other.
And that’s exactly the focus of Quip.
As a cloud-based task collaboration software, Quip is designed for connecting the remote workforce. If you’re considering it for your business, here are the features you need to understand.
Quip overview
Quip has three pricing levels available for customers. As you move to an upper tier, you get the features from the lower tiers along with advanced extras.
Rather than messy email back-and-forth sharing documents and ideas, Quip allows for real-time chat among employees about each individual project. Any documents associated with the project remain linked to the project’s individual chat room, allowing for immediate feedback and comments, all from one screen.
Quip further tracks the organizational aspects of each project, so employees can manage to-do lists, project deadlines, and other tasks.
Quip pricing and plans
Free
- No limitation on length of trial period, which is competitive for project management software
- Includes most of the same features as the next tier up, Starter
- Unspecified data usage and storage limitation (unlike Starter)
Starter
- $10-$12 per user per month
- Share and create multiple kinds of documents
- Manage individual chat rooms for each project
- Access on both desktop and mobile
Enterprise
- $25 per user per month
- Customized integration with other apps
- Enhanced security
Quip for Customer 360
- Customized price quotes only
- Extensive integration with Salesforce
Quip key features
- Granular-level chat capability: Use project-specific chat rooms for quick team discussions or specialized chat rooms for topics not related to projects. Within a chat, you can reference or link to something as specific as a single spreadsheet cell.
- Tailor to your needs: For example, you can easily control what notifications you get and avoid alert fatigue.
- Tight integration with Salesforce: With Quip for Customer 360, you can embed collaborative docs, spreadsheets, and slides inside Salesforce while opening Salesforce reports inside Quip. This product’s uniquely strong integration with Salesforce is a boon for enterprises.
- Work on desktop or mobile: We don’t say this about many software providers, but Quip nailed their mobile platform. Most users are up and running in no time.
- Work offline or online: And when online, users can collaborate on documents in real-time. Quip automatically stores a revision history for all documents.
- Emojis and memes: Need I say more?
What makes Quip different?
One of the most interesting features that sets Quip apart, as I alluded to earlier, as its extensive integration with the Salesforce software. Salesforce acquired Quip a few years ago.
Quip is still a standalone product, but it is also extremely useful for Salesforce-powered companies.
At its heart, Quip was designed to keep everything required for project management in one place. It may not excel at any one feature, especially when compared to apps that specialize in that area, but it does an outstanding job of simplifying project management to the very simplest degree.
Let’s go over all the pros of Quip in more detail.
Quip pros
Multifunctional
Quip doesn’t have the document creation capabilities of apps like Google Docs or Office 365. It doesn’t have the same task-tracking and note-taking capabilities of Evernote. It doesn’t offer quite the efficiency of communication as does Slack.
What Quip does, though, is combine the core features of all of these capabilities in one, allowing teams to work on projects as a group while also setting up deadlines and task lists to drive projects to the finish line.
So, if you don’t want to have to use multiple apps to handle all of the different jobs involved with managing multiple projects, Quip is your one-stop-shop.
Easy to use
When choosing a tool designed to help your workforce collaborate and communicate more efficiently, you don’t want to waste valuable trial hours trying to learn how to navigate the interface.
Quip doesn’t have that problem. Its interface is super easy to understand within minutes, and all chat functions are available within the documents themselves, allowing for real-time conversations about edits being made. Everyone can see the discussion and the edits as they happen.
At first glance, you may feel like the Quip interface is too cluttered. But you’ll quickly be able to pinpoint the different aspects of the software that are most important to you.
Quip is made to help employees make the most of their time spent with the software, and it succeeds.
Handles multiple types of files and apps
No matter what type of file you want to use with Quip, the software can handle it. Some of the most common file types used with Quip include:
- Spreadsheets
- Word processing
- Slide shows
Quip also handles integrations with many popular apps like:
- Box
- Dropbox
- Jira
- Lucidchart
Through these integrations, you get the option to add features like a calendar to the specific project you’re running in Quip.
Easy change-tracking
Through Quip, you can see every comment and every edit on a document within a project over days, weeks, and months. This simplifies the process of finding key information quickly.
If you were trying to manage the project over email, finding a key comment or piece of information within an email chain can be almost impossible. Everything is easily findable within Quip.
Task assignments are easy to track as well. You can assign tasks to specific people, and all the information stays in your project chat room. So you can easily check on the progress of the task or spot where balls are being dropped.
Great for brainstorming
If one of your biggest business challenges is getting ideas and projects off the ground, you’re in the right place. Quip is made for this. Everyone in a chat room for a single project or document can easily chime in with ideas and revisions, which helps give projects momentum.
Quip cons
Managing the review process can be tricky
Quip does not enable different levels of permissions for its documents, which can make things tricky for the person overseeing the group as it works on a project.
Anyone who is part of the chat room has the ability to make edits to the document at any time. Although this is great for frictionless collaboration and brainstorming, it can be frustrating when trying to approve who works on what task.
The best a project manager can do is “lock” the document for editing. (A misnomer, as no document is truly locked in Quip.) Others in the chat room still have the ability to unlock the document and make editing changes. But if the document was locked, the manager at least gets a notification about who unlocked it.
Uploaded documents aren’t always available for markup
When you create documents within Quip, your chat group can make edits and add notes. However, when you upload into Quip any documents that were created elsewhere, you don’t always have the option of editing them in Quip.
For example, when you upload a PDF file into a Quip chat room, you can’t highlight or annotate parts of the PDF. You can leave notes in the chat room about it, but you can’t draw on it or make changes, which other cloud-based document collaboration apps (like Box) allow for.
Runs painfully slow at times
Quip runs quickly the majority of the time. The fewer files or chat rooms, the better. However, as your organization or projects grow, the software’s performance could slow down significantly.
The search bar in Quip is a handy feature for finding certain documents or items in chat, but it especially struggles with speed when the number of chat rooms in use increases significantly.
Ultimately, you’ll want to have an extremely fast internet connection when using Quip, especially for a big organization. This can be a significant problem when using Quip’s mobile app, as you may not have the speed you need to work effectively if you have spotty cellular signal.
Wrap up: Here’s what we’d recommend
Should you buy it?
Quip is great for organizations that can’t meet in person because people work in multiple locations. It’s a solid choice for teams that need chat, document creation and editing, task creation, and note-taking all wrapped up in one software package with an easy-to-use interface.
Who should buy it?
Definitely organizations that make use of Salesforce. The recent acquisition uniquely positions Quip to simplify integrations with Salesforce data. But any organization experiencing challenges collaborating remotely can benefit from Quip’s strengths in organizing information.
Who should avoid it?
Quip definitely has its drawbacks. It’s not the best pick for people looking to put beautiful finishing touches on things like slideshow presentations. And for teams that want to collaborate on projects, but leave gatekeeping and decision-making to a select few, the community effort that Quip supports might be frustrating.
If that’s you, G Suite is a good alternative that covers businesses of all sizes. Go here for a full review of G Suite, including its pros, cons, and how to decide if it’s right for you.
