Full of potential but will need a lot of work.
I moved over from Docusign and Contractbook, and I don't feel a need to move back at least for now. Having said that, Crove has its share of problems which it needs to address as it grows.
I gave a 4 star taco because it's an AppSumo deal. You'd be delusional to expect a fully polished product on a LTD.
How I use it: I'm a consultant. When a client books a consultation on my website through Trafft, it automatically generates a consultation agreement for the client to sign.
Secondly, I offer a range of 80+ services to my clients and need to sign service agreements. I use Crove to customize each document using variables. I haven't gotten to it yet, but I will automate this using their conditions in the future.
For these types of use cases, Crove is working fine. I don't feel a need to look for other alternatives.
Now, for things I didn't like
1) I'm not sure if these documents are legally enforceable. The audit trail does not track details specifically for signatures. Normally, Docusign and Contractbook include the date and time stamp of when the document was sent, when it was viewed, when it was signed, and the IP address where each of the above actions took place. Crove does not do this currently and I think it should be their #1 priority.
2) When you send a document to client for signature, there's a bug where if they sign quickly and submit the documents before the signature renders on the preview, the document gets submitted without signature.
3) This might be because I just don't understand the product enough but I need to use fee calculations in my documents. You can use formulas using "Expressions" on Crove. However, you can only calculate field values called "Variables". In my use case, I use Expressions to calculate the total fee including taxes. In the next section I break down payment by date milestones. For some odd reason, you can't make calculations using this total because it is a "Expression" calculated value (you can only make calculations with variables). So calculations are very surface level and not complex enough for me to use. Right now, I set up the form so I can manually inset the variables by making manual calculations.
4) Bugs upon bugs upon bugs using their form editor. I couldn't add variables into tables without refreshing the page every time I wanted to do so. In one instance calculations weren't triggered by variables which was fixed when I recreated a template.
As of today's date, these are some of the things you can expect. It's functional, but has a lot of improvements it needs to make. I recently saw that they were hiring more developers so improvements may be coming faster.
I'll be holding on to this LTD with high hopes that it becomes comparable to some of the mainstream document signing services available today.
Crove
May 9, 2024Hi Kevin, thank you for sharing a detailed feedback along with your use case. I love it.
1. We are updating our audit trail in February to include both email address and ip address as identifier
2. I will ask the tech team to look into the signature related bug on priority. It will be fixed
3. Check out this video to see how you can use value of one expression into another to do complicated calculations: https://support.crove.app/en/articles/6730467-how-to-use-result-of-one-expression-in-another-expression
4. To make our editor stable, we are working on editor 3.0 which will be released publicly in next 3-4 months time.
Thank you once again for your detailed review:)
Best
Gourav M.
Co-founder, Crove