Portant for Google Sheets: pricing and what still fits
By Josh ·
You searched for Portant, landed on a homepage about closing HubSpot deals, and you do not have HubSpot. Your data is a Google Sheets spreadsheet and you want to know whether this tool is still built for you.
It is, and the homepage is not misleading you either.
Does Portant still work with Google Sheets? Yes. Google Sheets is a supported source with its own documentation section, including row grouping and automatic document creation, and the free plan works without a CRM anywhere in the picture. What changed is where the company points its homepage and most of its 2026 release notes.
Two descriptions, one product
Open Portant's pricing page and the page title ends "Document Automation for HubSpot". The homepage headline is "Closed-won, not copy-paste." You are reading about proposals, quotes, contracts, e-signatures, payment links.
Now open the Google Workspace Marketplace listing. Different name, "Portant Data Merge". Different pitch: merge Google Sheets, Google Forms, or Trello into Docs and Slides and email the result. The pricing does not match either, which is the odd part. The listing advertises "$9/month to remove Portant branding" or "$89/year", and no such plan exists on the pricing page. The listing was last updated in November 2023. It does not mention HubSpot once.
So one storefront is 2023 and one is the live one. Google's is the one showing 984K+ installs and a 4.7 rating from 121 ratings.
Neither is a lie. Portant grew up as a Workspace merge add-on, kept that plumbing, built a sales-document business on top of it, and pointed the marketing at the new business. What you are looking at is the seam. The Sheets features remain in the current product with their own documentation, and Google Sheets has its own integration page on the marketing site. It is not in the main navigation.
There is also no announcement to read. I looked for a post explaining the shift and there isn't one, so everything below is read off the product rather than out of a statement. The evidence is a frozen add-on listing and six months of release notes.
Read those release notes if you plan to run this every month for years. Going back six months, the shipped work is HubSpot, Outlook, e-signature plumbing, and a Microsoft add-in. Google Sheets appears only as bug fixes, one of them a fix for auto-create producing duplicate items. My reading of that, and it is a reading rather than a fact: maintained, not developed.
What still works if you live in Sheets
Templates you build and tag
Portant merges into Google Docs, Google Slides, Word, PowerPoint, and fillable PDFs, and all five work on the free plan. You paste a tag like {{first_name}} where the value belongs and Portant fills it at merge time. They are blunt about the division of labour: "You design the template once in the tool you already use; Portant is not a document editor."
That is classical mail merge and Portant does it properly. It is also the part I like least. The first invoice template is an afternoon of fiddling with a Docs table, and every change to it afterwards is another sitting. Fillable PDFs come with an extra condition: the file has to already have real form fields, so a flat PDF someone emailed you is not a template until somebody makes it one.
Grouping several rows into one document
For billing work, this is the feature to switch for, and it gets little attention. Their data grouping page has you nominate a key column. The eleven rows carrying invoice 1001 then collapse into one document, stacked as repeating rows inside a single table, and you can pin a row above and below that block so a column heading and a totals line print once instead of eleven times.
That is an itemized invoice, described correctly. Of the tools named further down this page, Autocrat cannot do it, and Document Studio's combine feature appends whole records end to end without nesting them under a key. I wrote up the whole problem separately, because it is the most common reason a merge produces output nobody wanted.
The annoying gap is that the documentation page names no plan. Portant's pricing grid has a "Line items and formulas" row that is struck out on Free, and the grouping doc's canonical address sits under a line-items path, so the two are likely the same entitlement. No Portant page says so outright. If grouping is the reason you are buying, ask their support to confirm the tier in writing before the card goes in.
Automatic creation when a row appears
Portant's auto-create polls the sheet and builds a document when a new row lands, or when an existing row's data changes if you tick that box. Portant calls it a Pro feature available on paid plans.
The constraints decide whether it fits. Auto-create "does not process rows that already exist in the sheet when you turn it on", so switching it on does nothing to your backlog. And the trigger is the row. I searched Portant's own full documentation export for a calendar or recurring run and could not find one described anywhere. Going by the docs, there is no way to tell Portant to render every open invoice on the first of the month, because the first of the month is not a row event.
Portant's docs do warn you about one booby trap, and plenty of vendors wouldn't bother. A formula column that writes empty strings reads to Portant as a row that is already filled in, so everything below it silently stops processing. Wrap the formula so it returns a true blank and the problem goes away.
For a form feeding a sheet, all of this is exactly right and you will never think about it again. For a monthly billing run over rows that already exist, it is built around the wrong event, and nothing in their documentation offers a different trigger.
Email from your own Gmail
Add a Gmail block to a workflow and the finished document goes out through your own account, landing in your Gmail Sent folder like anything else you send. Outlook works too. The address is whichever one you signed up with, and sending from an alias is a Pro feature. That reads like a minor row on a feature grid until a client hits reply and the answer lands in your own inbox.
E-signatures
Signing lives inside the document flow, so there is no second vendor with its own login and its own bill. A single signer is included on every plan, the free one too. Multiple signers, up to four of them in a defined order, starts at Pro.
The free tier has a string attached that lives in their docs rather than on the pricing grid: signed PDFs on free accounts carry a Portant watermark in the footer, and removing it means upgrading. That is fine for testing and no good on a contract you send a client.
Caveat aside, this is the clearest win Portant has over every free Google merge add-on. Those tools hand you a file and stop. Portant carries the document to the signature and back.
The pricing, decoded
Portant's pricing page loads with the billing toggle already flipped to Annual, badged "Save 14%". So the first numbers you see are the discounted ones, and month-to-month costs more than the page appears to say.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Documents per month | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 30 | 1 |
| Pro | $42/mo | $49/mo | 2,000 | 1 |
| Team | $125/mo | $149/mo | 5,000 | 5, then $30 per extra user |
| Enterprise | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | From 10,000 | Negotiated |
Those were the figures on their own pages as of August 2026, and plan structures move. Their pricing page is the authority. Flip the toggle before you compare anything against it, and remember while you read that the feature rows mix Sheets capabilities with HubSpot ones without labelling which is which, so check what a tick mark covers before you count on it.
Their billing docs carry a footnote to read before you test anything. Test runs count against your allowance, and an automation will refuse to start if finishing it would take you past what is left for the month. On thirty free documents, a couple of trial runs is a meaningful bite.
The free tier deserves a fair word. Thirty documents a month is small, and anything you route through signing comes back with that Portant footer on it. But thirty is thirty, every month, with a signer included. A solo consultant sending six invoices and the occasional contract can run the whole job on it and pay nothing.
Where it creaks for a Sheets-only user
- No calendar run that I can find documented. The trigger is a row arriving or changing. Driving a monthly billing cycle off that means putting Zapier or Make in front of it, which is another subscription and another place for the run to fail quietly.
- Your rows go to their servers. The two products differ, and Portant's security page draws the line itself. The legacy Data Merge add-on does not collect or have visibility on your operating data. Portant Workflow, the current one, stores that operating data for the period of the automation and discards it afterwards unless you choose otherwise. Their servers run on Google Cloud, and their published sub-processor list includes Anthropic and OpenAI for the AI features. Check which of the two you are on.
- You build the template. Portant does not reconstruct a document you already have. You lay it out in Docs or Slides and tag it by hand, and you maintain that file for as long as you send it.
- The roadmap is pointed elsewhere. Nothing in the docs or anywhere else I looked says Sheets support is ending, and I am not predicting that it is. But the shipped work is going to HubSpot and Microsoft, which is an inference I am drawing from release notes, and the company has said nothing either way.
- Excel goes in through Google. Portant will hand you an .xlsx on the way out, but it has no Excel source: their integrations page files Word and PowerPoint as template sources and lists no Excel entry at all. If the workbook lands in your inbox every month, getting it into Drive is a step you own.
- The feature grid mixes two products. Sheets rows and HubSpot rows sit in the same column with no label, so working out what you get as a Sheets user takes a careful read.
Who should stay on Portant
Stay, and stop shopping, if any of these describe you:
- You use HubSpot. Nothing else in this category is close, and the deal-triggered document flow is the reason the company exists.
- The document needs a signature at the end. Portant carries it there and back, and the free add-ons do not.
- You want documents landing in your Drive and mail leaving from your own Gmail, with your signature on it and the replies coming back to you. Portant does that part better than anything on our side of the fence.
- Your volume is under thirty documents a month and you would rather pay nothing.
- Your trigger is a form submission or a row someone adds by hand.
That covers a lot of people.
If Portant is not the shape you need
Autocrat is free, from New Visions for Public Schools, and it is the default Sheets merge add-on. One row becomes one document. It runs on a time trigger or a form trigger, and nothing you touch ever leaves Drive. It cannot group rows. Its runs are Apps Script executions, so the ceiling on a long one is set by Google, who you cannot email and who moves it without asking. None of that stops it being the right tool for a school office sending forty letters home, at a price of zero.
Document Studio, from Digital Inspiration, has been a Workspace add-on for years too, and it is the one that answers the gap. It merges Sheets rows into Docs, Slides, and PDFs, mails them per row with {{variables}} in the subject and body, and it will run a workflow on a background trigger every hour whether or not your spreadsheet is open. Hourly is the floor, though: their docs attribute the limit to Google's own ceiling on add-on clock triggers, so "every day at 9am" is not really a setting. Pricing is per year, $79 for Standard and $99 for Enterprise when I last checked, and the free tier is 25 rows a month. Watch the units on the paid plans, because those quotas are per day rather than per month, which makes them far larger than they first read. Its data claim is stronger than Portant's current one: the listing says your data stays in your Google Drive.
DocsAutomator is the paid Sheets-native option that most resembles Portant's merge half without the CRM half. Its entry plan is $19 a month billed annually, and that plan tops out at 100 documents, a cap to find before you commit instead of in month two. Its automation is new-row based like Portant's, so it has the same gap.
SheetRender is our product. Nothing here starts with a blank template. Send an invoice you have already issued, as a PDF or a photograph of the printed one, and we reconstruct it as a working template with your column names dropped into the right places. Point it at a connected Google Sheets file, or upload the .csv or .xlsx as it sits. Invoice 1001's eleven rows come back as one document with the items running down a table. Schedules are clock schedules, so you choose a frequency and an hour and then stop thinking about it. Free gets you 50 documents a month, 50 emails, 2 active templates, footered output, 30 days of retention, and no scheduled runs. Paid starts at $19, which buys Starter's 1,500 documents and one schedule; Pro's $49 covers 10,000 with schedules uncapped.
Measured against Portant specifically, signing and payment links are absent, so a contract that has to come back countersigned belongs with Portant. There is no HubSpot connection at all. Email goes out from our servers rather than your Gmail, which means it does not land in your Sent folder and the reply path is something you configure instead of something you get. Rendering happens on our servers too, so the spreadsheet's contents leave Google. Portant Workflow does the same, but Autocrat and Document Studio don't, and if keeping data in Google is written down somewhere at your company, those two are your shortlist.
You get a PDF and only a PDF, so nobody can open the output and fix a typo in Docs afterwards, and no column in your sheet records which rows went out. A grouped total is a sum of one column you already keep, so if your sheet stores quantity in one place and unit price in another and nowhere multiplies them, the invoice cannot do that arithmetic for you. The reconstructed template wants a few minutes of your attention wherever the original was cramped, and what you feed the rebuilder sets the ceiling on what comes back out of it. A worked grouped billing run lives on the invoices page, and there is a side-by-side against Portant if you want one.
For a longer list, the spreadsheet-to-PDF roundup covers more tools.
The comparison
Every figure below came off the vendor's own page in the same August check. Portant and DocsAutomator both show you the yearly-billing rate first, so the sticker you remember may not be the sticker you get charged.
| Tool | Cost | Rows grouped into one document | Runs without a person pressing go | What you build first |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portant | Free for 30 docs/mo; $42/mo annually or $49 monthly for 2,000 | Yes, documented data grouping, tier not stated | New or changed rows, paid plans only | Docs, Slides, Word, PowerPoint, or fillable PDF you tag |
| Autocrat | Free, its only plan | No, and its combined-output mode is not grouping | Yes, time and form triggers | Docs or Slides template with <<tags>> |
| Document Studio | Free for 25 rows/mo; $79/year Standard | Appends rows into one document, not an itemized table | Yes, a background trigger every hour | Docs, Sheets, or Slides template with {{markers}} |
| DocsAutomator | $19/mo billed annually for 100 docs | Yes, repeating line items | New rows only, polled | Docs or Word template, or a PDF overlay |
| SheetRender | Free for 50 docs/mo, footered; $19/mo for 1,500 | Yes, on a key column you choose | Yes, on a clock, paid plans | A finished document you already send |
Quick answers
Is Portant free? There is a free plan. It gives one user 30 documents a month and a single e-signature per document, and anything you send for signature comes back with a Portant watermark in the footer until you upgrade. Hold thirty against your monthly volume, because that number decides whether you ever see a bill.
Does Portant work without HubSpot? Yes. The sources their documentation lists are HubSpot, Google Sheets, Google Forms, webhooks, and Zapier, and the product runs perfectly well with no CRM connected at all, even though HubSpot dominates the marketing and the release notes. Anything else you have read about, a Typeform or a Tally form, arrives through the webhook door instead of its own integration.
Can Portant group rows into one document? Yes, and few Sheets merge tools can. You nominate the key column, and rows sharing that value stack up as repeating rows in one table, with a heading row and a totals row you can print once per document. That is an itemized invoice. Which plan carries it is not stated in their documentation, so get that confirmed before you build a billing run on it.
Can Portant run on a weekly or monthly schedule? Not that their docs describe: automation is the new-row auto-create trigger, and it also ignores rows that were already in the sheet when you switched it on. A recurring run over existing rows means putting Zapier, Make, or a script in front of it, and that is a second bill and a second thing to debug at 5pm.
The part I would tell a friend
Portant is a good tool that has decided what it wants to be, and it kept the old machinery running while it got there. Plenty of companies switch the old thing off. Plenty of software does what you need today and has no plans to do more, and depending on it is a perfectly reasonable choice as long as you make it on purpose.
So stop asking whether Portant works. Ask where the thing you need next sits on somebody's roadmap. If it is signatures and CRM triggers, you are standing in the middle of Portant's. If it is a clock, you are standing outside it.