Founded in 2003, Docusign is the granddaddy of e-sign platforms, and is still the popular choice, dominating the e-sign market with a 55% market share.
However, in 2024, e-signature functionality isn’t quite the awe-inspiring game-changer that it once was. E-sign feature sets are now routinely incorporated into a wide range of business software tools, including CPQs, sales enablement tools, and proposal creation software.
Docusign has added to its own feature set. Still, it’s fair to say that there are plenty of use cases where you could opt for a different electronic signature platform - and gain a whole new set of tools in one single platform for the same price as you’d pay for Docusign’s Standard or Business Pro packages.
There are also some surprising disadvantages to using Docusign, which we’ll explain shortly.
To help you make an informed decision, we’ve rounded up a few of the alternative platforms you could use to satisfy the e-sign needs of your sales organization or company.
Key takeaways
- Docusign is only a cost-effective choice for businesses closing less than 100 deals a year.
- For smaller businesses, several other ‘CRM-lite’ platforms include e-sign functionality
- Certain use cases (for example, being tied into an existing platform ecosystem) might influence your choice of e-sign software
- Larger organizations and medium-sized businesses are best served by powerful, flexible document creation tools such as Qwilr.
Compare Docusign competitors
| E-sign Tool | Best For | Free Trial | Starting Price for Teams (USD)* | G2 Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Docusign | Real estate | ✅ | $25 /month per user | 4.5/5 |
| Qwilr | Sales teams | ✅ | $35 /month per user | 4.5/5 |
| Acrobat Sign | Adobe users | ✅ | $14.99/license/month | 4.4/5 |
| Honeybook | Small businesses | ✅ | $16/month | 4.5/5 |
| signNow | On a budget | ✅ | $8/month | 4.6/6 |
| Fiverr Workspace | Freelancers | ✅ | $18/month | 4.1/5 |
*Price as of October 2024
Why look for a Docusign alternative?
Capped usage is common across all kinds of sales tools and B2B software platforms. It’s most often used as a differentiator between free and budget pricing tiers and the higher-cost premium or enterprise plans—if you want unlimited usage, you often need to pay for it.
What’s uncommon about Docusign’s approach is that capped usage is applied at every tier— even the Enterprise plan.
To use Docusign’s terminology, documents sent using their platform are enclosed within virtual ‘envelopes’. These envelopes can contain multiple documents, so in theory, you can send as many documents as you like to an individual client within one envelope and still have no impact on your usage cap.
So far, so good. However, Docusign users come unstuck when trying to work with higher volumes of clients—there’s a limit of 100 envelopes per year. This arguably makes Docusign an impractical solution for any company operating at a regional level or above, with a lot of documents for signature.
The only way to get around this limit is to purchase multiple licenses (which may well be the intention of Docusign’s capped usage policy). The subscription costs of this approach can quickly mount up—especially if you’re paying for Enterprise packages.
Even working within the limitations of Docusign’s 100-envelope cap, there are some other unnecessary barriers.
Lots of additional features that you’d expect to be included in almost any paid plan are reserved for customers on the third tier up—the Business Pro plan, at $40 per user month. Some of these features are basic table stakes—CRM integration, for one, or being able to individualize bulk-sent items to different recipients.
Features to look for in a Docusign alternative
Docusign’s been going for such a long time, it stands to reason that they’ve been getting some things right.
Many of the key features Docusign offers are rooted in the stability and security of their enduring platform—in previous comparison pieces, we’ve highlighted Docusign as a good option for organizations with strong legal and compliance needs (particularly for internal document management, where the capped usage would be less of an issue).
If you’re looking for a Docusign alternative that can also provide this robust feature set of reassurance and compliance, then features to look for include:
- Multi-factor authentication to ensure document access is reserved for genuine collaborators or prospects, and to close any potential vulnerabilities or cyber attack paths.
- Detailed access controls, allowing the document owners to fine-tune access permissions and decide who gets to read and sign a document, who they can share it with, and how long they can retain access.
The best Docusign alternative in 2024
Here’s our rundown of the best alternatives to Docusign at the moment. As well as the best overall alternative electronic signature solution, we’ve provided you with several solutions to specific niche use cases that you may also find helpful.
1. Qwilr: Best overall solution
G2 Rating: 4.5 / 5
As a direct alternative to Docusign, Qwilr offers the same amount of flexibility and functionality for security and compliance.
Qwilr documents can be protected either by password or through email verification (so your client would need to verify through their email before accessing the document). You can apply these safeguards at either the document or the page level, restricting access to certain parts of a document if needed.
You can also restrict the total number of views, or set a page link to expire automatically after a certain date.
For Qwilr Enterprise customers, there’s even more control over your security and data—you can filter out internal document views to clean up your analytics, and you can restrict document access to specific domains—ensuring that the document can’t be opened outside of your client’s or your own servers.
Top features
- Interactive proposals & web-based documents: Create engaging web-based collateral with embedded media, which clients can sign electronically.
- Plain-text agreements: Lay out plain-text, print-friendly documents to accompany interactive proposals
- Real-time analytics & notifications: Track how recipients interact with your proposals in real-time and receive instant notifications when a proposal is viewed and signed, enabling timely follow-ups
- Legally binding signatures: Qwilr's e-signatures are fully compliant with major e-signature regulations like ESIGN and UETA, ensuring legal validity
- Integrated payment: Stripe integrations enable prospects to make payments and sign, all on one document
- Branding control: Maintain consistent branding across all documents, ensuring a professional and cohesive look
- Seamless integrations: Integrate with CRM systems, such as Hubspot and Salesforce, as well as communication tools like Slack
- Template library: 100+ proposal, contract, quote, and reporting templates
Pricing
Take Qwilr for a test run with our 14-day free trial
- Pro: $35/month per user (billed annually)
- Business: $66/month per user (billed annually)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
2. Acrobat Sign: Best for Adobe users
G2 Rating: 4.4 / 5
If you’re already tied into the Adobe ecosystem, Adobe Acrobat Sign may well be of interest. Billed as ‘Microsoft’s preferred e-signature solution’, there are some strong integrations available here, allowing you to sign and send from within Teams, PowerPoint, Word, and Microsoft 365.
Drawbacks?
It’s expensive. The cheapest tier is $14.99 per user/month and offers very little in the way of additional functionality or features.
It’s PDF-based. PDFs used to be great for business purposes. Then we all got mobile phones. Now? Not so much.
There are plenty of reasons why client-facing business documents shouldn’t be presented as PDFs. Apart from their chronic mobile-unfriendliness, they’re cumbersome to share and open.
PDFs can’t include dynamic or interactive content, such as pricing calculators. Tracking and analytics is also a feature that’s hampered by Acrobat Sign’s reliance on this outmoded format - reporting is restricted to ‘sent/approved/signed’, with no insight into time spent on a page, view numbers, or anything else.
Top features
- Document automation: Automate complex signing workflows, reducing errors and speeding up the signing process
- Compliance & Security: Compliant with eIDAS, ESIGN, and UETA regulations, ensuring legal validity and security
- Integration with Adobe tools: Seamless integration with Adobe Acrobat and other Adobe products for a streamlined experience
- Custom workflows: Tailor signing workflows to fit specific business needs, including multi-step approvals
- Global signatures: Supports electronic signatures from anywhere in the world, with language localization options.
Pricing
For individuals:
- Acrobat Standard: $12.99/month per user (billed annually)
- Acrobat Pro: $19.99/month per user (billed annually)
For business:
- Acrobat Standard for Teams: $14.99/license/month (billed annually)
- Acrobat Pro for Teams: $23.99/license/month (billed annually)
3. Honeybook: Best for small businesses
G2 Rating: 4.5/4
Honeybook is a great all-rounder for smaller organizations looking for an e-sign platform with a diverse feature set.
Positioning itself as an ‘all-in-one client flow platform for those who do it all’, Honeybook provides tools for meeting booking and scheduling, online forms, questionnaires, invoices, and online payments.
For companies without a viable use case for a customer relationship management system, Honeybook functions nicely as a linked set of resources and processes that can mimic much of what you might expect from your CRM.
As you might expect, this ‘CRM-lite’ positioning is reflected in Honeybook’s integrations, with a distinct lack of compatibility with any of the major CRM platforms. What integrations there are (Quickbooks, Gmail, Calendly, Facebook, Zapier) tend to be designed to supplement individual tools from within the Honeybook platform. For example, should you need more advanced features for your bookkeeping, you can connect Quickbooks to your Honeybook account.
It’s not ideal for larger companies—there are some distinctly clunky aspects (such as the less-than-intuitive user interface) and the lack of proper collaboration tools means that it’s a fairly unworkable solution for scaled-up operations.
Top features
- Client management: Combines e-signatures with robust client management tools, perfect for freelancers and small businesses
- Invoicing & payments: Integrated invoicing and payment processing, making it easy to get paid after signatures
- Customizable templates: Create and reuse proposal and contract templates, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks
- Automation: Automate client follow-ups and reminders, ensuring timely responses and reducing manual effort
- Mobile app: Manage contracts, invoices, and client interactions on the go with the HoneyBook mobile app
Pricing
- Starter: $16/month (billed annually)
- Essentials: $32/month (billed annually)
- Premium: $66/month (billed annually)
4. signNow: Best on a budget
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
It’s hard to beat signNow's pricing plan—The three main tiers are all lower than their Docusign equivalents, with the Enterprise tier coming in at a very reasonable $30 per user per month.
However, this bargain deal comes with some important caveats.
Firstly, there’s the customization issue. You can upload your own documents, and create reusable templates—but your ability to edit only goes so far as adding fillable fields. There’s no functionality that lets you alter the overall style, layout or color scheme of your document.
Secondly, even this limited set of editing tools is no longer an option once the document is sent. The only change that can be made to an active document is the addition of a digital signature. For complex sales organizations, where the terms of the deal may evolve several times during the sales process, this would then require a fresh document to be created and sent.
Perhaps the biggest disincentive to use signNow is the confusing positioning and pricing of what is effectively their fourth and most expensive tier, ‘Site License’. Rather than a set figure per month, Site License requires that you pay $1.50 per signature invite.
For larger sales teams, this pricing model will quickly result in some pretty steep costs, undermining SignNow’s budget-friendly positioning.
Site License is also the only signNow tier that offers CRM integration, which for many organizations may well be a deal breaker.
Top features
- Bulk sending: Send documents for e-signature to multiple recipients at once, saving time on large-scale signing tasks
- Advanced security: Offers multi-factor authentication and HIPAA compliance for secure document handling
- Mobile access: Fully functional mobile app for managing and signing documents on the go
- Template creation: Save and reuse templates for frequently signed documents, speeding up the process
- Team collaboration: Share and manage documents within teams, with customizable access controls
Pricing
- Business: $8/month (billed annually)
- Business Premium: $15/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $30/month(billed annually)
5. Fiverr Workspace: Best for freelancers
G2 Rating: 4.1/5
Aimed primarily at freelancers already working within the Fiverr ecosystem, Workspace shares similarities with Honeybook. Designed to ‘boost every part of your business’, it’s another CRM-lite solution, with multiple tools that’ll track both Fiverr and non-Fiverr client relationships, via a single integrated dashboard..
As well as ‘smart’ proposals, customizable templates and invoicing functionality, there’s some neat time-tracking and finance reporting tools on offer—as well as a free plan (the other tier is priced at $18 per user/month).
It’s worth pointing out that the free plan is as stripped back as you might expect—you won't be custom branding your documents, and any customer service needs you’ve got won’t be eligible for priority support.
You won’t find any analytics functionality here (on either the free or the paid plan). The deliberate lack of CRM integration we found with Honeybook is also a defining characteristic of Fiverr Workspace, effectively ruling out this platform for larger organizations.
Top features
- Client approval: Clients can easily review, sign, and approve documents, streamlining the project initiation process
- Expense tracking: Built-in expense tracking to manage project budgets and ensure profitability
- Time tracking: Integrated time tracking for accurate billing and project management
- Custom branding: Add your logo and branding to documents for a professional look
Pricing
- Basic: Free (limited features)
- Unlimited: $18/month (billed annually)
Final thoughts
As we said at the outset, since 2003 the sales software market has changed beyond recognition.
It’s easy to find e-sign features included as standard across a variety of different platforms. As ever, matching the tool to the business requirements is the key - invest wisely in your tool stack, avoid overlapping feature sets and look for integrations that will streamline your processes.
For larger sales organizations with more moving parts, it often makes sense to avoid ‘all-in-one’ tools and choose something powerful, scalable and specific to the task. This is why Qwilr is the ideal choice for enterprise and complex sales situations.
If you’d like to find out for yourself, take advantage of Qwilr’s 14-day free trial.
About the author
Dan Lever|Brand Consultant and Copywriter
Dan Lever is an experienced brand consultant and copywriter. He brings over 7 years experience in marketing and sales development, across a range of industries including B2B SaaS, third sector and higher education.
