Your Guide to Finding the Best eSignature Providers Available Today
Signing documents is essential to any business, whether you need your newly hired employee to sign a contract or your clients to sign an NDA agreement. But waiting for in-person signatures dramatically slows your workflow and ultimately costs you money. Plus, loose-leaf documents can easily get lost or fall into the wrong hands.
A better solution is electronic signatures. They’re safer, easier and more efficient — as long as you partner with the correct provider. Start your search for the best e-signature providers right here.
Top eSignature Providers
There are numerous e-signature providers that offer great service today — way more than we can include on this list. Here’s a quick look at the top five providers that can help you streamline your digital processes.
Adobe Sign
Adobe has long been a leader in PDF editing software, offering the well-known Adobe Acrobat solutions. However, those plans include much more than just e-signature features and come at a high price.
To accommodate businesses that need extensive e-signature services — not added complex PDF conversion abilities — Adobe released EchoSign, now known as Adobe Sign.
What It Does Well
Adobe Sign focuses exclusively on e-signature solutions, leaving behind the bells and whistles of Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro. It lets you collect and track signatures, send in bulk and include customized branding.
There are two plan options: one for small businesses and one for enterprises. Both let you set industry-specific compliance requirements, but the enterprise option includes APIs, advanced authentications and integrations.
Where It Falls Short
One of the downsides of Adobe Acrobat is the high monthly price for features well outside the realm of e-signatures. Since Adobe Sign focuses on eSign capabilities, the plans should be cheaper — but they are not.
The small business plan starts at $21 per month — and license. That’s more expensive than the Acrobat Standard plan for teams. And the enterprise plan does not even list a price, which leaves you wondering just how expensive it is.
Another issue arises with customer support. If you run into any issues, it can be challenging to get help quickly.
DocuSign
If Adobe is a big name in the e-signature world, there might be an even bigger name: DocuSign. It came out before Adobe Sign and helped revolutionize how we think about electronic signatures.
DocuSign has garnered more than a billion users worldwide thanks to its integrations and flexibility. It offers things like e-signature solutions, document generation, document workflows and signer verification.
What It Does Well
One of its major selling points is its smooth integration with Salesforce. Companies are already using Salesforce to connect with their clients, so adding the ability to e-sign through DocuSign helps streamline processes.
Another interesting feature is remote notarization. Instead of requiring clients or employees to physically visit their local notary, companies can join a remote notary session through DocuSign.
Where It Falls Short
Pricing again is an issue. The personal plan option is fairly affordable at $10 a month, but it limits you to only five documents per month. Small businesses can choose more comprehensive options, but they start at $25 per month, per user. And extra features like notarization are separate products requiring another subscription.
While DocuSign offers diverse e-signing features, they can become overwhelming — especially if you’re a small business that just needs a safe and flexible e-signature provider.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a software-as-a-service provider that lets you create, manage and electronically sign documents. The founders were looking for a way to improve company-customer relationships in a digital world, and PandaDoc was born.
The all-in-one document automation software helps streamline customer communication via personalized documents. Electronic signatures are just one of many available features a PandaDoc account offers.
What It Does Well
PandaDoc advertises comprehensive software that goes above and beyond. It offers drag-and-drop templates to create quotes, proposals, contracts and other forms. Plus, users can use online notarization services.
For the e-signature software, the pricing plans are reasonable. Users can start with a free account to create eSignatures and accept payment when the document is signed. For integrations, document analytics, templates and branding, users must choose a plan at $20-$50 per month.
Where It Falls Short
PandaDoc is good at what it does — but what it does is serve sales organizations. Many of its strongest and most innovative features are only helpful for sales professionals and business development managers. For businesses in other fields, these added features are likely to go unused.
Plus, the document creator lacks some user-friendliness. Making slight changes might throw the whole alignment off, and there are some hurdles to creating a streamlined signing process with multiple signers.
signNow
signNow forms part of the Business Cloud and helps millions of users worldwide streamline their document processes. The company offers much more than just eSignatures.
For example, signNow provides API solutions that allow developers to embed eSignatures into document workflows. It’s also part of airSlate, which provides e-signing capabilities and all-in-one document generation.
What It Does Well
One significant perk is that signNow offers integrations with some of the most-used business apps on the web, like Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and Oracle. It also offers reasonable pricing plans.
The lowest subscription plan starts at $8 per month and includes unlimited templates and basic fillable fields. Even the next level up — ideal for small businesses — is affordable at only $15 per month, per user.
Where It Falls Short
While the lowest plans are definitely affordable, they are only that cheap if you pay an annual subscription. If you don’t want to commit that far ahead, the price for the lowest tier shoots up to $20 per month — a 250% price increase. And that’s only the cheapest option.
Another downside is that users might experience glitches in the system and very limited feature options. For example, you must upgrade to the business premium plan just to send one document to multiple signees. And only the enterprise and business cloud plans offer advanced threat protection, even though signNow advertises compliance with global security standards.
jSign: The Simplest and Most Convenient e-Signature Provider
All the e-signature providers above offer impressive services and features, from document creation to notary services. However, therein lies the problem. These companies have taken something as straightforward as electronically signing a document and made it into a service with lots of embellishments.
Those extra services may work well for massive enterprises, but they can be overwhelming and downright confusing for small companies or startups just looking for a simple eSignature service.
And that’s where jSign thrives. We may not have the same name recognition as DocuSign or Adobe, but we have something better: a simple, safe and affordable e-signature platform.
At jSign, we focus on making eSignatures as simple as possible with the following features:
- Various signing options: Want to draw your signature? Type it? Upload a previously saved signature? You can do all that and more with jSign. Just click in the signature placeholder and choose how you would like to sign — or select from your saved signatures.
- Multiple upload formats: No matter the document type, you can sign it with jSign. You can upload PDFs, PowerPoints, Excel documents or even JPEGs and add signature placeholders.
- Different ways to send signed documents: Once everyone has signed your document, you can send it to your email, Google Drive, One Drive or Dropbox.
- Protected signing process: With jSign, there’s no need to worry about cybersecurity and hackers. We use blockchain technology to track every stage of the signature process and create a Certificate of Completion.
- An unlimited number of signees: You can add as many signees as you need, regardless of whether they have a jSign account. And you can set the signing process to parallel (everyone signs at once) or sequential (everyone signs in a specific order).
- Customized signing process: You have complete control over the signature process with jSign. You can set due dates for each signature, request a location capture and even restrict the signing to a specific location. Plus, you can remind people about pending signatures or send private messages.
- Legal signatures: An e-signature with jSign is a legally binding signature. jSign is UETA and ESIGN-compliant, and every signature records the signee’s exact geographical location, IP address and device. We are also HIPAA compliant, which works well for all our users in the healthcare industry.
- 24/7 customer support: Whenever you need help, we’re available. Contact us anytime via phone or email. Or you can start a chat on our website.
- Integrations: jSign seamlessly integrates with Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive to make your workflows easier.
And the best part is that you can get all those perks for much less than other providers. Our plans start at $9.99 per month — with no tricks to get you to pay for an entire year. Even our business subscription plans are both under $20 monthly because we focus on providing exactly what you need: a simple e-signature process that streamlines your business.
No frills, no extra features you’ll never use and no complex interface either. You have enough to worry about running your business, so let us simplify things with a straightforward e-signature platform.
See for yourself how jSign compares to other providers by signing up for a two-week free trial.
