There are literally dozens of eSignature tools available to get you out of the wet-ink-on-paper practice of physically printing, signing, and mailing contracts and legal agreements, but, along with our own LinkSquares Sign, four other apps lead the market: Adobe Sign, DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, and PandaDoc. So, which of these five should be the number one choice for your legal team? That depends on what you need.
Digital Signature Tools
First, let’s talk about why LinkSquares Sign, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, HelloSign, and PandaDoc lead the electronic signature market: they offer digital signatures rather than just electronic signatures. An eSignature refers to any electronic identification, from an attached email address to an image of a written signature to an Active Directory ID appended to a file. In most cases, an electronic signature is not especially secure, nor is it necessarily legally binding. A digital signature solution, on the other hand, is tied into a verifiable encryption key that is far more secure — and thus more often legally enforceable — than other types of electronic signature. The big five use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to authenticate their digital signatures so they stand up to scrutiny and are therefore much more valuable.
As to legal specifics, a digital signature in the United States must comply with the ESIGN Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). To operate in the European Union, a digital signature must conform to the eIDAS standard. Tools that meet these standards are generally viable in any industrialized nation. LinkSquares Sign, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, and PandaDoc are verified digital signature solutions under these legal standards, and most legal teams would do fine with any of these tools. Which one is exactly right for you depends on what aspects of a digital signature solution are most important to you.
LinkSquares Sign
Meet the eSignature tool built into the LinkSquares platform where you can manage and track agreements from one place.
No integration required.
Why LinkSquares Sign
Having all your contracting processes in one place saves time and money, reduces mistakes, and improves communication between stakeholders.
With an eSignature tool built directly into your CLM, you can manage and track your agreements in one platform — from drafting to signature and beyond — while automatically centralizing your contracts in one repository. It simplifies your workflow and eliminates the risk of exporting or uploading the wrong files or file versions when switching between LinkSquares and an external signature tool. It also means you can track your agreements from start to finish in real time. Without leaving LinkSquares, you can see who has the pen and who needs to sign to uncover bottlenecks and get to signature faster.
Perhaps most critically, by using LinkSquares Sign, your agreement’s audit log and Signature Certificate live in one platform; you’ll never have to “marry up” your drafting and approval history with your signature log again because it’s all in one place.
LinkSquares does offer eSignature integrations to help customers achieve some of these advantages. However, with LinkSquares Sign, you’re dealing with one system, one vendor, and one source of truth, so your contracts go from request to draft to approval to signature seamlessly.
While you can integrate competing signature solutions with LinkSquares to achieve some of these advantages, these integrations require logging into a separate app or dealing with all the typical headaches of a single sign-on solution (SSO) when it comes to integration. With LinkSquares Sign, all those headaches go away.
LinkSquares Sign is a signature solution designed for corporate legal teams and their workflows. Most fringe or specialized features in other digital signature solutions are intentionally absent from Sign. The built-in solution makes it easy for LinkSquares customers to manage, track, and house their agreements in one platform, with as few diversions or chances for error as possible.
That simplicity shows up in the LinkSquares Sign pricing. If you elect to purchase additional Signature Requests after using up your free samples, LinkSquares Sign usually comes in at around half the cost of either Adobe Sign or DocuSign.
Adobe Sign
Adobe Sign, formerly known as EchoSign, is the digital signature solution designed by the creators of the PDF file format. Considering that PDFs are the preferred electronic version of the forms and contracts that you need digitally signed, choosing Adobe’s eSignature solution may seem like a no-brainer.
That said, most legal teams don’t spend a lot of time using Adobe Creative Cloud (which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) to compose artfully typeset and lavishly designed legal briefs and agreements. On its face, being made by Adobe doesn’t necessarily mean a solution that’s better for legal teams.
Why Adobe Sign
The strongest argument for Adobe Sign is that almost every person to whom you send a PDF contract is going to open it in some version of Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader, which could then seamlessly connect to the Adobe Sign infrastructure.
By that same token, as one of the most influential and successful software firms, Adobe Sign integrates with virtually every major software solution. Even famously closed-source Microsoft products can output PDF files, so everything from MS Office to Salesforce to Google Workspace can easily tie into Adobe Sign. No matter which major document creation or workflow management solution you use, you can use Adobe Sign to get your internally generated contracts securely and effectively signed. You can even integrate Adobe Sign directly into LinkSquares.
And, to no one's surprise, scanning paper documents and converting them to digitally signable PDFs is incredibly easy with Adobe Sign. If PDFs are your bread and butter, Adobe Sign is an obvious digital signature choice.
DocuSign
Adobe Sign is just one small part of Adobe's software portfolio, whereas DocuSign produces exactly one solution: DocuSign.
They are specialists in digital signature tools who have worked to make this technology accessible to businesses of all types and customers of all sizes.
Why DocuSign
There are many cases where DocuSign's singular focus shows, not least in ease of use. DocuSign's mobile applications are extremely slick and intuitive, which often proves important when soliciting signatures from clients and outside parties who are not - how shall we say - highly technical.
The flip side of DocuSign's perfectionism is that its breadth of features can't quite match Adobe Sign's or PandaDoc's, though it's only noticeable in specific cases. For example, Adobe Sign supports 34 languages, while DocuSign only supports 14 languages. If you need to offer a specific language functionality, Adobe Sign may be able to help you when DocuSign can't.
By the same token, DocuSign doesn't (openly) negotiate prices for large corporate clients, nor do they offer annual discounts for prepaid yearly licenses. Adobe and PandaDoc, as major enterprise software vendors, offer the usual enterprise-tier price flexibility and incentives.
If you aren't a giant corporate behemoth with offices on five continents, Adobe Sign may seem needlessly complex or cumbersome. DocuSign, however, will probably feel just right. But then, so will Dropbox Sign or LinkSquares Sign. Where DocuSign absolutely shines is in its user interface. If you care most of all about ease of use, DocuSign is your choice.
Dropbox Sign
If you know just one thing about Dropbox Sign it should be this: It's the eSignature solution that comes bundled with Dropbox.
Before being acquired by Dropbox in 2019, Dropbox Sign was HelloSign, the plucky upstart in the eSignature app market, and that shows in its pricing.
Why Dropbox Sign
There are three reasons you'd choose Dropbox Sign over LinkSquares Sign, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, or PandaDoc.
First, Dropbox Sign comes bundled with Dropbox, so if you run all your document storage, management, and sharing out of Dropbox, Dropbox Sign will be the easiest eSignature solution to adopt. No integration is required.
Second, Dropbox Sign has a very robust e-fax solution, so if you regularly have to deal with clients, partners, or regulators that still run on fax machines -- looking at you, government agencies and doctor's offices -- Dropbox Sign will make your life easier. You can e-fax documents with the click of a button.
The third and arguably the best reason to try Dropbox Sign is if you're a small operation because it offers a free 30-day trial. The trade-off here is that Dropbox Sign has the slimmest feature set and their user experience isn't as refined as DocuSign. Dropbox Sign is an adequate solution, but you're not getting any of the premium options the other major eSignature solutions offer.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a proposal drafting and workflow suite that includes an e-signature tool that you can purchase as a standalone solution.
Why PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a full proposal-drafting suite originally designed for creating legal agreements on behalf of advertising agencies, convention hotels, and other service providers that need to conjure up bespoke contracts from boilerplate components. The PandaDoc eSignature tool is a complement to that suite.
If you're using PandaDoc to draft contacts, obviously there's no reason to use a different eSignature tool. If you're drafting contracts elsewhere, PandaDoc isn't as useful but does offer a few specific features that may be worth paying for since PandaDoc is far from the least expensive top-line eSignature option.
First, PandaDoc excels at managing your signing order. If you want clear control over who signs a document in what sequence, PandaDoc makes this very specific task easy to execute and track. And, speaking of tracking, as part of an overall workflow tool, PandaDoc has excellent reporting about who signed which documents when and which signatures remain outstanding.
If you regularly need multiple disparate (and not always punctual) parties to sign your legal agreements, PandaDoc is a great choice. And if you need to precisely control the order and timing of those signatures, PandaDoc will serve you even better.
If you don't need those specific features, PandaDoc is probably overkill - and overpriced - for your eSignature needs.
Which is Right for Your Legal Team?
If there is a specific feature or integration you need that only LinkSquares Sign, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, or PandaDoc offers, your choice is simple. But all five solutions cover most major digital signature use cases, so the choice isn't often so obvious.
LinkSquares Sign is the clear winner for legal teams looking to move their business forward and ensure transparency along the way. LinkSquares Sign was designed specifically for legal teams and their workflows. If you're drafting and managing contracts in LinkSquares, there's no reason to leave that ecosystem to get an agreement signed -- especially when LinkSquares Sign is almost certainly less expensive than any standalone tool you'd care to integrate or adopt.
Dropbox Sign is the least expensive standalone solution and is the best choice for small or even one-person legal teams. And if you're using Dropbox or reliant on e-faxing, it's a clear winner.
DocuSign has the best user experience, especially on mobile devices. So if ease of use for signatories is your primary concern, you can't do better.
PandaDoc is the clear winner if tracking signatures -- especially signature order -- is a big concern. If you want to accelerate time-to-close on your sales contracts, PandaDoc will help you monitor and manage that metric. But you'll pay for it.
Adobe Sign is enterprise-grade all the way -- with the major software integrations, price supports, and service tiers to match. If your digital signature solution has to integrate with a complex corporate security infrastructure and complicated document workflow tools, Adobe Sign is probably the best fit.
Whichever digital signature tool you select, you'll want a high-end contract analysis solution to monitor the agreements you virtually execute. LinkSquares meshes seamlessly with every major eSignature app - even the ones that LinkSquares doesn't sell - ensuring that no matter who collects and authenticates your digital signatures, the resulting agreements are well cataloged, analyzed, and managed.
If you're ready to keep better track of your digitally signed contracts and legal agreements -- generated by LinkSquares Sign, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, PandaDoc, or any major eSignature tool - contact LinkSquares today.