What’s in this guide:
Top reasons to seek out a DocuSign alternative
Types of DocuSign alternatives
Features to look for in a DocuSign alternative
The best DocuSign alternatives for every purpose (⭐12 winners)
Top reasons to seek out a DocuSign alternative
E-signatures can be used by every type of business, from wedding planners to software providers. The reasons for seeking out an alternative to DocuSign can be as unique as the person doing the searching.
But for the most part, the reasons boil down to:
Affordability
Cost is often the top motivation to find an alternative—whether you want advanced features at a cheaper price or are looking for a completely free option.
Unlimited contracts
DocuSign’s most affordable plan is just $10 per month, but it only offers up to 5 contracts each month. If you’re looking for unlimited contracts, you might be hunting for a platform with lower monthly pricing than DocuSign’s $25-per-month unlimited plan.
Boosting sales closing rates
What about better performance and results?
DocuSign allows you to send boring, ugly contracts.
Sales teams that are looking to win over prospective buyers will do better with proposal software instead. By the same turn, HR teams wanting to excite prospective employees with a stellar job offer will want more attractive contracts along with their e-signatures.
Consolidating platforms
Many DocuSign users are looking to ditch the platform simply to consolidate their tech stack.
If you can find e-signatures inside of a more robust platform that meets more of your needs, then you can easily cancel your DocuSign plan.
Better collaboration or lifecycle management
Corporations expect a lot more out of their contract platform. Procurement teams might need better vendor management data, while legal teams might want advanced clause templates, collaboration, and approval workflows.
Types of DocuSign alternatives
There are a few different types of DocuSign alternatives.
It’s good to understand what’s out there so you can make a better decision.
Legally binding e-signature platforms - These types of platforms are direct competitors of DocuSign. They offer document uploads, contract templates, text fields, and e-signatures. Many platforms also integrate with popular work management systems.
Proposal software with e-signatures - This type of software allows you to write beautiful, on-brand proposals and send them alongside a legally binding contract. This can boost your closing rates compared to sending a basic contract. Combining e-signatures and proposals together will also lead to higher closing rates than if you were to separate these into different formats (such as a PDF proposal and a separate e-signature process).
All-in-one client business management software - With this type of software, you can manage almost all of your business in one place. For example, a photographer can manage contracts, e-signatures, scheduling, and invoices. Keep in mind that some of these platforms can be for specific roles (such as HR), rather than just for a specific business type. By incorporating e-signatures into another platform, you can save money on your software expenses while improving team productivity.
Contract lifecycle management - Enterprise-grade software will offer features to foster collaboration between the legal team and the rest of the company and to make it easier for internal buyers to track upcoming renewals.
Features to look for in a DocuSign alternative
If you’re considering switching from DocuSign, you need to be sure that you have your basics covered before you vet an alternative for advanced features.
Make sure your new platform offers these basic features:
Contract templates
Clause templates
Text fields
Signature fields
Is legally binding
Here are some additional features to consider:
Proposals
Dynamic pricing
Proposal templates
Viewing analytics
Contract lifecycle management
Internal legal approvals
Time tracking for projects and staff
Invoices
Payment processing or integrations
Project management
Client communication
The best DocuSign alternatives for every purpose [10 winners]
Now that you know a bit more about what to expect from alternatives, let’s take a look at our top choices.
We’ve hand-selected the best DocuSign alternatives for a variety of roles, use cases, and business types:
Best e-signature platform for sales teams
Best e-signature platform for legal teams
Best e-signature platform for HR teams
Best affordable DocuSign alternative
Best free DocuSign alternative
Best platform for corporate contract collaboration
Best platform for procurement and vendor management
Best for CLM software
Best e-signature platform for high-compliance industries
Best all-in-one platform for freelancers
⭐1. Best e-signature platform for sales team
Proposify is a proposal software platform that sales teams use to write, send, and track proposals to prospective clients.
In this Proposify review on YouTube, sales influencer Will Aitken, walks viewers through exactly how to set up proposal templates, add dynamic pricing options, and get the deal done.
Top features:
E-signatures
Proposal templates
Contract templates
Contract clause templates
Drag & drop elements
Internal reviews and approvals
Dynamic pricing (optional rows and editable quantities)
Email templates
Pre-scheduled email reminders
Proposal analytics (viewing and closing insights)
Integrations with Salesforce, Drift, Asana, ActiveCampaign, Stripe, Vidyard, and more
Pros:
Proposify offers features designed to increase proposal closing rates, such as dynamic pricing and e-signatures (Proposals with e-signatures close 35% faster)
The templates aren’t just document-by-document but allow for modular use. For example, you can drop in different service pages and case study mentions to match.
Viewing and closing analytics offer insights into specific client activity, as well as average rates for benchmarking performance.
Cons:
Proposify is designed for business proposals and isn’t a fit for signing other types of contracts.
Pricing:
The most affordable plan is the Team Plan, which costs $49 per user per month. Larger sales teams can try the Business Plan, which starts at $590 per month and includes custom onboarding and assistance with setting up proposal template content and workflows.
Reviews:
Proposify has 4.6 stars on G2.
⭐2. Best e-signature platform for legal teams
Clio is a fully-featured platform designed for law firms and legal teams. It can be used to organize cases, create and manage contracts, send for legally binding e-signatures, and automate documents.
Some of these features are split into different products, meaning that internal legal teams can just pay for the case management and document management features, while law firms can opt for the client management, accounting, and payment features.
Top features:
Case management
Contact management
Project and task management
Document management
Document automation (automatically fill out repetitive contracts)
E-signatures
Email templates and automation
Time tracking
Integrations with Microsoft Office, QuickBooks, Zoom, and others
HIPAA compliance
Pros:
Clio’s task management offers custom categories and tags so that different case types and projects can be managed with the right workflow.
The document automation features can be used to save time on repetitive tasks, including filling out legal forms, automating template creation, and locating the correct forms quickly.
Can easily be used by internal legal teams or small law firms to track cases, projects, and internal contacts.
Cons:
Not customized to a specific type of law. Some teams may prefer to get more granular and find a platform designed for their specific use case, such as real estate law or intellectual property law.
Clio doesn’t offer process optimization features, so it may be difficult to assess where your team could be saving time.
Pricing:
The lowest plan costs $39 per user per month, and the highest plan costs $129 per month and unlocks access to all features.
Reviews:
Clio has 4.6 stars on G2.
⭐3. Best e-signature platform for HR teams
BambooHR is one of the most popular HR platforms. At many small businesses, the majority of the operations tasks lie within HR. Small businesses need to track employee time, paid time off, compensation rates, payroll dates, and tons of other staff-related tasks and data. That’s why it can make sense to use an HR platform that includes e-signatures, rather than pay for a dedicated signature software like DocuSign.
Large businesses will need additional platforms to manage e-signatures. For example, the HR team can use BambooHR, while the sales team could use Proposify. When other teams occasionally need contract signing, such as marketing asking a contract to sign an NDA, they could use something free or affordable like Adobe Acrobat or HelloSign.
Top features:
E-signatures for new hires and renewing employment contracts
E-signatures for onboarding and offboarding
E-signatures for contractors and vendors
Applicant tracking system (ATS)
Onboarding and offboarding management
Staff time tracking
Paid time off (PTO) management
Payroll processing
Employee performance management
Employee satisfaction surveys and tracking
Pros:
BambooHR offers the majority of features that HR teams need all in one place.
Electronic signatures and contracts can be sent for a variety of purposes.
BambooHR can help improve employee and compensation management across a variety of industries, including healthcare, construction, finance, and technology.
Cons:
While BambooHR can be a great e-signature platform for small businesses and HR teams, it won’t meet the needs of large companies or other departments.
If a business doesn’t use the HR features regularly, the cost of the e-signatures won’t be worth it, as you per per user. However, as long as the features for time tracking and payroll are used, then you can consider the e-signatures as a free add-on.
Pricing:
BambooHR doesn’t publish their pricing online, but some quick research shows that plans range from $8 to $9 per employee per month.
Reviews:
BambooHR has 4.4 stars on G2.
⭐4. Best affordable DocuSign alternative
As one of the most popular DocuSign alternatives, Hellosign is an excellent choice if you’re looking for e-signatures and you don’t want to combine e-signatures with other platforms.
Maybe you’re a freelancer who already has tools for invoicing, scheduling, and client management. Or maybe you’re purchasing software for a company and you already have all of the business management platforms you need, except for e-signatures.
At the end of the day, what really matters here is getting legally binding electronic signatures at a better price. You’ll pay less with Hellosign compared to DocuSign in order to unlock unlimited signature requests.
Top features:
E-signatures
Document templates
Mobile app for requesting signatures and signing
Audit trail
Support for 22 languages
Signer fields including checkbox, text input, and signatures
Conditional logic for fields
Custom URL redirect after signing
Integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft SharePoint, and more
Pros:
HelloSign offers template URLs to allow clients to sign directly from your website after purchasing a package.
You can use HelloSign on any mobile device to collect signatures in-person, making it great for sales onsite, during events, or real estate purchases.
What’s more, Hellosign was bought out by Dropbox, and you can purchase the two together to save 20%.
Cons:
HelloSign doesn’t offer other business management features, so you’ll need to double up your work or use integrations to track closed contracts and add them to your project management system or CRM.
HelloSign’s user interface, while functional, isn’t the most attractive.
Pricing:
For unlimited signature sending and up to 5 templates, you’ll only need to pay $15 per month for the Essentials plan. Or get up to 15 templates for $25 per month with the Standard plan.
Reviews:
HelloSign has 4.7 stars on G2.
⭐5. Best free DocuSign alternative
You’ve probably used Adobe Acrobat before. If your e-signature needs are infrequent and uncomplicated, then you might be able to get by with Adobe Acrobat. For example, if you send only a few NDAs and contracts a year, you can avoid paying for a dedicated tool.
However, keep in mind that Adobe Acrobat might make your business look unprofessional. If you’re trying to close a client, you’ll be better of with proposal software. But if you’re sending contracts for non-sales-related purposes, then Adobe Acrobat just might do the trick.
Top features:
E-signatures
Text fields
Request e-signatures
Share with signers and collaborators
Download completed contracts
Read PDFs
Comment and highlight on PDFs
Pros:
You might already have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer. If you need to just sign documents yourself, you can use the sign and fill features for free, but if you need to request signatures from others, it will set you back a low monthly fee.
If you only need to sign a couple of documents per month, you can get by with the free version.
Cons:
Using fill and sign is clunky for managing contract templates, so you’ll need to create a Word Doc template, and then save that as a PDF in order to sign it.
Adobe Acrobat doesn’t offer the best experience for clients, and it could make you look less professional than if you used a more modern e-signature platform.
Pricing:
Adobe Acrobat allows you to use the free version of their Fill and Sign tool up to two times a month. Or, you can pay for the desktop app and get unlimited signing for $12.99 per month.
Reviews:
Adobe Acrobat has 4.5 stars on G2.
⭐6. Best platform for corporate contract collaboration
Windward Core is a great DocuSign alternative for enterprises looking to take their document management and contract collaboration to the next level. The platform offers contract template designing, data integrations, data queries, and template management so that organizations across a wide variety of industries can better manage documents in-house.
The key user roles would typically be within the legal team, but that depends on the business. For example, within a city government, the platform might be used by civil engineers to manage contractor engagements.
Top features:
E-signatures
Upload document templates from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Reusable templates and elements
Template management, access, and internal contract approvals
Data tags for template elements
Conditional logic for contract fields
Data source integrations
Data queries
Contract and document outputs in DOCX, XLSX, PDF, HTML, and more
Pros:
Once smart contracts are created with all of the content, data queries, and data tags, all future contract drafting will go much quicker.
The platform works by turning Word Doc, Excel, and PowerPoint into templates. This will come as a relief to potential users from large corporations and government agencies, as they already have tons of documents using those formats and won’t have to redo the design work.
With document automation, the platform can pull together data from your other documents to develop legal contracts for any new purpose.
Cons:
The high price makes this a no-go for all businesses except large corporations and government entities.
The platform is designed for control over outgoing contracts and documents. While that helps with compliance, it makes it harder for individual contributors to use it. For example, this could slow down your sales cycle, as sales reps might not have the access or skills to spin up contracts themselves and will need to wait for the legal department to deliver the contract for their lead to sign.
Pricing:
You’ll pay $6,470 per year for up to 36,000 pages or $8,780 per year for unlimited pages.
Reviews:
Windward Core has 4.5 stars on G2.
⭐7. Best platform for procurement contracts and vendor management
Just as sellers need their own platform for tracking relationships and contracts, so do buyers. Kissflow Procurement Cloud offers several different features for managing engagements from the buyer’s side, including e-signatures on purchase orders and vendor contracts.
The platform is a fit for enterprise and government organizations with high standards for their vendor relationships.
Top features:
Vendor contracts
E-signatures
Purchase requisitions
Purchase orders
Spending analytics
Vendor management
Purchase invoices
Integrations with SAP, Oracle, QuickBooks, Xero, and more
Pros:
Kissflow Procurement Cloud includes granular user permissions befitting an enterprise platform, so you’ll be able to give team members access to the right features.
The vendor management and spending analytics will help you track active contracts and eliminate unnecessary renewals.
With the available integrations, you can make sure that data is consistent across your accounting system and your business analytics platform.
Cons:
Unless you’re spending at least half a million dollars per month on vendor contracts, the cost of the platform will likely not yield ROI.
There are no features for sending and managing contracts that fall outside the realm of vendor relationships.
Pricing:
Kissflow Procurement Cloud starts at $1,990 per month, with pricing dependent on the features, transaction volume, and the number of users.
Reviews:
Kissflow Procurement Cloud has 4.8 stars on G2.
⭐8. Best contract lifecycle management platform
Malbek is a contract lifecycle management system that allows you to create, track, and automate contracts. It has some overlap with Kissflow Procurement Cloud in that it can help you create and track vendor contracts, but it’s different in that you can use it for other types of contracts too.
With Malbek, you can monitor contracts across their lifecycle: inception, authoring, review, negotiation, signature, and long-term tracking.
Top features:
Contract lifecycle management
Contract repository
Search within contracts
Renewal notifications
Contract templates
E-signatures
Contract authoring with automated suggestions
Clause library
Pros:
Malbek’s contract AI is pretty advanced. It can help you automatically create a contract repository with searchable contracts and reusable clauses.
Malbek can help you save money by stopping contract renewals and gathering the data you need to negotiate a better deal.
Cons:
Malbek doesn’t include procurement-focused features like purchase orders and purchase requisitions, so if you’re going to be using it primarily for procurement, you might be better off with Kissflow Procurement Cloud.
If you’re planning on using Malbek for sales, it might not have all of the features you need. Sure, it can automate some of the contract creation, but without an attractive proposal and dynamic pricing, you might fail to close the deal.
Pricing:
Malbek’s pricing isn’t publicly available, so you’ll need to contact sales for a custom quote.
Reviews:
Malbek has 4.5 stars on G2.
⭐9. Best e-signature platform for high-compliance industries
ContractWorks offers advanced contract management features for the healthcare industry, which has a lot of complexity. Medical offices, insurance companies, and others need advanced cybersecurity from their e-signature platform. ContractWorks can also be a fit for any high-compliance industry, such as government and non-profit organizations.
The platform can be used by multiple departments within an organization, including legal, finance, and HR.
Top features:
E-signatures
Contract repository
Contract lifecycle management
Contract milestone alerts
Contract templates
Clause library
Data tags
Pros:
ContractWorks offers the advanced security that healthcare organizations need, including 2FA, SSO, and SOC2 compliance.
With reporting and alerts, collaborators can track contracts at any stage, whether awaiting signature or renewal.
ContractWorks offers unlimited users on every plan, meaning you’ll pay for usage and nothing more.
Cons:
ContractWorks is only intended for internal use, so you’ll need another platform for storing patient signatures.
Because the platform is designed for legal, finance, and HR, it can drift into jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none territory. Legal, finance, and HR teams will still need other platforms for their work, and these platforms might come with their own e-signature tools. If those e-signature tools pass the compliance requirements, then ContractWorks might be redundant.
There are no sales-focused features, so if your company offers medical device or service sales, then you’ll need another platform for the sales team.
Pricing:
The lowest plan costs $700 per month and allows for up to 2,500 documents per month and unlimited users. Or, pay $900 per month for up to 10,000 documents.
Reviews:
ContractWorks has 4.8 stars on G2.
⭐10. Best all-in-one platform for freelancers
Independent businesses and solopreneurs can get a lot done with HoneyBook. The platform is an all-in-one business suite for onboarding new clients, collecting payments, and scheduling work. It’s a great fit for bookkeepers, graphic designers, event caterers, wedding photographers, and plenty more.
Top features:
Contract e-signatures
Contract templates
Invoices
Payment processing
Meeting scheduling
Project workflow automations and reminders
Pros:
HoneyBook can help small businesses consolidate their tech stack and save on their monthly expenses.
Because of its target audience, HoneyBook is very easy to learn and use.
Cons:
With HoneyBook, you don’t get contract analytics, meaning you can’t easily benchmark and track your closing rate.
HoneyBook doesn’t integrate with Salesforce
Pricing:
For full access to HoneyBook, you’ll pay $39 per month or $390 for the year.
Reviews:
HoneyBook has 4.5 stars on G2.
How to choose the right DocuSign alternative for your business
If you’re simply looking for a more affordable way to send and sign unlimited documents, then Hellosign might be right for you.
But if you want to improve your closing rate and close deals faster, then you’re going to need a platform designed for sales.
Proposify offers:
Beautiful, modular proposal templates
Dynamic pricing so clients can select the options within their budget
Built-in e-signatures and contracts for immediate closing
Image and video embeds to really sell your services
Hands-on onboarding, training, and creative work
