Electronic signatures

Electronic signature services send a document (a contract, an offer letter, a consent form) to the people who need to sign it, collect their signatures online and return a signed PDF with an audit trail of who signed, when and from where. Sales, HR, legal and operations teams use them in a web app, and developers add signing to their own products through an API. They differ in how they bill (per user with an envelope allowance, per sender with unlimited sending, or a seat plus fees per document), in the EU signature levels and identity checks they offer, and in which security and compliance features come on a plan you can buy online.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, API pricing, security, legal and documentation pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether prices are published and can be bought online, whether the price of extra envelopes is published, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict themselves.
• Free plan: how many documents a month a permanent free plan sends for signature, or only free signing and a trial.
• Price for 3 senders: the lowest listed monthly cost for 3 senders each sending 30 envelopes a month from the web app, billed annually, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Legal standing and evidence: US ESIGN Act or UETA compliance, the highest EU (eIDAS) signature level on offer, an audit trail, a seal that shows later changes, and signer identity checks beyond email.
• Compliance and team security: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, a HIPAA BAA, SAML SSO, and a choice of storage region.
• API and templates: a documented API, the entry price of live API sending, a free sandbox, webhooks, SDKs, shared templates and bulk send.

How long a document takes to be signed depends on the signers, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.