The 10 Best DocuSign Alternatives for Each Team and Industry

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

Send proposals designed to close with Proposify.