Adobe vs. DocuSign—How To eSign With Both Services

For businesses as well as private people, signing contracts, forms, and anything else has become more or less the standard. Both Adobe Sign and DocuSign offer services to enable this. They’re both tech giants dominating their respective industries, and both aim to help individuals and businesses to streamline workflows and move deals forward with their electronic signing tools.

Adobe is known as the creator of the popular PDF format. Over the last decade, their services have surpassed the mere PDF reader functionality, branching out to establish a more substantial online and offline presence with its product offerings. Aside from Adobe Sign—where you can create digital signatures or request them from others, they have many tools at their disposal—for users to compress, edit, or convert PDF documents.

DocuSign, on the other hand, has always revolved its business around digital document signing. It’s arguably the go-to tool for many companies to sign contracts and close deals. It is renowned for cross-country regulatory compliance plus integrations with many online SaaS, such as Salesforce.

Both services require an account for document signing, offer free trials, and have similar starting prices, which fluctuate based on the chosen plan.

Should I use DocuSign or Adobe Sign?

It’s entirely up to you and your needs. Both companies have huge followings, expansive global brand presence and trust, and support businesses of all sizes—from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies.

When it comes to electronic signing: Both services offer standard and legally binding electronic signatures, form fields. Their online tools work straight from your web browser. Sending a document to another party to sign is also simple, although Adobe has a different tool for this task, functioning from the same platform.

Since both are paid software, you should opt for the one that fits the needs your business the most. Both tools offer mobile apps to sign documents from your mobile devices. If you need more than just signing, though, Adobe additionally offers access to their PDF conversion tools—depending on the plan you choose. For instance, since PDF is the ideal format for document sharing, most people opt to convert a Microsoft Word document to PDF before signing it.

With DocuSign, on the other hand—you get a tool that lives and breathes digital signing. If you don’t need any other functionality than signing, you’re likely better of choosing this service. They also offer a much more extended trial period than Adobe (30 days instead of 14) and seemingly higher ratings across all online software listing platforms.

By offering sophisticated customization options for generating, preserving, and recycling templates, DocuSign aims to accelerate corporate operations. Users may simply reuse agreements or sales contracts for new transactions, guaranteeing more efficient and seamless processes.

Can I Sign for Free Without Adobe or DocuSign?

Yes—while there are numerous free tools out there (online, or even offline with preinstalled software such as Preview)—few offer everything both companies bring to the table.

That’s where we take the stage. Smallpdf is the most popular online PDF software—and strives to make PDFs easy. You can convert, edit, and sign like with Adobe, or modify contracts and request signatures via emails like DocuSign with our site.

And better yet, you don’t need an account like you do with Adobe or DocuSign to start the signing process. We feature an easy-to-use UI for a smooth and simple customer experience when it comes to signing the document. This is how it works:

1. Go to the eSign tool on Smallpdf’s site.
2. Drag and drop your document into the tool page.
3. From there, create your electronic signature to begin.
4. If needed, request signatures from the right-hand panel.
5. Download your final document once it’s ready.

And yes, it’s free. You don’t need to start a trial or enter your credit card information to get someone to electronically sign your digital document or sign it yourself.

Your Trustworthy eSign Service

Our number of users has surpassed 2.4 billion individuals. Everyone loves a free, simple, effective solution to PDFs, especially in the last few years—when many of us started to work remotely and maybe still do.

“The Signing”, an aptly named specialist eSign team, is continuously working to create the greatest electronic signature software, outperforming Adobe and DocuSign. Real-time tracking of document actions, such as modifications, comments, and signatures, is possible with our service. At any time, you can review every single edit, comment, and signature placed, giving you full control over your contract.

What’s even more critical is predicting user needs. We want to involve you at the beginning, the middle, and the end of every document modifying process and ensure that you have all the tools required to keep things going in your daily work processes.

If you have any questions, feedback, or feature requests, hit us up via @smallpdf on Twitter or email us at support@smallpdf.com

Enjoy signing your digital documents—be it with Adobe, DocuSign, or (hopefully) Smallpdf!