Adobe Acrobat Sign vs. DocuSign

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Acrobat Sign
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Acrobat Sign is an e-signature solution that combines simple and secure e-signatures with Adobe Acrobat. With Acrobat Sign, the user can create, sign, send for signature, manage, and track documents from one Adobe platform. The user can create signing experiences for customers and teams by enabling them to sign documents on any device or browser – anytime, anywhere. No additional software download or accounts are needed. As Microsoft’s e-signature solution, Acrobat Sign…
$14.99
per month license
DocuSign
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
DocuSign supports transactions with document sharing and electronic signature, as well as automated and guided data collection and entry, record updating across disparate systems and payment collection upon agreement, as well as analytics and reporting.
$15
per month
Pricing
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
Editions & Modules
Acrobat Standard DC for teams
$14.99
per month license
Acrobat Pro DC with advanced e-sign
$16.99
per month license
Acrobat Sign Solutions
Call 800-685-4192 for pricing
Personal
$15
per month
Real Starter
$15
per month
DocuSign for Realtors
$35
per month
Standard
$40
per month
Business Pro
$60
per month
Advanced Solutions
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$34.99 license per monthNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
TrustRadius Insights
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Docusign and Adobe Sign are electronic signature software options designed to work for businesses of any size. Abode Sign is more popular with large organizations that utilize other Adobe products while Docusign is more popular with small businesses.

Features

Docusign and Adobe Sign both provide the basic features of electronic signature software but there are a few standout features that set them apart.

Docusign includes document generation tools, strong mobile support, and offers many third party integrations. Adobe Sign integrates with Adobe’s suite of document management software to allow for end-to-end document management.

Limitations

Docusign and Adobe sign also both have a few key limitations that are important to consider.

Docusign places a limit on the number of users for most of their plans, and often receives poor feedback regarding slow or insufficient customer support. It is also difficult to alter Docusign documents after their creation. Adobe Sign has limited integrations outside of the Adobe suite and uses a difficult to use Android application for mobile users.

Pricing

Docusign offers two tiers of pricing for businesses. Their standard tier is $24.99 per month per user, and allows up to three users. Their business plan is $39.99 per user per month and allows users to process payments.

Adobe Sign also offers two tiers of pricing for business. Their small business plan costs $34.99 per user per month, which has no limitation on users. Their business plan costs $39.99 per user per month and requires a three year commitment, but includes advanced form options.

User Ratings
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
Likelihood to Recommend
7.1
(0 ratings)
5.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(0 ratings)
4.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Acrobat SignDocuSign
Likelihood to Recommend
Organizations with heavy usage inside Adobe product suites will find adoption seamless. However as it is driven on Adobe's platform some users may face challenges but as a whole the same business philosophy drives this as other Adobe platforms - they want your business - all of your business and it presents challenges if you don't agree. Product inculturation has been successful for organizations like Apple and even BMW, but with the global economy it can provide an appearance of elitism, often duly earned, or present unnecessary hurdles for integration which always impacts adoption timing and usage. While I understand and agree (for the most part) with revenue driven product layering, I believe that easier integration and full product availability definitely affect both acquisition and retention numbers. Adobe has a mighty and well deserved pedigree, and if you are aware of and prepared for the challenges I listed - you will probably love this software. If you need to have an easier and larger adoption and rollout, there are other options that will be a better fit especially if one of your data points is monitoring the impact and efficacy of the software on your team's time, conversion metrics and the impact on your clients. Adobe doesn't appear fond of self report analytics. On a side note, Adobe is a HUGE corporation and I have managed several of their enterprise platforms and they are awesome at allowing access to and support of legacy products, but identifying direct support was moderately to extremely difficult and requires a patience and tenacity above what one might expect for a company with whom you contribute significant income for their products. In a time when a new software pops up by the minute, having the heritage of Adobe is rock solid but a little more flexibility would make this product more attractive. I would still recommend the product albeit with awareness and acceptance of aforementioned challenges
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I am going to speak of a personal experience- on multiple occasions: I need my husband to sign documents during the day and I don't need him here- physically. He sometimes works in different parts of the state as well at his own company. There is no problem at all, as long as he has access to his cell phone, email, and cell phone service- he can sign the documents I need him to. It is AMAZING- I can't speak highly enough of Docusign.
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Pros
  • Adobe Acrobat Sign tracks whether or not a signer has viewed a document
  • Adobe Acrobat Sign tracks when a signer has signed, and the document has been sent to the next signer
  • Adobe Acrobat Sign sends you confirmation emails and progress update emails along the way
  • Adobe Acrobat Sign provides a "confirmation of signing" page at the end of the document package you put together, to prove the signatures are authentic
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  • Ease of sending the same document out to multiple recipients, at multiple locations, for multiple signatures
  • Quick turnaround - once the recipient signs the document, we receive notification and the document back immediately
  • Can resend, alter, change, and/or add to the email and/or document that is sent out very easily
  • The recipient can save the document after signing, so they too have their own electronic copy for their records
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Cons
  • I've noticed if I am sent a link to sign through Adobe Acrobat Sign and I have several Acrobat windows open (especially if there is a prior sign window still open) the program freezes when it tries to open the new signature link (my firm uses Macs, so not sure how or if that is related to the glitch).
  • I have had times when one of the parties in the email string sent to gather signatures either encountered issues or are unable to sign and the integrated help menus don't seem to be sufficient to walk a novice through the process.
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  • You have to purchase a subscription and unless you really need to originate a lot of documents, it's not cost-effective to maintain the subscription. It would be better to have a subscription that allows you to purchase a bundle of say, ten documents and then use them as needed for the occasional user.
  • You'll be hard-pressed to find anything negative from users other than the price.
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Likelihood to Renew
EchoSign has without a doubt helped our company to become more economic and time efficient. We can provide our customers with an entire documentation packet filled with all of the required paperwork they will ever need to sign in one quick email. The return time is at least four times quicker than sending through traditional mail methods, and is just as easy to instruct as flagging a hard copy. Our company is in the renewable energy industry, and it's great to know that there's a product like this that can help reduce waste. EchoSign diligently secures all documents and signatures, and provides an audit trail that is integral to keeping our customers' information private
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The product is a great tool for a remote workforce. As the company gets bigger, adding users to the account can be rather expensive. We considering providing read/sign only access for certain individuals and providing full access to other users as necessary to reduce costs.
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Usability
I've had very little trouble with it in all my uses with it. I do wish the text boxes you add wouldn't cut off the text if you entered too many words and that it would adjust it's size to fit within the space you've provided. However, that just takes a little refining in the initial set up of the document before you send it out.
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As an Administrator of the system, its ease of configuration and the guidance around doing it is second to none. The screens are broken down into manageable segments and easy to navigate to the area that needs to be looked at. Our Process Delivery teams, after initial training are using the system without any problems and find it easy to operation. We get minimal if any, requests for support.
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Reliability and Availability
I would have rated this a 9 or greater had they not had had such critical outages. They have taken steps to resolve this so I may come in and revise this
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It does not go down. I have had zero issues with DocuSign, approaching 4 years.
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Performance
The Adobe Acrobat Sign's performance are excellent.
When we send electronic document by email for signature all the customers receive it regularly, nobody has any issue to open it and the signature phase was very easy. The user-friendly aspect of this product reduce or reset the call for IT support
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Everything loads quickly. Reports are generated in a reasonable time. No noticeable difference in integrated software processing speeds.
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Support Rating
It is a great tool to get signatures from the client and has reduced a lot of overhead that was caused before resulting in very long delays. With the integration of Adobe Acrobat Sign, we have reduced this delay making the process much smoother and more efficient.
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I'd give them a 10, but there has been 1 or 2 small cases that seemed to fall to the wayside, but I was able to call them up and get them resolved. We were having a bad implementation night (after midnight) and we needed assistance from Docusign. They were able to get an engineer to help us in the early morning hours
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Online Training
The best types of training are well integrated into the product and Echosign does this well. As mentioned earlier in my review - there are some areas of functionality that can be difficult to understand ("only I sign") for the novice user. Other areas such as macro usage, bulk signature and so on were easily learned and understood via the online tools.
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Docusign is super easy to use, and apart from a few administration details, there was really nothing to train on. Post implementation, there were issues with configuration of auto-filled documents with the integrating 3rd party. That training required some time, because the DocuSign expert took the time to walk me through the 3rd party's configuration (how often does that happen?) so I could see how DocuSign should be best used to overcome weaknesses in the 3rd party platform. 10/10 expert care.
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Implementation Rating
Our IT team implemented and the implementation was fine. The only lesson learned is that the integration with Salesforce.com is great, but if you use the product for something other than sales orders (e.g. timesheets, client correspondence etc.), you need to plan with that in mind. They have a very good web based interface for that
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Until you get the hang of it, I recommend doing several internal tests before sending a document to a client. As I mentioned earlier, you have to go through a bit of trial and error at first to verify that the workflow works as expected.
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Alternatives Considered
DocuSign is a little more user-friendly and more updated that Adobe Acrobat Sign. Ultimately, we made the switch to Adobe due to their product offerings. By choosing Adobe, we can utilize other platforms within the suite that allow us to further edit documents. Which provides capabilities beyond what DocuSign offers
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Adobe Acrobat Sign is less user-friendly and more suited to small scopes, or one-off documents. It lacks the use of templates that DocuSign has, which is what ultimately streamlines and delivers the consistency and efficiencies for the business.
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Scalability
At the beginning we assigned Adobe Acrobat Sign just to Purchase Office Department because at that moment we needed a tool that supported us to avoid manual signature and was compliance with remote working.
Now we are using it also in other situation because it help us with time and we can also reduce cost
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In my years of using DocuSign, I have never had an outage. I haven't even encountered a bug.
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Return on Investment
  • Significantly reduced the time required for document signing processes reducing wasted time and effort
  • Cost savings since there is no longer any need to print and post/scan traditional signed paper-based documents
  • Faster decision-making since time-sensitive decisions and approvals can now be processed much more quickly by using e-signatures.
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  • Less paper use, faster signature times, less time standing at the printer/scanner to send documents to yourself
  • Security over your signature! Security over your company's signature and authorization to approve projects, cash flow etc
  • Love audit trails and the seamless tracking of the status of the document
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ScreenShots

Adobe Acrobat Sign Screenshots

Screenshot of Send, sign, manage and archive documents with 100% legal e-signatures. Collecting e-signatures is as easy as swipe and tap with Adobe Sign. Sign from any device. Legally binding. Works with multiple apps. extremely cost-effective.Screenshot of Easily send e-signature requests to multiple recipients using Send in bulk feature.  Send a document to multiple people with one click, and every recipient gets their own personalized form ready to sign.Screenshot of Track and manage signatures with Adobe Acrobat Sign.  Get real-time visibility for every document out for signature, and receive notifications when documents have been signed.Screenshot of Create an online web form with Acrobat Sign.  It allows your recipients – whether they’re your employees or customers – to quickly access, complete, and sign critical documents without printing or mailing anything.  You will also get immediate access to the data and signatures.

DocuSign Screenshots

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