Compare / Adobe Inc.
Rutba vs Adobe Acrobat Sign
Signing from the company that invented the file everyone is signing. The comparison is really about whether the PDF is the centre of your process or an output of it.
Checked 3 September 2026Adobe: Acrobat Sign product pages ↗
What Adobe Acrobat Sign is
Adobe's electronic signature service, sold inside Acrobat plans and as an enterprise solution licensed by transaction. Signing sits alongside the full PDF toolchain (editing, forms, redaction, accessibility tagging) and is integrated deeply with Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint and Dynamics.
Who it genuinely suits
- Organizations where Acrobat is already deployed and paid for
- Anyone whose documents need real PDF work (forms, redaction, accessibility) before they are signed
- Microsoft-centred teams, where the integrations are first-party on both sides
- Enterprises that prefer to license by transaction volume rather than by seat
Where they win
What Adobe Acrobat Sign does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
The PDF toolchain, which we do not have
Editing, form field creation, redaction, accessibility tagging and preflight are a genuine product and we do not compete with any of it. Sign pins a document by hash on arrival and never rewrites it: a deliberate choice for evidence, and it means the document has to be right before it gets here.
The signature inside the PDF, done properly
Appearance settings and certificate-based digital signatures embedded in the PDF itself, on whatever PDF you bring. We place fields on the page too, and the executed copy draws every mark and value on the original’s own pages, but it carries no certificate signature of its own: the evidence record beside it is what proves the signing. A few unusual PDFs get no executed copy from us at all, only the certificate, with the reason recorded.
Qualified signatures and enterprise compliance
AdES and qualified signatures through Adobe's trust partners, plus the compliance programmes large buyers audit against. Our seal is Ed25519 over a canonical manifest and our timestamp is a genuine RFC 3161 token: cryptographically sound, and not the same thing as an accredited qualified certificate.
Already in the building
If Acrobat is deployed, signing is often a licence change rather than a purchase, an integration or a new supplier to onboard. That is a real cost we cannot beat.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
The record is the product, not the rendering
Acrobat Sign's deliverable is a signed PDF with an audit report beside it. Ours is a sealed completion manifest over a hash-chained ledger, with the documents pinned by hash and never rewritten, so "has this been altered" is answered by comparing hashes rather than by trusting that the rendering pipeline did not touch anything.
Two independent clocks
Every sealed digest carries a platform countersignature and an RFC 3161 timestamp from a public authority. The second one is the point: it is a time assertion nobody at Rutba can move, obtained from a party with no interest in the agreement, and preserved as an artifact any standard tool can check.
Free public verification, permanently
A counterparty checks a completed package with no account and no payment, and can keep doing so after you have stopped being a customer. Verification is not a tier here and never will be.
No seat, and no charge to sign
Per envelope on pay-as-you-go, an organization-wide allowance on the subscription, and signers never pay. A team that sends occasionally is not buying seats for the privilege.
And the one that is not a feature
Adobe Inc. will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them. A vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Adobe Acrobat Sign |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Not covered |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Partly |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Not covered |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Adobe Inc.’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter, which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Adobe Acrobat Sign actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Documents keep working: a PDF is a PDF. What does not move is the signature appearance built in Acrobat's tooling.
- 2
If your process depends on a certificate signature embedded in the PDF itself, stay: we draw the marks on the original pages, and the proof is the evidence record beside the file.
- 3
Signed archives stay with Adobe and stay verifiable there.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism (what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt) rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
If the document work happens in Acrobat and the signature is the last step of a PDF workflow, stay. The seam we would put in the middle costs more than it returns. Consider us when the signed artefact needs to prove something to a third party years later, or when the documents are generated by systems you already run rather than authored by hand.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Note before you compare: Rutba Sign, Rutba Docs & Sheets, Rutba Drive are not generally available yet. Any row above that we win on them is a claim about what ships, not about what you can buy today.
Rutba Sign
Early accessElectronic signature software
Send agreements for signature by link, to people who need no account, and get back a sealed, hash-chained record of who was invited, how they proved who they were, what they saw, and what they agreed to.
- Signing by link: your counterparty needs no Rutba account
- An append-only, hash-chained record of the whole ceremony
- Identity evidence you choose per signer: email, phone code, access code, location
Includes: Sign · Signing engine · Verify
From $0.50 per envelope
Rutba Docs & Sheets
Early accessOnline documents & spreadsheet software
Collaborative documents and spreadsheets, stored on Drive and shared through your organization. The difference is that a sheet can pull live figures from your stock and your accounts.
- Word processor and spreadsheet, edited together in real time
- Opens and saves .docx and .xlsx on our own engine, with no round-trip loss
- 145 spreadsheet functions with dependency-ordered recalculation
Includes: Docs & Sheets · Workspace service
From $2 per user / month
Rutba Drive
Coming soonCloud file storage & sharing
Folders, sharing, permissions, and version history for the whole organization, with attachments from your orders, tickets, and documents living in the same place as everything else.
- Folders and files with real version history
- Sharing by person or role, plus view-only links that expire, can be revoked, and record each use
- Shared with me: every file shared with you, in one list
Includes: Drive · Drive API
From $1.50 per user / month
Head to head
Adobe Acrobat Sign against the others.
You are comparing Adobe Acrobat Sign to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page: sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against Adobe Acrobat Sign?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.