Compare / Docusign, Inc.
Rutba vs Docusign
The category, more or less. If you have signed something electronically you have probably signed it here, and that recognition is a real feature rather than a branding fact.
Checked 3 September 2026Docusign: eSignature product pages ↗
What Docusign is
An electronic signature product that has grown into an agreement platform: envelopes and signing, plus contract lifecycle management, an agreement repository with extraction, a workflow builder, web forms, identity verification and remote online notarisation. Sold per user with an envelope allowance attached to the seat, self-serve at the lower tiers and through sales above them.
Who it genuinely suits
- Companies whose counterparties are enterprises with a procurement checklist
- Anyone who needs remote online notarisation, or a qualified signature through a trust service provider
- Teams already deep in Salesforce, Microsoft or Workday, where the integration is first-party and maintained
- Regulated industries needing a named compliance programme rather than an argument about one
Where they win
What Docusign 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.
Your counterparty already trusts the envelope
This is the advantage that is hardest to compete with and the easiest to underrate. A signer who receives a Docusign envelope opens it without thinking about it. A signer who receives ours reads the sender name twice. Recognition is not a moat we can build with engineering, and pretending it does not decide deals would be dishonest.
Identity, notarisation and qualified signatures
Government-ID verification, knowledge-based authentication, remote online notarisation through their own notary network, and qualified electronic signatures through trust service providers: all in production, all inside the product. Ours is narrower: an identity ladder of email, phone code, access code, location and signed-in identity, and a formality desk where you ask us to arrange a stamp, seal or notarisation and a person books it with a third party. Arranging is not performing. If a document has to be notarised in the tool, in a session, tonight, that is theirs.
Breadth beyond signing
An agreement repository that extracts terms from executed contracts, a workflow builder, and web forms. We carry the lifecycle itself now (effective dates, term ends, renewal notices, the manager and the renewal chain), so "they manage agreements and we only execute them" is no longer the difference between us. What is still theirs is the breadth around it: extraction, workflow and forms are three products we do not have and are not building.
Anyone can buy it this afternoon
Sign is in early access and there is no card checkout yet, so starting is a conversation with us and onboarding is hands-on. Docusign has no such gate.
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.
Verification without an account, a subscription, or trusting us
A completed package can be checked by anyone who holds it: no login, no payment, permanently, and free. The check is cryptographic: the seal over the completion manifest, an RFC 3161 timestamp obtained from a public authority, and the hash chain over the event ledger. A counterparty verifying a Docusign envelope is asking Docusign. A counterparty verifying ours is checking arithmetic.
The evidence outlives the relationship
Stop paying us and every completed envelope and its evidence stay yours, permanently, and stay verifiable. This is a commitment about what happens after we lose your business, which is the only time it matters, and it is the reason verification is free rather than a paid tier.
Priced per envelope, not per seat
Six people who each send a contract occasionally pay for six seats almost everywhere in this category. Sign has no seat count on pay-as-you-go, the subscription allowance belongs to the organization rather than to a user, and the people who sign are never charged on any tier. The envelope is charged when it is sent rather than when it completes, deliberately: charging on completion would pay us to nag your customer.
The lifecycle costs a subscription, not a negotiation
Agreement calendars, renewal notices and a renewal chain are sold in this market as contract lifecycle management, quoted rather than listed, and landing in the tens of thousands a year. Ours is a tier: envelopes plus the calendar and the manager over live agreements, for a monthly figure a small company can read off a page and pay by card. Not their depth: no term extraction, no clause library. The claim is narrower: a company with two hundred live agreements should not need a procurement cycle to get a renewal reminder.
Formalities arranged at cost, never marked up
Where a jurisdiction wants a stamp, a seal or a notary, the desk arranges it, passes the provider fee through unmarked with a flat handling charge, and shows the number before anything is committed. Arranging your own and filing the reference costs nothing. The incumbent quotes one bundled figure per notarisation, which is easier to buy and makes the margin invisible.
It signs the records you already keep
On your own instance, a quote from Rutba CRM, an offer letter from Rutba People or an engagement letter from Rutba Books goes out for signature and comes back to the record it belongs to. Nothing exports, nothing re-uploads, and the signed result is in your own Drive rather than in a vendor library you rent access to.
And the one that is not a feature
Docusign, 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 | Docusign |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Not covered |
| 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 Docusign, 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 Docusign 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
Completed envelopes stay where they are. Nothing here migrates a historical agreement out of another vendor, and no honest tool does: the evidence for a past signature is theirs and belongs with them.
- 2
Templates are rebuilt rather than imported. Ours are the composer's own.
- 3
The practical move is forward-only: new agreements start here while the old ones stay verifiable where they were signed.
- 4
Check the identity rung you actually rely on before moving. A qualified electronic signature still needs an accredited partner we do not have, and that is a reason to stay.
- 5
Notarisation is arranged here rather than performed. If the volume is high or the turnaround is same-session, a desk booking a third party will not match a notary network inside the product.
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 you need qualified electronic signatures, notarisation performed inside the product at volume, or a counterparty who will not proceed without a name they recognise, stay. None of those are close calls. Look at us when the thing that matters is what the record proves later, when you want the agreement lifecycle without a CLM contract, when you are tired of paying per seat for occasional senders, or when the documents being signed are already Rutba records.
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 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 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
Docusign against the others.
You are comparing Docusign 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.
Docusign vs Adobe Acrobat Sign
Docusign vs Adobe Acrobat Sign
The two incumbents, and a choice that is usually decided by what is already deployed rather than by the signing itself.
Docusign vs Dropbox Sign
Docusign vs Dropbox Sign
The platform against the tool. One of these is trying to manage your agreements; the other is trying to get a document signed and get out of the way.
Docusign vs PandaDoc
PandaDoc vs Docusign
A comparison people make constantly and which is usually the wrong comparison. These two solve different halves of the same sentence.
Docusign vs SignNow
SignNow vs Docusign
The value option against the category leader, and the only question that really matters is what the signature has to survive.
Weighing this against Docusign?
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.