Compare / Dropbox, Inc.
Rutba vs Dropbox Sign
The one developers reach for. Formerly HelloSign, and still the cleanest API in the category — which makes it the closest competitor to the half of our product that is an engine.
Checked 2 September 2026Dropbox Sign — product pages ↗
What Dropbox Sign is
An electronic signature product with a strong API and embedded signing, sold per user with document allowances and a free tier for very low volume. Tightly integrated with Dropbox storage, and deliberately simpler than the platform products above it.
Who it genuinely suits
- Developers embedding a signing step inside their own product
- Small teams who want signing to be one clear thing rather than a platform
- Dropbox customers, where the storage integration is first-party
- Anyone whose volume genuinely fits a free or entry tier
Where they win
What Dropbox 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 API is more mature than ours and better documented
Embedded signing, embedded templates and a stable public API with years of production use behind it. Ours is a core module with a frozen cross-tier contract and a published verify shape — younger, narrower, and not something a third-party developer can sign up for today.
There is a free tier
A handful of documents a month at no cost. Our lowest commitment is per envelope from the first one; verification is free but sending is not.
Simplicity as a deliberate product
It does one job with very little to learn, which is a real advantage over a product whose pitch involves hash chains and RFC 3161. If the requirement is "get this signed", the shortest path is a virtue.
Available standalone, today
Anyone can sign up and send this afternoon. Ours needs an existing Rutba licence until card capture and pooled hosting land.
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.
Evidence a third party can check independently
Dropbox Sign gives a signature certificate and an audit trail — genuinely good, and produced and vouched for by Dropbox. Ours is verifiable against a public timestamp authority and a published seal, by someone who has no relationship with us at all. When the question is adversarial, who is vouching matters more than how detailed the report is.
The identity ladder is per signer and stated on the certificate
Email, phone code, access code, location and signed-in identity, chosen per party, and the certificate of completion never claims more than was actually verified. A document that says "identity verified" when only an email was checked is worse than one that says what it did.
Priced by envelope rather than by seat
Once past a free tier, this category charges per user with a document allowance. Ours charges for the envelope that was sent, and the subscription allowance belongs to the organization. Occasional senders stop being expensive.
It signs your own records, on your own instance
For Rutba customers the documents come from the systems that generated them and the signed result lands in their own Drive — not a signing vendor's library that ends when the subscription does.
And the one that is not a feature
Dropbox, 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 | Dropbox 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 | Extra vendor or licence |
| 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 Dropbox, 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 Dropbox 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
If you embed signing in your own product today, wait: our engine is licensed to Rutba organizations and there is no third-party API programme yet.
- 2
Templates are rebuilt, not imported.
- 3
Completed documents stay verifiable with Dropbox and should stay 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
For an embedded signing step in somebody else's product, this is the better tool today and it is not close. Consider us when the signing is your own business's agreements, when the evidence has to answer to a third party, or when the documents already live in Rutba.
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
Coming soonElectronic 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 $0.75 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 governed by your organization roles, not stray links
- Org-wide storage quotas you control
Includes: Drive · Drive API
From $5 per user / month
Head to head
Dropbox Sign against the others.
You are comparing Dropbox 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 Dropbox 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.