Almost nobody goes looking for a DocuSign alternative because DocuSign stopped working. It works. It is the most recognised name in the category by a distance, it has an enormous feature set, and it is the envelope your customer has probably seen before. That familiarity is worth real money.
People go looking because of the shape of the bill.
A small UK firm rarely has one person who sends paperwork. It has an office manager who sends quotes, a director who signs off contracts and whoever covers on Friday. Per-seat pricing asks you to pay for all three, or to share one login, and sharing a login quietly destroys the audit trail you bought the tool for.
We sell one of the alternatives listed, so every figure here for another vendor is quoted from that vendor’s own pricing page and dated.
What you are actually being billed against
Nearly every e-signature product prices on two axes at once, and the difference between them is which axis they lean on.
- Seats. How many people can send a document out for signature. The people who receive and sign are free everywhere worth considering. It is the sender who costs money.
- Volume. How many documents or envelopes you may send inside some period. Watch the period closely: per month and per year are very different animals dressed the same way.
Lean on seats and five occasional senders pay five times over. Lean on volume and they pay once, but a busy team hits a ceiling. Neither is dishonest; most small firms are just quietly on the wrong one.
How DocuSign charges, read from its own page
Taken from DocuSign’s UK plans page on 15 September 2026, and the prices were the same when we read it again on 19 October 2026. Prices move, so check it yourself before you decide anything:
- Personal: £8 a month (£96 billed annually), one user, described as “Send 5 envelopes for signature each month”.
- Standard: £20 a month per user (£240 billed annually), up to 50 users, described as “Send a total of 100 envelopes per user per year for signature”.
- Business Pro: £33 a month per user (£396 billed annually), up to 50 users, with the same envelope wording.
- Enhanced: custom pricing, aimed at 50+ users.
Two details are worth pulling out. The per-user figures are the annually billed rate, so the headline assumes a year’s commitment. And the envelope allowance on both business plans is quoted per year, not per month. A hundred envelopes a year is about two a week.
The same page lists what the higher tiers add: bulk sending and payment collection on Business Pro, and document generation from within Salesforce on the Enhanced plans. If you need those, the per-seat bill is the price of the thing you need.
The alternatives, and the shape of each bill
Every row below was read on the vendor’s own pricing page on the date shown. We describe the model rather than reciting every number, because models change far more slowly than prices.
| Provider | How the bill is calculated | What we checked |
|---|---|---|
| DocuSign | Per user per month on both business plans, with the envelope allowance quoted per user per year. | UK plans and pricing page, 19 Oct 2026 |
| Adobe Acrobat | Per licence, advertised “per license excl. VAT” on Adobe Acrobat’s own pricing page, so add 20% VAT to the price shown. | Adobe Acrobat UK business plans page, 19 Oct 2026 |
| Zoho Sign | Per user per month (headline rate billed annually), with envelope caps per user on lower tiers and unlimited envelopes higher up. | Zoho Sign pricing page, 15 Sep 2026 |
| Legalesign | Cambridge-based. Flat monthly single-user plans (Solo Basic £10, Solo Pro £25), a team plan at £15 per user per month for 2 to 5 users, plus pay as you go at £1.50 a document. Listed “ex VAT”. | Legalesign pricing page, 19 Oct 2026 |
| PandaDoc | Per seat per month, billed annually and priced in US dollars: $19 on Starter, $49 on Business, with a free plan of 5 documents a month. | PandaDoc pricing page, 19 Oct 2026 |
| Pixasign | Free for 1 user and 3 documents a month, then a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, priced on documents sent per month. | Our own pricing, which we can obviously vouch for |
Signable, Dropbox Sign and Pixasign are priced in the next section, against a worked example. Every figure on this page is read from the vendor’s own pricing page on a stated date, because a confidently wrong claim about a competitor is worse than no claim.
One caveat across the whole table: the units are not identical. An envelope can hold several documents going to several signers. Check what each vendor counts before putting two numbers side by side.
Three senders and 20 documents a month, priced
Answer engines and buyers both want a number, so here is one worked example, on each vendor’s entry plan that covers it: three people who send, 20 documents a month, 240 a year. Every price was read on the vendor’s own page on 19 October 2026; the Dropbox Sign row was re-read in pounds, from the UK, on 20 October 2026. Where a price is published before VAT, the “with VAT” figure is our arithmetic at 20%.
| Plan | Price as published | Three senders, 20 a month | Source, 19 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DocuSign Standard | £20 per user a month, billed annually. No VAT basis stated on the page | £60 a month, £720 a year up front. 300 envelopes a year between the three | DocuSign UK plans |
| Adobe Acrobat Standard for teams | £14.16 per licence a month, excl. VAT, annual plan billed monthly | £42.48 a month, £50.98 with VAT. No limit on signature requests stated | Adobe UK business plans |
| Legalesign Team (2 to 5 users) | £15 per user a month, ex VAT | £45 a month, £54 with VAT. Fair use 100 documents per user a month | Legalesign pricing |
| Signable Essentials | £40 + VAT a month, billed annually, unlimited users | £40 a month, £48 with VAT, £576 a year up front. 300 envelopes a year | Signable plans |
| Dropbox Sign Standard | £20 per user a month billed yearly, or £24 billed monthly, as shown to a UK visitor. No VAT statement on the page | £60 a month billed yearly (£720 a year), or £72 billed monthly | Dropbox Sign pricing |
| PandaDoc Starter | $19 per seat a month, billed annually. “Prices exclude any applicable taxes” | $57 a month, billed annually | PandaDoc pricing |
| Pixasign Starter | £19 a month inc VAT, flat, unlimited users, billed monthly | £19 a month inc VAT. 50 documents a month | Our pricing |
Read the table with the caveat above in mind: an envelope is not always one document, and 300 a year is an annual pool, not 25 a month. Move the example and the order changes: one sender with a handful of documents a month, or a team sending 400, gives a different table. We have put no figures against signNow or Zoho Sign: we could not read a UK price on either vendor’s own page, and we do not print a competitor figure we have not read there.
Where per-seat pricing actually bites
Three patterns come up over and over, and none is about the headline price.
You share a login. The obvious workaround, and the expensive one. Every certificate then records an account rather than a person, so when someone asks who sent that contract the answer is “one of four of us”. You paid for evidence and threw away the useful part.
Someone waits. Under-provision to save money, the seat holder goes on holiday, and a quote sits unsent for a week. That cost is on no pricing page.
Growth is taxed early. Take on two people and a per-seat plan bills you for two more seats immediately, long before they generate the work that pays for them.
What Pixasign does, and how it compares
We are one of the alternatives, so here is the plain version.
Pixasign is free for 1 user and 3 documents a month, then a flat monthly price with unlimited users: £19 a month for 50 documents, £59 for 200, £99 for 500, all inc VAT. The price you see is the price you pay. Everyone gets their own login, which is what keeps the audit trail naming a person. Signers need no account and no app. They tap a link in an email, which stays live for fourteen days.
Pixasign seals each signed PDF with an independent timestamp from DigiCert that covers the whole file, a PAdES document timestamp under ETSI EN 319 142. DigiCert is an independent timestamp authority, so the seal time does not come from us. The time of each earlier step is recorded by our server. Alongside the PDF comes an evidence certificate: a hash-chained timeline, SHA-256 fingerprints before and after sealing, and the signer’s IP, approximate location and device. Anyone can check a file at our free public checker with no account: it tells you whether Pixasign sealed a file and whether it has changed since.
And what that means in practice:
| If you need | Pixasign | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited senders on one flat bill | Yes, on every paid plan | The whole reason this page exists |
| An independent timestamp on each seal | Yes. RFC 3161, issued by DigiCert | Included on all plans, not an upgrade |
Where it runs, and why a UK buyer might care
Pixasign is built in London by Pixacomms Ltd, registered in Wales, company no. 15861826, with its registered office in Cardiff. The application runs on Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany, and that is where your documents and their evidence are stored, with backups in Reykjavík, Iceland. Card payments are handled by Stripe. The detail is on our security page.
For plenty of buyers that is irrelevant. For others (public sector, healthcare, anyone with a data protection officer who asks where things physically sit), it comes up early and is awkward to answer vaguely. DocuSign’s data residency page (updated 14 April 2026) says it stores agreement data in one of five regions (the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan), provisioned closest to where you sign up. What applies depends on your account, so ask rather than assume. It is a question you have to put to them, not to us.
Price it against your own month
Free for 3 documents a month, no card. Send a few real documents, then compare the price for everyone who sends paperwork against what you are paying per seat today.
Start free UK company. Documents stored in the EEA.Questions
- Is a cheaper e-signature tool less legally valid?
- Price is not what makes an electronic signature stand up. Electronic signatures are valid and enforceable for the vast majority of business documents under UK law, and what decides a dispute is the evidence you can produce about who signed, what they signed and when. That is a question about the audit trail and the sealing, not the monthly fee. For land, wills or statutory declarations, take proper advice rather than a supplier’s word for it, ours included.
- What counts as a document or an envelope?
- It varies by vendor, and this is where comparisons quietly go wrong. An envelope can typically hold several files going to several signers as one unit, so one envelope is not always one piece of paperwork. Pixasign counts documents sent per month. Check what each vendor counts, and whether the allowance resets monthly or annually.
- Can I take my signed documents with me if I leave a provider?
- Yes. Every sealed PDF downloads with its seal and DigiCert timestamp embedded in the file itself, and anyone can check it free at pixasign.co.uk/check. Stop paying us and your account moves to the Free plan rather than being deleted.
- Do the people signing have to pay or create an account?
- Not with Pixasign, and not with the mainstream alternatives either as a rule. The charge falls on the sender. With us a signer taps a link in an email, signs on whatever phone they have, and never creates an account or installs anything. The link stays live for fourteen days.
- We only send a handful of documents a year. Is switching worth it?
- It can cost nothing. If one person sends a handful of documents a year, the Pixasign Free plan covers it: 3 documents a month, no card. The switch pays most when several people need to send, or when you need evidence strong enough to hand to an insurer or a solicitor.