Is a Pixasign signature as legally valid as a DocuSign one?

Validity under UK law does not come from the brand of software. Electronic signatures are valid and enforceable for the vast majority of business documents, and what decides a dispute is the evidence you can produce about who signed, what they signed and when. Pixasign seals each document cryptographically, has the seal time-stamped by DigiCert, and issues an evidence certificate with a hash-chained audit trail, which is a strong answer to all three questions. A few categories of document carry special formality requirements, so for land, wills or statutory declarations take proper advice rather than any supplier’s word for it, ours included.

Will the people I send documents to notice the difference?

Not really. They get an email, they tap a link, they read the document and sign it by drawing or adopting a typed signature on whatever phone they have. No account, no app, no download. The link stays live for fourteen days, and Remind sends a fresh one if someone needs longer.

Are you actually cheaper than DocuSign?

It depends on how many people send and how much. For one sender who sends up to 3 documents a month, the Pixasign Free plan costs nothing. From two senders, Starter at £19 a month inc VAT costs less than two DocuSign Standard seats at £40 a month (billed annually), and a flat fee keeps winning as you hire. Our plans are free for 3 documents a month, then £19 a month for 50 documents, £59 for 200 and £99 for 500, all inc VAT. Work it out against your own month rather than against an example on a vendor’s website, ours included.

What happens to my documents if I stop paying?

Nothing is deleted. Your account moves to the Free plan, so you can still view, download and check everything already signed, and send up to 3 documents a month. Documents you sent earlier in the same month count towards it. Anything already out for signature still completes. The sealed PDFs and certificates you have downloaded are unaffected, because the seal and its timestamp are embedded in the PDF itself.

Pixasign vs DocuSign for UK small businesses

Comparison pages written by the challenger are easy to distrust, and the reader can tell when the incumbent has been drawn unfairly. So: everything below about DocuSign was read on DocuSign’s own pages on 15 September 2026, its UK prices were read again on 19 October 2026 and had not changed, and where their pages do not say, we tell you to ask them rather than guess.

The short version

DocuSign suits firms that want a very broad platform: a large integration catalogue on every plan and workflow tools on its higher plans, as listed on DocuSign’s own plan comparison.

Buy Pixasign if the people who send paperwork outnumber the people you would ever buy a seat for, if you would rather pay monthly at the advertised price, and if what you want is evidence that holds up afterwards rather than workflow automation.

Pixasign is built around one job, done thoroughly: we send a document to an email address, the recipient signs it on a phone or computer, and we seal the result, with a DigiCert timestamp on the seal and an evidence certificate with a hash-chained audit trail alongside.

Where Pixasign is the better fit

DocuSign’s UK plans page (ecom.docusign.com/en-GB/plans-and-pricing/esignature) prices Standard at £20 a month per user and Business Pro at £33 a month per user, both at the annually billed rate, and describes the allowance on both as “Send a total of 100 envelopes per user per year for signature”. Personal is £8 a month, also billed annually, for one user and 5 envelopes a month. Billed monthly, Standard is £34 and Business Pro £54 per user.

So picture a firm with five people who send paperwork: a director, two project managers, an office manager and whoever covers holiday. On Standard that is five seats at £20: £100 a month, billed annually as £1,200, for 500 envelopes a year between them. Pixasign’s Team plan is £59 a month inc VAT, flat, for as many senders as you like, with 200 documents a month, and £59, inc VAT, is what you pay. If 50 documents a month is enough, Starter at £19 inc VAT covers all five. Unlimited users means no charge per user: an account starts with room for 200 active people, and we raise that free on request.

The units differ, and it matters: an envelope can hold several files to several signers as one unit, while we count documents sent per month. Do the arithmetic against your own month rather than ours.

The sixth person is the tell On a per-seat plan, adding one more person who occasionally sends a quote costs you another full subscription for someone who might send four things a year. On a flat plan it costs nothing. If you have ever shared a login to dodge that, you already know which shape you are on, and sharing a login is how audit trails stop naming people.

Side by side

Pixasign and DocuSign compared on pricing, commitment, signing and where each one runs
Compared on	Pixasign	DocuSign
Pricing shape	Flat monthly fee, unlimited senders, priced on documents per month	Per user per month on both business plans, with an envelope allowance
Commitment	Monthly	Per-user headline prices are the annually billed rate
Signer needs an account or app	No. A link in an email, live for fourteen days.	No, as a rule
Where it runs	Hetzner Nuremberg, backups Reykjavík. Card payments handled by Stripe.	One of five regions (US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan), set by where you sign up, per DocuSign’s data residency page

Technical details

The seal is a PAdES document timestamp, the standard set out in ETSI EN 319 142: an RFC 3161 timestamp issued by DigiCert over the whole file, RSA-4096 with SHA-384, with long-term validation (LTV) data embedded in the PDF. The fingerprints on the evidence certificate are SHA-256 hashes.

Who vouches for the time

The seal time comes from DigiCert, not from us Pixasign has each seal time-stamped by DigiCert, an independent timestamp authority, when the document is sealed after the last signature. That distinction is the one that matters in an argument: the time on the sealed document is attested by somebody other than the supplier who sold you the software. The time of each earlier step is recorded by our server on the evidence certificate.

What you are left holding

This is the part we would rather be judged on. Every signed document comes back with an evidence certificate: who signed, the address it went to, their IP and approximate location, the device, the timeline to the second, and digital fingerprints of the file before and after sealing. The events are hash-chained, so each locks in the one before it. The chain’s final value is printed on the evidence certificate every party is sent, so a later change to the record would not match their copy.

The seal and its timestamp are embedded in the PDF itself, and anyone can check a document free at pixasign.co.uk/check, without an account: a customer, an insurer, a solicitor, someone who has never used Pixasign. It tells you whether Pixasign sealed a file and whether it has changed since. Sealed documents you have downloaded keep their seal and timestamp if you stop paying us.

Where each one runs

Pixasign is made by Pixacomms Ltd, a UK company registered in Wales (company no. 15861826), with its team in London and its registered office in Cardiff. The application runs on Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany, and backups sit in Reykjavík, Iceland, both in the EEA. Card payments are handled by Stripe. The detail is on our security page.

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, and that limited data may be replicated outside that region. What applies depends on your account, so ask them rather than assume. DocuSign, Inc. gives its address as 221 Main Street, San Francisco, on its investor site, read 15 September 2026. If your data protection officer asks where the documents physically sit, that is a question for DocuSign, not for us.

Send one and compare the evidence

Free for 3 documents a month, no card. Send a real document, have it signed on a phone, and read the evidence certificate that comes back. Then put it next to whatever your current tool gives you.

Start free UK company. Documents stored in the EEA. Unlimited users on every paid plan.

Questions

Is a Pixasign signature as legally valid as a DocuSign one?: Validity under UK law does not come from the brand of software. Electronic signatures are valid and enforceable for the vast majority of business documents, and what decides a dispute is the evidence you can produce about who signed, what they signed and when. Pixasign seals each document cryptographically, has the seal time-stamped by DigiCert, and issues an evidence certificate with a hash-chained audit trail, which is a strong answer to all three questions. A few categories of document carry special formality requirements, so for land, wills or statutory declarations take proper advice rather than any supplier’s word for it, ours included.
Will the people I send documents to notice the difference?: Not really. They get an email, they tap a link, they read the document and sign it by drawing or adopting a typed signature on whatever phone they have. No account, no app, no download. The link stays live for fourteen days, and Remind sends a fresh one if someone needs longer.
Are you actually cheaper than DocuSign?: It depends on how many people send and how much. For one sender who sends up to 3 documents a month, the Pixasign Free plan costs nothing. From two senders, Starter at £19 a month inc VAT costs less than two DocuSign Standard seats at £40 a month (billed annually), and a flat fee keeps winning as you hire. Our plans are free for 3 documents a month, then £19 a month for 50 documents, £59 for 200 and £99 for 500, all inc VAT. Work it out against your own month rather than against an example on a vendor’s website, ours included.
What happens to my documents if I stop paying?: Nothing is deleted. Your account moves to the Free plan, so you can still view, download and check everything already signed, and send up to 3 documents a month. Documents you sent earlier in the same month count towards it. Anything already out for signature still completes. The sealed PDFs and certificates you have downloaded are unaffected, because the seal and its timestamp are embedded in the PDF itself.

Pixasign vs DocuSign