What is Docusign and Is It Right For You?
See Docusign’s features, use cases & how its pricing model works. Explore 3 alternatives & find out how to get them for the lowest price.
DocuSign’s multi-tiered plans, product combinations, and flexible integrations make the platform an extremely robust solution for contract management. But it’s also difficult to navigate DocuSign’s various solutions and hybrid pricing model.
So you can understand how Docusign works, see this overview of the platform, its key features, most common use cases, and pricing options.
You’ll learn about DocuSign’s four main feature categories and how its plans are organized. You’ll also discover three alternatives to DocuSign.
Plus you’ll find out how to get the lowest price and best terms, avoid hidden costs, and future-proof your contracts.
What is Docusign? An overview
Docusign allows you to sign, send, and manage agreements within a centralized space for all your documentation. It offers a secure, legally binding way to handle paperwork that needs signatures, saving you time on manual tasks.
Because it’s cloud-based, you can access Docusign from anywhere, on any device. This streamlines processes, reduces manual errors, and helps you track important documents more easily. Whether you're managing contracts, sales agreements, or other business documents, Docusign integrates with your tools to simplify workflows.
With features like authentication, encryption, and audit trails, Docusign ensures your documents stay secure and compliant throughout the signing process. It’s particularly useful for businesses managing agreements across teams or locations, with specialized features for industries like real estate.
Also, Docusign includes AI and automated tools for tasks like contract analysis, which helps reduce your workload and provides insights that can improve decision-making. This means you can close deals faster and reduce risk.
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How does Docusign work?
Docusign organizes its offerings into four main categories:
- Products form the foundation of the platform, providing essential tools like eSignatures or contract management.
- Applications build on those products, tailoring the tools for specific use cases, creating more relevant user experiences.
- Capabilities are the technology that powers both the products and applications, ensuring secure, compliant, and scalable processes, such as encryption and APIs.
- Platform services include tools like Docusign Maestro, Docusign Navigator, and Docusign AI to help you automate, analyze, and integrate document workflows.
Altogether, these features of the Docusign ecosystem form a highly robust solution to document generation and management. But, with so much functionality, it’s hard to determine which plan or combination of features you need.
To help you understand your options, see the at-a-glance view of select products, applications, services, and capabilities below.
Docusign products and platform applications
The following Docusign products, capabilities, applications, and services are available across the platform’s four plan types, which we’ll explain next.
Use this feature summary to see which Docusign tools would be most relevant to your department or business.
Selected Docusign products and capabilities:
- Docusign eSignature: Simple remote signing workflows, real-time audit trail, notifications, and reporting
- Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management: Automates contract creation and approval
- Docusign Identify: Verifies the identity of signers using methods like government ID verification and two-factor authentication
- Docusign Document Generation: Automatically generates documents from templates and data, reducing manual creation
- Docusign Web Forms: Integrate with the eSignature process to collect data and speed up signing
Selected Docusign applications and services:
- Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) Core: Centralized platform for managing and optimizing the full lifecycle of agreements
- IAM for Customer Experience: Tailored for managing customer-related agreements, ensuring seamless interactions
- IAM for Sales: Focused on automating and managing sales agreements, helping to close deals faster
- Docusign Maestro: Automates complex agreement workflows, ensuring efficient routing and approval processes
- Docusign Navigator: Helps store, manage, and analyze agreements, ensuring compliance and easy access to documents
- Docusign AI: Transforms static agreement data into actionable insights through AI-driven analysis
Selected Docusign feature categories:
- Streamlined workflows & documents: Includes branded template management, invoicing features, bulk sending, and Salesforce integration
- Trust, security & certifications: Includes digital audit trails, multiple certification compliance, GDPR compliance, authentication types, and automated risk monitoring
- Agreement management: Automates storing, management, analysis, and data retrieval with AI
- Developer tooling: Features API management, SDKs, scalable features for mobile and bulk send with eSignature REST API
- Create agreements: Automates creation of interactive web forms from templates, reminders and notifications, and digital agreements from paper documents
- Built for real estate: Manages standard real estate forms, enables real estate professionals to strike through text and clauses, and features exclusive NAR branding
Docusign pricing and plans
Docusign has four plans, each ranging from basic solutions for individual users to advanced, customizable options for large enterprises.
Price-per-month pricing is applied to individual or lower-tier plans, which offer essential features and a limited number of envelopes.
On the other hand, price-per-user-per-month plans are designed for teams or businesses that require more advanced features, higher envelope allowances, and greater flexibility to scale with additional users.
You can see the plans below, but for more information — including on possible upcoming changes to Docusign’s pricing model — see our Docusign Buyer Guide:
eSignature
eSignature is Docusign’s core electronic signature product for sending, signing, and managing digital agreements. Available in personal, standard, and business pro levels with features scaling up from basic document sending to advanced automation.
eSignature real estate
Tailored specifically for real estate professionals, this plan includes industry-specific features like access to real estate association forms, transaction management workspaces, and REALTOR® branding.
Developer API
For businesses that need to integrate DocuSign into their existing software systems, this plan offers robust API access for custom workflows and automations.
IAM
For managing the full lifecycle of agreements with advanced automation, AI-driven insights, and multi-step workflows, IAM offers multiple automation and AI solutions, with ‘Enhanced Plans’ for sales and customer experience use cases.
Common use cases of Docusign
Here are some of the top use cases for DocuSign, so you can see how it could help you streamline processes, reduce manual paperwork, and ensure secure, legally binding agreements.
Sales contracts
Sales teams use DocuSign to manage proposals, contracts, and quotes efficiently. By integrating with CRM systems like Salesforce, you can automate document workflows and speed up the process of closing deals.
Legal agreements
Legal teams trust DocuSign to handle contracts such as NDAs, settlements, and other binding agreements. The platform’s features, including secure encryption and detailed audit trails, ensure the security and compliance of legal documents.
Human resources
HR departments rely on DocuSign to digitize onboarding tasks, including signing employment contracts and NDAs. This helps streamline the hiring process and allows new employees to complete paperwork securely from anywhere.
Real estate transactions
In the real estate industry, DocuSign is commonly used to expedite signing contracts, purchase agreements, and other legal documents. It enables realtors, buyers, and sellers to finalize deals remotely and operate more efficiently.
Docusign competitors and alternatives
Here’s an overview of three DocuSign competitors you can compare and consider for your team.
Each is a reputable solution for contract lifecycle management (CLM), eSignatures, and document automation, and is available for purchase through Vendr Marketplace.
PandaDoc
For SMBs, PandaDoc offers intuitive document creation, eSignature, and automation tools. It’s known for providing an all-in-one platform with capabilities like proposal generation, contract management, and in-depth analytics, making it a great option for sales teams and customer-facing departments.
For enterprise-level organizations, PandaDoc provides advanced features like CRM integrations, approval workflows, and custom branding. It also offers API access for integration with larger business systems.
Vendr's PandaDoc expertise
- Deals handled: 75
- Unique purchasers: 55
- Average contract value: $13K
- Average savings: 26%
Ironclad
Ironclad is a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform designed for legal and business teams. It simplifies contract drafting, negotiation, and approvals through real-time collaboration, version tracking, and automated workflows.
The platform integrates with CRM and ERP systems, providing enterprise-level visibility and control over contracts for compliance and efficiency. Alongside specialized legal operations tools, Ironclad supports sales, procurement, and IT teams with tailored features and capabilities.
Vendr's Ironclad expertise
- Deals handled: 195
- Unique purchasers: 114
- Average contract value: $70K
- Average savings: 21%
Juro
Juro is a contract automation platform built for SMBs across sales, HR, procurement, finance, and legal teams. It simplifies contract creation, negotiation, and eSignatures with AI capability through a single browser-based interface.
The platform has tailored plans based on your contract volume and integration needs, and offers unlimited users, workflows, and templates. Juro also provides detailed analytics and tracking to help you manage contract bottlenecks, compliance, and turnaround times.
Vendr's Juro expertise
- Deals handled: 19
- Unique purchasers: 13
- Average contract value: $55K
How Vendr helps companies save on Docusign (and other SaaS products)
Vendr combines detailed contract assessments with expert negotiators to secure the lowest price for your software.
By leveraging strategies like longer-term contracts and analyzing factors such as usage needs, overage rates, and required scope, we’ll make sure your deal is optimized and future-proofed in your favor.
With our advanced contract analysis, pricing intelligence, and extensive negotiation experience, you’ll not only have the lowest price but also favorable terms, saving you time and eliminating hidden costs.
