Which PDF editor lets you sign, and get your clients to sign?

Foxit is the only editor here where sending for signature lives inside the app with a quota spelled out. PDF Editor+ includes Foxit eSign with 150 envelopes per user per year. An envelope is one send: one or more documents going to one or more signers, with tracking and reminders. You prep the PDF in the editor, drop in signature fields, and send without switching tools.

Pricing is clear: $159.99 a year for PDF Editor+. Plain PDF Editor, from $10.99 a month, and the PDF Editor 14 lifetime license at $209.99 only let you fill and sign yourself. No cloud, no sending. Buy the lifetime license thinking you'll get clients to sign, and you've bought the wrong product.

The trap nobody mentions: when you e-sign a PDF yourself through the editor's eSign feature, Foxit burns an envelope. Sign your own documents with Fill & Sign instead, which doesn't count, and save the 150 for real sends. One university IT desk reminds its staff that each user is capped at 150 envelopes a year.

On compliance, Foxit says eSign meets the ESIGN Act and UETA, which is what US contracts need for standard e-signatures. Past 150 sends a year, Foxit points you to eSign Business, sold separately on a quote.

Acrobat covers all three levels. With the free Reader, you fill in and sign a PDF you received. Standard lets you request signatures and track responses. Pro adds bulk send, reusable signature templates and your branding (logo, URL) on requests. Studio carries the same signing features as Pro.

What's missing is the quota. Adobe's pricing pages don't show how many sends you get, and answers on Adobe's own forum contradict each other. An Australian freelancer sending about five requests a month needed around a hundred clients to re-sign within a week: he couldn't find his limit, and the reply pointed to a page with no number. Before a big send, ask support in writing.

Per-send caps are real, though. On PDF Pack, a transaction takes 10 signers at most, and Adobe's answer is to upgrade to Pro. Other forum users hit a wall at 100 or 200 pages per document, and several say they moved to DocuSign over it. If you send thick contracts, split them or check the cap first.

One more thing before you subscribe: the annual plan billed monthly is costly to leave early. After 14 days, canceling it costs half of what's left on the year. For a one-off project, the month-to-month plan is the safer bet.

iLovePDF started as an online toolbox (merge, compress, convert), but its signing goes further than most free tools. On the free plan you sign your own documents with no limit and can send a few requests to others. The exact number isn't published: the page just says "limited," with no audit trail or reminders.

Premium flips that for $5 a month billed yearly, or $9 month to month. Standard signature requests become unlimited, and you get the audit trail, automatic reminders, templates and multi-signer sends. Premium covers 1 to 25 users. For a freelancer sending ten quotes a month, it's by far the lowest cost per send here.

Know this before you rely on it: Premium includes 5 advanced electronic signatures (AES, the EU's identity-linked level). Five total, not five a month. Keep them for clients in Europe who ask for that level, and send everything else as standard requests. For AES at volume, iLovePDF points to its Business plan, on a quote. Don't mix it up with iLoveSign, a related brand sold separately with its own quotas.

The limit is editing. iLovePDF edits PDF text less precisely than Foxit or Acrobat, and everything runs through the vendor's servers.

Wondershare's PDFelement is a full editor at a reasonable price: $79.99 a year on Windows, $89.99 cross-platform, with a perpetual license from $51.99. For your own signature it does the job: unlimited image signatures and certificate-based signatures with no cap, which is rare at this price.

Sending to others is another story. The store lists Request eSign once during the 14-day trial and 3 times on the paid plans we read. Three sends is enough to try the feature, not to run a business on it. Some store columns are incomplete, so ask support for your plan's exact quota before paying.

Our advice: use PDFelement to edit and sign yourself, and pair it with a dedicated e-signature tool if clients need to sign. Or go straight to Foxit PDF Editor+, which includes 150 sends for $70 to $80 more a year.

Sejda is a clean, simple editor on the web and desktop, and it scores higher than PDFelement in our PDF editor ranking. On signing, though, it went backward: requests to other signers were discontinued, leaving only Fill & Sign for your own signature.

Sejda says plainly that its tool doesn't guarantee the signature is legally binding. That's honest, and it's the right way to see it: you're placing an image of your signature on a page, nothing more.

Its real strength is the Web Week Pass: $5 for 7 days, no auto-renewal. Got a stack of forms to fill and sign this week? Pay once and nothing keeps billing you. The free tier, capped at 3 tasks an hour, is often enough.

Plenty of roundups still list Sejda as a "PDF editor with e-signature." If you need someone else to sign, it isn't anymore.

PDF24 doesn't get anyone but you to sign, and it doesn't pretend to. For your own signature, though, it's the best free option here. The online tool works with no sign-up and no restrictions; ads pay for it.

It goes past a pasted image. You can sign with a digital certificate, either one PDF24 generates or your own .p12 or .pfx file, and add a timestamp from a time-stamping authority. That's rare in a free tool.

Heads-up: the PDF24 certificate is self-signed, so your recipient's reader will flag the signature as "not verified." Nothing's wrong, but it can confuse a client. If you have a certificate from a trusted provider, load that one instead.

The line is clear: no sending, no tracking, no audit trail. To collect a signature, pick one of the top three tools.