Documenso
Open-source e-signature platform you can self-host or use as a hosted cloud.
Where your files are processed
Reported to upload your files
The vendor states that files are uploaded to their servers. We have not independently tested this. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.
Cloud service: documents are uploaded and stored in Documenso's EU data centres. The self-hosted Community Edition processes everything on your own infrastructure instead.
What it does
Documenso is an open-source e-signature platform that can be self-hosted or used through the vendor's cloud. You upload a PDF, add recipients and fields such as signature, date, name and text, then send it for signing with an audit trail, direct links and optional templates. The self-hosted Community Edition is free under the AGPL, while Business and Enterprise editions are paid licences. Cloud plans start at a free tier of five documents a month.
Best for: Teams that want an auditable signing flow they can run on their own infrastructure, or a lower-cost hosted alternative to DocuSign.
Worth knowing: It signs and tracks documents rather than editing them — no redaction, compression, merging or general editing. The AGPL licence and the paid Business and Enterprise editions matter if you plan commercial self-hosting, and the project has paused external pull requests, so community contributions are limited to issue reports. Self-hosting decides where documents are stored, not what every configured path sends. A signing platform reaches recipients by email link, and storage, verification and webhook integrations are configured rather than implied by the licence, so "on your own servers" describes the deployment and not the whole exchange.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Web · API · Self-hosted
- Website
- documenso.com
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- European Union
- Open source
- Yes
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- HTTP API · Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 60 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish: The vendor’s own site was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist — it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach — but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote. Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded — not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“Documenso aims to be the world's most trusted document-signing tool.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the README's introduction, and it is worth being precise about its grammar because it changes what the claim is. Documenso "aims to be" the world's most trusted document-signing tool — this is a stated ambition, not an assertion of market position, and the surrounding paragraph grounds it in something concrete: the trust "is built by empowering you to self-host Documenso and review how it works under the hood". Read next to the neighbouring claims in this tier it is a useful contrast, because Docusign's page asserts market leadership and PDF Expert's puts a competitor to shame, while this one states a goal and a method.
Standing: Re-read: the text is unchanged, but the page publishes values that move
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- f7e7cc3eac6fc2167942ebb97724949424d3f190ec169bc59c897bc0d563d804
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://github.com/documenso/documenso re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-github-com-documenso-documenso-0a04f539.txt.
-
“Run Documenso in production on your own infrastructure.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered as the page's opening line. A self-hosting claim is the most checkable kind in this index, because it says where the software runs rather than what it does, and Documenso is open source so the claim is not merely a licence position. Worth noting for a reader comparing it with the rest of this index: self-hosting is what puts a tool in a different retention category altogether, since there is no vendor server to hold a document, and the same project offers a hosted service through documenso.com. Recorded as the vendor's description; nothing was deployed and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 25db194d6d79ce406c5362d6f6f478ab2613c632e0f04ca65155359eb778b1ba
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://documenso.com/self-hosted re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-documenso-com-self-hosted-7f970f57.txt.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked — it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Open source PDF tools, and what their licences require — what open source does and does not tell you.