The Switching Trend of 2026
Something shifted in 2026. Australian businesses — from boutique law firms to growing construction companies — started asking a simple question: do we actually need all of this?
PandaDoc is a capable platform. It handles proposals, quotes, contracts, and e-signatures all under one roof. For sales-driven organisations that build custom proposals and need CRM integrations, it can be a great fit. But for the many businesses that just need to send a document and get it signed, PandaDoc's breadth of features has become a burden rather than a benefit.
The result is a wave of businesses looking for something simpler — a tool that does one thing well, costs less, and keeps their data where it belongs.
Document Automation Overkill
PandaDoc bundles e-signatures together with proposal creation, quote generation, contract lifecycle management, and payment collection. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and a dozen other CRMs. For a business that lives and breathes sales pipeline automation, these features are valuable.
But most businesses don't need any of that. A property manager sending a lease renewal, a HR team onboarding a new employee, a trades business getting a safety form signed on site — these are straightforward document signing tasks. They don't need a proposal builder. They don't need quote templates with pricing tables. They don't need a CRM integration.
The reality is that many PandaDoc users touch perhaps 10% of the platform's features but pay for 100% of them. The interface feels cluttered with options they'll never click. Onboarding new team members takes longer than it should because there's so much to navigate around. What should be a two-minute task — upload a PDF, place signature fields, send it off — becomes a journey through menus and workflows designed for a use case that isn't theirs.
AirSign takes the opposite approach. It's built for document signing and nothing else. Upload your document, drag signature and input fields where you need them, send it to your signers. No proposals, no quotes, no CRM dashboards — just fast, reliable e-signatures.
The Data Sovereignty Question
This is the issue that's been simmering for years and has finally reached a boiling point in 2026. Australian businesses are increasingly aware of — and concerned about — where their sensitive documents are stored.
PandaDoc stores data on US-based servers. For many Australian businesses, that means their employment contracts, client agreements, financial documents, and other sensitive paperwork is sitting in data centres on the other side of the world, subject to foreign jurisdiction.
With growing regulatory focus on data sovereignty across Australian federal and state governments, and clients increasingly asking where their data lives, this is no longer a theoretical concern. It's a practical one that affects procurement decisions, compliance obligations, and client trust.
AirSign stores everything on Australian servers. Every document, every signature, every audit trail — it all stays in Australia. For businesses that need to demonstrate data sovereignty to their clients, regulators, or internal compliance teams, this is a straightforward answer to a question that PandaDoc can't easily address.
Pricing That Makes Sense
Let's talk numbers. PandaDoc's Business plan — the tier most teams need to get meaningful functionality — starts at US$49 per user per month. For a five-person team, that's US$245 per month. Per year, that's nearly US$3,000 for features that most of those team members will never touch.
The Essentials plan is cheaper at US$19 per user per month, but it comes with significant limitations. And regardless of which plan you choose, you're paying per user — so costs scale linearly as your team grows.
AirSign's pricing works differently. The Starter plan begins at just $5 for 10 documents, with affordable additions for extra team members. You're paying for what you use — document signing — without subsidising a proposal builder and CRM integration layer you never asked for.
For businesses that have been absorbing PandaDoc's monthly fees out of habit, running the numbers on a focused e-signature tool is often an eye-opening exercise.
Want to see exactly how AirSign and PandaDoc stack up across features, pricing, and data storage? See our detailed AirSign vs PandaDoc comparison →
The Right Tool for the Job
PandaDoc isn't a bad product. For businesses that genuinely need end-to-end document automation with proposals, quotes, and deep CRM integration, it serves a purpose. But for the majority of Australian businesses whose document needs begin and end with getting things signed, it's the wrong tool for the job — too complex, too expensive, and too far from home.
The trend in 2026 is clear: Australian businesses want simplicity, local data storage, and pricing that reflects what they actually use. AirSign delivers exactly that.