# BoldSign vs airSlate SignNow

> BoldSign scores 70.3 (BB) to airSlate SignNow's 66.3 (B) for e-signatures. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-signnow
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-signnow.md (~3,700 tokens)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (the key docs and every listing in one file, at most 16 MB, about 4 million tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- DNS: dig +short TXT <slug>.grade.anchorterminal.com (the grade as a DNS TXT record, for a sandbox with no HTTP where names still resolve; also top., best.<category>. and <a>.vs.<b>. under the zone, and the same under grade.letme.dev)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-11-04

BoldSign scores 70.3 (BB) on agent readiness against airSlate SignNow's 66.3 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. airSlate SignNow leads on reliability. Both do e-signatures.

- BoldSign: grade BB, 70.3/100, rank #190 of 1349. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/boldsign.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/boldsign.json
- airSlate SignNow: grade B, 66.3/100, rank #340 of 1349. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/signnow.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/signnow.json
- Best contract, proposal and e-signature APIs for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/e-signatures/index.md
- All 45 e-signatures comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/e-signatures/index.md

## Which one, for what

### BoldSign (BB)

Good for: A product team embedding signing, requesting and templates at a per-envelope price with regional hosting in the US, EU, Canada or Australia, and an agent that sends from templates and tracks status through the hosted MCP server.

Ahead on:
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 35
- Maintenance & community, 78 against 57

Also in its favour:
- Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
- No incidents deducted, where airSlate SignNow loses 3 points for them

Watch for: API keys carry every scope and the docs say that is not customisable; only OAuth apps get narrower scopes, and there is no Documents.Read scope

### airSlate SignNow (B)

Good for: An agent that sends agreements from templates, embeds signing in another product or tracks invites, and teams that want per-invite pricing with a free test mode.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 93 against 84

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine

Watch for: API keys don't expire and work for all API requests. Narrower access needs an OAuth token requested with a URL-pattern scope


## Why the edge

### Maintenance & community: BoldSign +21

- BoldSign (78): Read as a closed service. The API changelog's newest entry is 16 October 2026, and the PHP SDK repository was pushed the same day, Java and Python on 13 October (30). Changelog entries on 13 August, 19 August, 7 September, 23 September, 8 October and 16 October 2026 (20). Support site, knowledge base and support@boldsign.com, with a public changelog. GitHub issues on the SDK repositories were not read (8 of 15). Five official SDKs, Node at 3.3.4 since August 2026. The hosted MCP server is not in the official MCP registry (15). The Node SDK clone shows no CI workflow and the deprecated MCP package stopped at 0.0.5 (5 of 10). 30 + 20 + 8 + 15 + 5 = 78.
- airSlate SignNow (57): The API changelog's newest entry is still September 2026, dated by month only, and the PHP SDK v3.5.4 (3 September 2026, a code change) is 59 days old, so both sit in the 90-day band (20). In the 90 days to 1 November the changelog has entries for August and September, and v3.5.4 counts half as an SDK release, which falls short of three, so half the line (10). Closed service with a monthly changelog and API support at api@signnow.com. The MCP repository that the docs name for issue reports was archived when checked on 7 October and has no commit after 27 July (8). SDKs for five languages, with PHP in September 2026, Python in April and Node in March per the 7 October check. The official MCP registry still lists io.github.signnow/sn-mcp-server at 0.3.1 while the newest tag is v3.1.0 (13). The MCP repository has CI with ruff, mypy and pytest and 60 test files, and it was archived when checked on 7 October (6).

### Reliability: airSlate SignNow +9

- BoldSign (84): Read with the hosted lines and scored on the REST API v1, the surface the SDKs and the hosted MCP server call. status.boldsign.com on Atlassian Statuspage has Web App and API components for Global, Europe, Canada and Australia plus Docs, with 90-day uptime and an incident history (20). The history feed, read on 3 November 2026, lists four one-hour scheduled maintenances between 19 and 27 September and no incident after a 20-minute partial disruption on 21 July 2026, so the 90 days from 5 August are clean (30). Rate limits are published per account, 2,000 requests an hour live and 50 an hour in the sandbox (15). The rate-limit page says 429 is returned with messages and usage is tracked in response headers, and the guide recommends webhooks over polling. No Retry-After is documented and there are no idempotency keys (6 of 15). No SLA document was found. security.txt advertises a 99.999 per cent uptime SLA, the terms disclaim uninterrupted service and refer to a support SLA available on request (3 of 10). v1 is the stable version with beta endpoints under v1-beta (10). 20 + 30 + 15 + 6 + 3 + 10 = 84.
- airSlate SignNow (93): Graded as a hosted API. Statuspage at status.signnow.com with six components including API (20). The history feed shows one incident in the 90 days to 1 November, a minor one on 3 September 2026 that made the SignNow University site unavailable for eight minutes, and none on the API component. The 17 October maintenance window of up to 15 minutes was announced on 2 October (30). Limits are published with numbers, 500 requests an hour in Development and 1,000 in Live (15). 429 is documented with X-RateLimit-Limit, Remaining and Reset headers and advice to back off exponentially. No Retry-After header and no idempotency key were found, and sending an invite is a charged write (8). The SLA commits to commercially reasonable efforts for 99.9 per cent monthly uptime with credits of 10 or 30 per cent (10). The REST API is generally available (10).

### Payments & pricing: BoldSign +5

- BoldSign (40): Read with the hosted rubric. No x402, MPP or L402 (0). The Enterprise API plan is public at $30 a month with 40 envelopes and $0.75 per additional envelope, and add-ons are priced per unit (20). The free sandbox gives full API access with no credit card, and the 30-day trial also needs no card per the pricing page (20). A person signs up in a browser and mints the key or registers the OAuth app in the web app (0). 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.
- airSlate SignNow (35): No x402, MPP or L402 found (0). The developers page states per-invite prices, from $2 at 500 invites to $1.20 at 5,000. The full plan table is a JavaScript page we couldn't read, so we scored between plan-only and per-unit (15). Development mode is free with up to 500 invites, and the help centre says the free trial needs no credit card (20). A person has to register in a browser and verify an email address before the first key exists (0).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | BoldSign | airSlate SignNow | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 84 | 93 | airSlate SignNow +9 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 81 | BoldSign +4 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 62 | 66 | airSlate SignNow +4 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 63 | 62 | BoldSign +1 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 35 | BoldSign +5 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 78 | 57 | BoldSign +21 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 77 | 75 | BoldSign +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **70.3 · BB** | **66.3 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | BoldSign | airSlate SignNow |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Syncfusion, Inc. | airSlate, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.boldsign.com/v1` | `https://api.signnow.com` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for e-signatures | $0.25 per transaction | not published |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under the BoldSign Terms of Use. The five official SDKs and the deprecated local MCP package on GitHub are MIT | Proprietary service under the SignNow Terms of Service. The MCP server and the SDKs on GitHub are MIT |
| Tools exposed | 14 | 21 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.signnow/sn-mcp-server` |
| Last release | 2026-10-16 | 2026-09-03 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-02-01 | 2023-03-02 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-07-01 | 2026-08-12 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | yes |
| Popularity | 1 stars | 8 stars, 7.7k npm/wk, 5.3k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (4) |

## How the scores have moved

### BoldSign

No score change since it was listed.

### airSlate SignNow

- -2.3 on 1 November 2026: correction, time
- +0.1 on 27 October 2026: checklist

## Verdicts

**BoldSign.** A public OpenAPI file, llms.txt, 20 OAuth scopes, published rate limits, a free sandbox and a clean 90-day status history. API keys carry every scope, there are no idempotency keys, the 2,000-an-hour account limit is low for bulk work, and the hosted MCP server's 14 tools include sending and revoking with no confirmation step of their own.

**airSlate SignNow.** The REST API has a public OpenAPI 3.0 spec with 354 operations, Markdown docs, a free Development mode with 500 invites and a hosted MCP server with OAuth. API keys don't expire and carry full account access, no idempotency keys were found, and the MCP server's GitHub repository was archived when checked on 7 October 2026.

## Before you call either

### BoldSign

1. Send `X-API-KEY: $BOLDSIGN_API_KEY` to the regional base URL (api.boldsign.com, api-eu, api-ca or api-au); a key from one region fails on another, and the MCP endpoint must match too
2. Build against a Sandbox key first. Sandbox documents are watermarked and deleted after 14 days, and the sandbox allows only 50 requests an hour
3. Stay under 2,000 requests an hour per account in production and use webhooks instead of polling `document/properties`; on a 429 wait for the window to reset
4. Don't retry a timed-out `document/send` blindly. There is no idempotency key, so list documents by title or search before sending again
5. Verify `X-BoldSign-Signature` (HMAC-SHA256 with the endpoint secret) on every webhook before acting on its payload
6. On the MCP server, start with `list_templates` and `get_document_properties`, and confirm with the person before `send_document_from_template`, `send_reminder_for_document_sign` or `revoke_document`

### airSlate SignNow

1. Call https://api.signnow.com with `Authorization: Bearer <API key or access token>`. Development and Live share this host, and Development documents carry a watermark
2. Request OAuth tokens with a narrow `scope` such as `document/* GET/user`. The default `*` grants every API action
3. Read `X-RateLimit-Remaining` and `X-RateLimit-Reset` on each response. The limit is 500 requests an hour in Development and 1,000 in Live, and 429 has no Retry-After
4. Check invite status before resending. No idempotency key exists, and a repeated invite call counts as another charged invite
5. Set `secret_key` when creating an event subscription and verify `X-SignNow-Signature` (HMAC SHA-256 of the body) on every callback

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, BoldSign or airSlate SignNow?

BoldSign scores 70.3 (BB) on agent readiness against airSlate SignNow's 66.3 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. airSlate SignNow leads on reliability.

### Do BoldSign and airSlate SignNow need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call BoldSign and airSlate SignNow without installing anything?

Yes. BoldSign has a hosted endpoint at https://api.boldsign.com/v1 and airSlate SignNow at https://api.signnow.com.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-signnow.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-signnow.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "boldsign", "b": "signnow"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare boldsign signnow`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/boldsign.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/signnow.json

## Other comparisons with BoldSign or airSlate SignNow

- [Adobe Acrobat Sign vs BoldSign](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/adobe-acrobat-sign-vs-boldsign.md)
- [Adobe Acrobat Sign vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/adobe-acrobat-sign-vs-signnow.md)
- [BoldSign vs Documenso](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-documenso.md)
- [BoldSign vs DocuSeal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-docuseal.md)
- [BoldSign vs Docusign](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-docusign.md)
- [BoldSign vs Dropbox Sign](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-dropbox-sign.md)
- [BoldSign vs PandaDoc](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-pandadoc.md)
- [BoldSign vs SignWell](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-signwell.md)
- [BoldSign vs Youtrust](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/boldsign-vs-youtrust.md)
- [Documenso vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/documenso-vs-signnow.md)
- [DocuSeal vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/docuseal-vs-signnow.md)
- [Docusign vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/docusign-vs-signnow.md)
- [Dropbox Sign vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dropbox-sign-vs-signnow.md)
- [PandaDoc vs airSlate SignNow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pandadoc-vs-signnow.md)
- [airSlate SignNow vs SignWell](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/signnow-vs-signwell.md)
- [airSlate SignNow vs Youtrust](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/signnow-vs-youtrust.md)

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Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp