An electronic signature is a legal category: any electronic mark or process a person adopts, meaning to sign. A digital signature is a cryptographic technique: a fingerprint of a file, signed with a private key, which shows whether the file has changed since. So electronic signature vs digital signature is not a contest between two products. One describes what the person did; the other describes what software did to the file afterwards. Many signing systems use both, one on top of the other.
The two phrases get used loosely, and "digital" sounds like the stronger of the two. The difference between an e-signature and a digital signature matters because they answer different questions, and a record needs both answers.
What "electronic signature" means in law
In the United States, the ESIGN Act defines an electronic signature as "an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record." UETA, the model law almost every state has adopted in some form, uses nearly the same words.
Read what that definition leaves out. It names no technology. A typed name can count. So can a name drawn with a finger, a click on a button labelled sign, or a recorded "yes". What makes any of them a signature is the last clause: the intent to sign. The drafters of UETA said as much in their own comments. A digital signature made with public key cryptography would qualify, and so would a name typed at the bottom of an email, "so long as in each case the signer executed or adopted the symbol with the intent to sign."
What a "digital signature" is
A digital signature is mathematics applied to a file. Software computes a hash of the document — a short fingerprint that changes completely if a single byte changes — and signs it with a private key. Anybody holding the matching public key can check the result. If the file has been altered since, the check fails.
That shows two things: these exact bytes, and this particular key. It does not say whose key it is. That is the job of a certificate: a small file, itself digitally signed by a certification authority, that binds a public key to a named owner. PDF readers ship with lists of authorities they trust, and when a document is signed under a certificate that chains back to one of them, the reader names the signer without being told anything else. This is what people mean by a certificate-based signature.
Notice what is missing from that account: anybody's intent. A key can sign a file because a person meant to agree to it, or because a server was set up to seal every file that passes through it. The UETA drafters made the same point from the other side: a private key can be used "solely as an access device with no intention to sign". A digital signature is a fact about a file. An electronic signature is a fact about a person.
Is a digital signature more legal?
Not in American law, and deliberately so. ESIGN and UETA do not rank methods. Both say a signature may not be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic, and ESIGN goes further: a state that writes its own alternative rules may not use them to "require, or accord greater legal status or effect to" a specific technology. The UETA drafters wrote in their prefatory note that it is not a digital signature statute at all. Whether a particular signing counts turns on what happened — intent, consent, attribution, the record kept — which is the ground covered in what the ESIGN Act and UETA actually require.
The European Union took a different route. Its eIDAS regulation recognises electronic signatures in general and then defines two stricter tiers. An advanced electronic signature must be uniquely linked to the signatory, capable of identifying them, made with signing data under their sole control, and linked to the document so that any later change is detectable, which in practice usually means certificate-based signing. A qualified signature adds a qualified signing device and a qualified certificate, and has "the equivalent legal effect of a handwritten signature". Even there, an ordinary electronic signature is not denied legal effect, or admissibility as evidence, merely for not being qualified.
Whether eIDAS reaches a transaction, and which tier it needs, is a question for a lawyer who knows that regime.
Where a certificate matters, and where it does not
A certificate earns its keep when a machine or a stranger checks the file without asking anybody. Open a signed PDF and the reader's signature panel does exactly that: it checks the fingerprint, then looks up who issued the certificate. If the certificate chains to an authority on the reader's trust list, it names the signer. If it does not, the reader can still tell whether the file has changed, but it reports the signer's identity as unverified. The same logic applies to a portal that validates uploads automatically, or a document that has to be checked in fifteen years by somebody who has never heard of you.
A certificate does very little for the questions a dispute usually turns on, and this is where the electronic signature vs digital signature distinction has practical weight. A certificate cannot say whether the person read the document, whether they agreed to sign electronically first, or who was holding the phone. It says a key signed some bytes. The rest has to come from the record around the signing.
Two other pieces go into this properly: AATL and non-AATL signing, on what the trust list in Adobe's reader is and is not, and when you do not need a certificate, on the agreements for which none of it applies.
Electronic signature vs digital signature: not rivals
The usual arrangement uses both. The person signs electronically — consents, reads, types their name, presses the button — and that act is the electronic signature the law cares about. Then the system applies a digital signature over the finished file as a seal, so that anybody holding a copy later can tell whether it is still the file that was signed.
Either layer alone leaves a gap: a record anybody could quietly edit, or a perfectly sealed file with no account of how the signature got onto it. The useful question about any system is how it does each layer.
How SignSealer does it
The signing itself is an electronic signature, recorded step by step: consent to sign electronically as its own event, then the signature, with the time, network address and browser at every step and a hash of the text as it stood. Those events are append-only, and the audit trail behind them is chained, each row's hash covering the one before, so removing or altering one breaks everything after it. Our page on evidence and the audit trail sets out what is kept.
The finished PDF is then sealed with a digital signature under a certificate SignSealer issues itself. No outside authority vouches for it, so a PDF reader will catch a changed byte and report the signer's identity as unverified, and the last page of the file says exactly that, and why. What stands in for the trust list is a code printed on the document: anybody can check it at signsealer.com/verify, with no account, and see whether the certificate still matches the record behind it. Add the file's SHA-256 and the page says whether it is the sealed copy that was issued, byte for byte, and shows who signed.
One word is doing two jobs here: that checkable record is what SignSealer calls the certificate. It is a record of the signing with a code on it, not a certificate from an authority. You can sign a real document on your own phone in the demo and check its certificate afterwards, and the rest of the product is on electronic signatures.
SignSealer is not a law firm and this is not legal advice. This describes what the two terms mean and what the statutes say; which rules apply to a particular document is a question for a lawyer.
