Why we launched PandaDoc for Developers — Embedding Documents and eSignatures into your workflow

Published in

PandaDoc Tech Blog

5 min readDec 6, 2021

PandaDoc as a product company has been solving problems in the document generation and eSignature space for nearly 10 years. We started as a simple software for creating sales proposals in 2010 and now have expanded to powerful features across eSignatures, Forms, Proposals, CPQ, Contracts and more.

But businesses are growing fast, and have complex workflows and we realised that just a powerful product is not going to make the cut. It needs great API infrastructure and a developer experience that can allow people to freely build the exact solution they need, without having to lose their minds trying to do so.

Say hello to PandaDoc for Developers!

Why did we launch PandaDoc for Developers?

We launched this to enable developers like you to easily build and integrate customisable document workflows and eSignature capabilities into your products, applications and websites.

Let’s simplify that. Businesses should be able to do what they do best — focus on expanding, diversifying and growing their business. Documents are at the core of all of this — Sales proposals, HR, RevOps, Marketing — there are documents everywhere. We want to empower you, the developer, to build very simple solutions that can bring supremely frictionless experiences with documents — remove the worries and let people go about their job.

What you as a Developer can do with our APIs

Integrate Documents and eSignatures with ease

Whether you are a developer, a VP or Director of Engineering, or even the CTO (and we believe the developer in you never stops coding) or just an agency evaluating solutions for your clients, we feel that the process of embedding document generation and legally binding eSignatures has to be effortless for you. That’s exactly what we went out to do.

“Good APIs focus on business problems. Great APIs focus on developer problems and how to make their lives easier. ”

Here are some sample code snippets to show how easy it is to get our APIs to work for you.

In fact, here is the complete documentation for

Create, Share and Download documents right within your application

We built powerful APIs, Javascript SDKs as well as embedding features. You can embed forms, templates and documents into your application or webpage.

For example, here is our PandaDoc experience where you can automate document management, except it is not on our application, but right within your application or even your website.

You can show a list of related documents to record(s) in your system. How simple is this? Extremely simple. All you need to do is place the following code within a <script> tag of your HTML page view.

var doclist = new PandaDoc.DocList({mode: PandaDoc.DOC_LIST_MODE.LIST}); doclist.init({
    el: ‘#ELEMENT_ID’,
    data: {
        metadata: {
            YOUR_META_KEY: ‘YOUR_META_VALUE’
        }
    },
    cssClass: ‘CUSTOM_CSS_CLASS’,
    events: {
        onInit: function(){},
        onDocumentCreate: function(){}
    }
});

In fact, you can generate our entire Document editor into your application as a modal overlay. Full list of capabilities are available here.

JavaScript Embed

You can also extend our embed functionality by customising the embed.js script provided for pre-filling your own data.

We can do

Template Embed — To give your users access to a common template
Form Embed — This is to let unlimited signers the ability to fill and complete the same form
Document Embed — This is to provide a document tailored to the specific signing scenario instead of a template

Track Document Status Changes

You can use either a web-hook listener or Active polling to track document status changes and use those status changes to trigger actions at your end.

Check out all our web-hooks capabilities here.

Build powerful integrations or expand the capabilities of existing ones

The scope of our APIs is a lot more. We believe nobody should be bound by their complex workflows and we have built our APIs to fit into your every need. We have powerful integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot and many others.

Here is a full list of our integrations. Over and above this, you can also do custom actions with our API

PandaDoc API for Developers

Get started now

If you have gotten this far, you know you want to try this out and really get a feel of the simplicity and power of our APIs. Come sign up for our trial sandbox. It is free for life. You can keep testing and playing around. Forever!

That’s right, you can test this forever for free.