Exclaimer vs CodeTwo vs Doing It Yourself: An Honest Comparison

TL;DR

Pick Exclaimer if reply and forward rendering matters, you run Google Workspace or a mixed M365 + GW estate, and marketing wants real banner campaigns with analytics. Pick CodeTwo if you’re pure Microsoft 365, want the cheapest per-user list price, and your needs end at “one nice signature per department”. Pick DIY only if you’re a tiny shop with one brand, no compliance disclaimer, and a tolerance for the fact that the signature won’t survive on OWA, mobile or replies.

What does each option actually do?

The three options solve the same surface problem (every staff email goes out with a consistent, branded signature) in three very different ways.

Exclaimer sells two products. Exclaimer Cloud Signatures is the SaaS one for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tenants. Exclaimer Signature Manager is the older on-prem / hybrid Exchange product. In 2026 almost every new deployment is Cloud Signatures. Mail flows out of your tenant, hits Exclaimer’s smart-host via an outbound connector or routing rule, gets the signature stamped server-side, then continues to the recipient. The user types nothing.

CodeTwo sells two products too. CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 is the SaaS one and the modern equivalent of Cloud Signatures. CodeTwo Exchange Rules is the on-prem product for organisations still running Exchange Server. The architecture is similar: connector out, stamp server-side, deliver. CodeTwo is a Polish company, Microsoft-only, and has been a fixture of the M365 signature space for over a decade.

DIY means one of three things. Outlook’s per-mailbox signature setting (deployed by hand, by Group Policy, or by an Intune configuration profile). Google Workspace’s tenant-wide Append footer admin setting. Or a Word document emailed round to staff with “please paste this in your signature, thanks”. All three are server-blind. The signature lives on the device, or in one Workspace setting that does not understand departments.

That is the whole architectural picture.

Where Exclaimer wins

Reply and forward rendering. The single biggest reason CodeTwo customers migrate to us. Out of the box, simpler signature tools stamp a fresh signature on every outbound message, replies included. Done badly, you end up with a signature stacked four times down a thread, plus the recipient’s stacked twice, plus the original. A mess. Exclaimer’s reply detection is more aggressive: strip the prior block before appending the fresh one, so the signature sits on the latest reply only. CodeTwo can be told to do this too, but the rule-set is fiddlier and we see more deployments where it has been left at default.

Google Workspace parity. CodeTwo does not do Google Workspace. It is a Microsoft-only shop. If you run pure M365, that does not matter. If you run pure Workspace, CodeTwo is not even on the shortlist. If you run a mixed estate (a holding company with a M365 brand and a Workspace brand, or a parent + acquisition that has not consolidated), Exclaimer is the only one that gives you a single dashboard across both. We have a few clients in exactly that shape.

Multi-tenant and multi-domain. Exclaimer handles multiple domains, multiple sending identities, send-as aliases, and multi-tenant management cleanly. The Workspace multi-domain pattern (different signatures per firstname@brand-a.co.za versus firstname@parentco.co.za) is documented and reliable. CodeTwo can do multi-domain in M365, but the rules engine takes more setting up.

Banner campaigns with scheduling and analytics. Both tools do banners. Exclaimer’s are easier to schedule with start and end dates, and the analytics layer (opens, clicks, click-through per campaign) is further along. If marketing is going to hold the budget for the signature tool, this is what they will care about.

Design tooling. Exclaimer’s template designer is, in our hands, the more polished of the two. Drag-and-drop, dark-mode-safe colour pickers, preview against Outlook, OWA, Gmail and iOS Mail rendering. Hand a non-technical marketing person the dashboard and they will produce a working campaign by lunchtime.

Channel and partner support. Exclaimer’s reseller programme is mature and the South African partner ecosystem is real. ZAR billing, local-time support, partners who have done the work before. CodeTwo has resellers but the bench is thinner outside Europe.

Where CodeTwo wins

Pure-M365 price. At the small-tenant end (under 50 mailboxes), CodeTwo’s per-user list price is usually lower than Exclaimer’s. If you are a 20-person business in pure Microsoft 365, with one brand, one office, and a single uncomplicated signature, CodeTwo gets the job done for less.

Office 365 admin centre integration. CodeTwo has worked hard, over the years, at fitting itself into the Microsoft 365 admin experience. Setup wizards inside the M365 admin flow, native-feeling connector configuration, a tighter Outlook desktop add-in for client-side preview. If your IT lead is a Microsoft purist who lives in the M365 admin centre, CodeTwo feels native in a way Exclaimer’s UI does not always match.

Microsoft-only simplicity. Sometimes a tool that does one thing does that one thing well. CodeTwo only does Microsoft. No Workspace surface area to mis-configure, no Exchange-vs-M365-vs-Workspace decision tree. Less to break.

Where DIY wins

DIY wins in exactly one shape of organisation: very small, very simple, and pragmatic about what they are giving up.

Very small organisations with under about 15 mailboxes, one brand, one office. The cost of an Exclaimer or CodeTwo licence at that size is small, but it is still a recurring cost for something that can be approximated with a Group Policy and discipline.

No compliance disclaimer requirement. If you are not regulated by FAIS, you are not handling protected health information, and your legal team has not insisted on a “this email and any attachments are confidential” boilerplate, you do not need the central enforcement that Exclaimer or CodeTwo provide. A pasted Outlook signature is fine.

No marketing banner ambitions. If you are never going to run a campaign banner, never going to A/B test a CTA, never going to track click-through, you do not need the campaign engine. The whole signature-as-marketing-channel angle is wasted on you.

Acceptance of what breaks. The DIY signature lives on the device. That means: it does not appear in OWA on a colleague’s machine when they log in. It does not appear on mobile (well, only if the user has set it up on their phone separately, and most have not). It does not appear on replies and forwards in any consistent way. It is absent from automated mail, shared mailboxes, Send As. If you can live with that, DIY is fine. Most of our prospects, when we walk them through that list out loud, decide they cannot.

The honest version of DIY is Outlook signatures, accepting they will render about 60% of the time, desktop only. If that is the trade-off and you are clear-eyed about it, save the money.

What about the 2024+ Exclaimer changes?

Some readers arrive here from old comparisons that are now out of date, so this section is worth reading even if the rest is familiar.

In 2024 Exclaimer finished moving to fully cloud-side rendering for Cloud Signatures. The old version had an option to render the signature client-side via the Outlook add-in. That option had holes: no OWA, no mobile, no automated senders. The cloud-side path is now the default and the recommended deployment. It covers Outlook desktop on Windows and Mac, OWA, Outlook mobile, the iPhone Mail app pointed at the M365 mailbox, the Gmail app pointed at the Workspace mailbox, Power Automate flows, shared-mailbox Send As, the lot. That change closed the “where does my signature actually appear” gap.

Pricing shifted too. Exclaimer moved to a tiered per-user model: a base tier, a marketing tier with banner scheduling and analytics, and a full tier with multi-tenant and advanced design. The entry licence got cheaper for organisations that only need a signature. The upper tier got more expensive for those using the full marketing engine. We’ll quote against your headcount and feature need in the fit assessment. Don’t trust list prices on the open web. They move.

CodeTwo’s product line has been more stable through the same period. Same SKUs, similar pricing, incremental improvements.

Side-by-side table

A direct picker, one more time

• Mixed M365 + Workspace, replies/forwards have to be right, marketing wants real campaigns? Exclaimer.
• Pure M365, under 50 mailboxes, one brand, the cheapest licence wins? CodeTwo.
• Under 15 mailboxes, no compliance disclaimer, no marketing banner ambition, willing to accept the signature only renders on desktop Outlook? DIY.

Anything outside those three lines is a conversation.

Book a 30-minute signature-stack assessment

Thirty minutes, video call, no slide deck. We cover platform (M365, Workspace, or both), what you’re using now, design requirements, and whether you actually want a banner campaign engine. You walk away with a written recommendation (Exclaimer, CodeTwo, or honestly DIY-with-discipline) plus a price band and a rollout timeline. If the answer is “you don’t need a tool”, we’ll say so.

Email support@osh.co.za with the subject line Signature stack assessment, or book directly from the Exclaimer page.