Luminance vs Harvey: contract intelligence or a legal AI platform

Luminance, Harvey and Gavel Exec compared

Every Luminance and Harvey cell below comes from the vendor's own site as read on November 12, 2026. The Gavel Exec column is there for teams whose work is mostly contract negotiation.

Who each platform is built for: every department or the lawyers

Luminance sells to the whole company and Harvey sells to lawyers. Luminance's homepage opens with "Contracts are everyone's business," while Harvey's opens with "Build a Frontier Legal Organization" and names law firms and in-house legal teams as its users.

Luminance's solutions menu lists Legal, Finance, Procurement, Compliance, Sales, Executive and Human Resources. Its legal page promises "governed business self-serve," and its Negotiation page says business teams progress routine contracts on their own while exceptions route back to Legal. Luminance counts 1,000+ customers in 70+ countries, and its customer stories feature TotalEnergies, Hitachi Vantara, Staples and AMD. The site has no solution page for law firms, although one customer story covers the law firm Clyde & Co and insurance claims analysis.

Harvey's solutions menu is organized around lawyers: In-House Teams, Law Firms and Mid-Size Firms, plus practice pages for Litigation and Transactional work. Its law firm page says it is "trusted by more than 1,400 firms" and by more than 80% of the Am Law 100, and counts over 1,000 in-house legal departments. Named customers include Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman, Deutsche Telekom and Bayer.

If procurement and finance need answers from contracts without asking a lawyer, Luminance is designed for it. If the buyers are partners, associates or a legal department that also handles disputes and regulatory questions, Harvey is the closer fit.

Negotiating a contract in Word: counterparty history or playbook review

Both products mark up a contract in Microsoft Word against your standards. Luminance leans on what your company agreed before, including with the same counterparty, while Harvey runs a playbook the firm or department maintains and applies the edits you accept as tracked changes.

Luminance says it will "Generate context-aware markups directly in Microsoft Word, even where formal playbook positions do not yet exist." It turns playbooks and templates into standards with preferred positions and fallback language, and shows prior liability positions and concessions with that counterparty.

Where Luminance starts from negotiation history, Harvey for Word drafts and edits from prompts and precedents and runs playbooks. A Harvey post from September 30, 2025 says playbooks "flag clauses as acceptable, needs review, or unacceptable" and that playbook managers can upload a playbook in any format. Harvey's help center states "Accepted changes are applied as redlined tracked changes in the document." Its advice for the add-in is a Windows computer, with Mac users sent to Word Online.

Luminance is stronger when the question is what you gave this supplier last time. Harvey is stronger when a firm wants playbook review inside the same add-in its lawyers already draft in.

Signed contracts: Luminance Repository or Harvey Vault

Luminance's Repository is a standing home for a company's contract portfolio. Harvey's Vault is a workspace for a matter or project, and Harvey adds a separate Contract Intelligence product for in-house teams that want renewals and obligations surfaced.

The Repository page says you can "Compare up to 10,000 contracts at once against your playbooks to identify deviations and areas of risk." It links related agreements and amendments, surfaces renewals and financial exposure, and gives teams source-backed answers.

Harvey's Vault page lists "100,000 files stored per vault" and review tables that "Extract and compare key data points from thousands of documents at once in a structured, tabular format." Vault syncs from document management systems such as iManage, SharePoint and Google Drive. Contract Intelligence, which Harvey's site says helps in-house legal teams with routine reviews, captures inbound contracts, runs review agents, compares a live negotiation with terms accepted in your executed deals, and surfaces "renewals, notice periods, and commitments."

For signed agreements that people outside Legal must search, Luminance has the fuller answer. For deal diligence or a litigation document set, Vault fits better.

Work beyond contracts: research, litigation and diligence

Harvey covers far more legal work than Luminance. Luminance's three products are Negotiation, Repository and Workflows, all about contracts, while Harvey lists litigation, transactional work, regulatory tracking and research.

For research, Harvey's Knowledge product offers "a powerful data pipeline into 500+ legal sources across the globe," and its partners include Ask LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer, Lefebvre and SCC Online, along with EDGAR and EUR-Lex. Harvey's help center says Ask LexisNexis is an add-on licensed separately. Its apps include Horizon Scanning for regulatory change and Facts & Chronologies for disputes.

Luminance brings research into the contract. External Sources, marked live in its October 2026 update, will "Bring cited research from trusted legal sources, web search and LexisNexis Protégé into the contract workflow." A LexisNexis press release dated April 21, 2026 says the alliance serves mutual in-house customers, so ask what a LexisNexis subscription adds. A litigation group will find little for its work on Luminance's product pages.

The models: Luna Crescent or OpenAI, Anthropic and Google

Luminance builds its own legal models and Harvey orchestrates models from the large providers. Luminance says Luna Crescent "runs on infrastructure controlled by Luminance." Harvey, by contrast, "uses models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, with Mistral also available in the EU," according to its help center.

Luminance describes Luna Crescent as its "family of proprietary legal intelligence models," built from a general-purpose base model and trained on Luminance's contract data. Its technology page cites "220M+ verified legal documents." Luminance reports Luna Crescent as 4x faster than general-purpose frontier models on its contract tasks and 5% more accurate in blind legal expert tests. Those figures are Luminance's own, and it does not name the frontier models.

Since those providers sit outside Harvey, its security page says "Harvey requires Zero Data Retention (ZDR) by model providers" and contractually prohibits them from training on customer data.

A security reviewer who wants fewer third parties handling contract text will prefer Luminance's approach. A firm that wants each new frontier model soon after release will prefer Harvey's.

What is live and what is announced

Check release status before you sign with either vendor. Luminance's Luminance Forward update for October 2026 lists nine items, of which two are live, three are in beta and four are coming soon.

• Live: External Sources and Template Agent, which turns gold standard contracts into reusable templates.
• In beta: a new Lumi conversational starting point; Lumi MCP, which extends Contract Intelligence into tools such as Slack, ChatGPT and Outlook; and Playbook Supervisor.
• Announced as coming soon: Parallel Approvals, a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) Negotiation Agent, Obligation Tracking and Scheduled Reports.

The Repository page already advertises renewal and obligation visibility, so ask Luminance which parts are in production today. Harvey's menu marks Legal Work Orchestration, Intake, Facts & Chronologies and the Connector Library as new.

Pricing and how you buy

Neither vendor publishes a price list, and neither site offers a free trial. Luminance gives no figure at all. Harvey gives one, in a help center article last updated November 6, 2026: "On average, Harvey costs several hundred dollars per user per month."

Every Luminance product page ends in "Request a demo." Harvey's help center ties the price to the number of seats, the products you deploy and contract terms, and says most teams begin with a sales demo and then receive a team quote for per-seat licenses.

Harvey's page for mid-sized firms is aimed at firms "of roughly 15 to 150 lawyers" and says setup, onboarding and training are handled with Harvey's support. It states no price and no seat minimum.

Luminance is bought for departments beyond Legal, so the user count can run well past the lawyers. Harvey is licensed per seat, with Ask LexisNexis as an extra license. For comparison, five seats of Gavel Exec for a year come to $8,700 at the published annual rate. See what AI contract review software costs across other vendors.

Security and data residency

Both vendors hold the certifications an enterprise security review expects, and Harvey publishes more detail on where data lives.

Luminance's security page describes an independently certified information security management system under ISO 27001 and "regular SOC 2 Type II examinations." It encrypts data hosted in Amazon Web Services with AES-256 (the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard) and offers role-based access, multi-factor authentication and single sign-on. It adds that "Customer-specific learning remains private to each organization and is not shared across customers." The public page names no hosting regions, so request them through its trust center.

Harvey "undergoes annual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audits," lists ISO 27701 and ISO 42001, and hosts on Microsoft Azure. Its help center says customers "can keep their data in-region: the EU or Switzerland, the US, or Australia."

For the review itself, use our security questions for legal AI vendors.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Luminance if contracts are the whole brief, you want procurement, finance and sales to self-serve under Legal's rules, you need a repository that compares thousands of signed agreements against your playbooks, and you prefer a vendor that runs its own legal models.
• Choose Harvey if you run a law firm or a legal department that also needs research from licensed sources, litigation and diligence support, a 100,000-document Vault, mobile apps, and models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google with data kept in a named region.
• Consider Gavel Exec if your need is negotiating individual agreements in Word day to day, and you want market benchmarking of each provision, a prioritized tracked-changes redline run from your playbook, and a published $160 per user per month you can try today on 25 free queries.

A third option for contract negotiators: Gavel Exec

Luminance runs a contract portfolio and Harvey a whole firm or legal department, but some teams weighing them mainly need help with the agreement open in Word today. That is the job of Gavel Exec, AI contract review and drafting software built for transactional attorneys, in-house legal teams, and solo, small and mid-sized firms that draft and negotiate in Word.

• Benchmarking: before you answer the other side's draft, the web app tags each provision on-market, off-market or missing, with filters for jurisdiction, industry and company size.
• What the redline looks like: in Word, Gavel Exec marks up the entire agreement with tracked changes ranked by priority and a stated reason for each one, with comments in the margin and missing terms listed.
• Playbooks: rules can be generated from a checklist, a spreadsheet playbook or agreements you have signed, or you can use the built-in set developed with attorneys in corporate and real estate law. Colleagues get read-only or edit access.
• Price and trial: beside two vendors with no price list, Gavel Exec charges $160 per user per month, or $1,740 per user per year, month to month with no long-term contract. Before paying, each user gets 25 free queries without a credit card or a sales call, and a paid plan covers 1,000 queries per user per month.
• Security: the AI model providers Gavel uses, OpenAI included, are bound by Zero Data Retention agreements, and Gavel is SOC 2 Type II certified. No customer data is used to train AI models, and every customer gets its own isolated database. See Gavel's security page.
• Results: first-cut review of a contract fell from about 15 hours to about 5 hours for Martin Algie of MIA Contract Lawyers. A regulated financial services firm's Legal Counsel, Omar Nakadi, estimates that review takes 40 to 60% less time per contract.

Gavel Exec was built under Dorna Moini, the CEO and Founder of Gavel, who was a litigation associate at Sidley Austin, and Gavel's users number over 2,000 legal organizations in 28 countries. Gavel Exec is built for transactional work: source checks run against your precedent, matter files, Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR filings and government sources in place of a case-law research database, Relativity, Gavel's parent company, covers litigation and e-discovery, and documents arrive as Word files because there is no native iManage or NetDocuments integration today.

The head-to-head pages go deeper: Luminance vs Gavel Exec and Harvey vs Gavel Exec.

How to test Luminance and Harvey side by side

1. Write down who will log in. List the lawyers, then the procurement, finance and sales users who would touch contracts. A long second list points to Luminance; lawyers who also need research point to Harvey.
2. Bring one negotiated agreement and your playbook to both demos. Pick a counterparty you have dealt with before. Ask Luminance for the Word markup and the prior positions with that counterparty. Ask Harvey to run playbook review in Word.
3. Bring 50 signed contracts too. Ask Luminance to compare them against your playbook in Repository, and ask Harvey to build a Vault review table from the same set.
4. Ask which features are live. Go through Luminance's October 2026 list item by item.
5. Collect the commercial terms by email. Ask each vendor for the per-user price, the user count they assumed, the contract length, where data is hosted and whether LexisNexis content costs extra.
6. Run the same agreement through Gavel Exec while the demos are scheduled. The 25 free queries are enough to compare its tracked changes with the markup your side sent.

More comparisons: Luminance alternatives, Harvey alternatives, Spellbook vs Harvey, the AI contract review tool rankings, and the full comparison index.