Spellbook vs Harvey: contract suite or legal platform

Spellbook vs Harvey at a glance

The table lines up what each vendor publishes about fit, Word redlining, playbooks, benchmarking, research, price, trial and security, with Gavel Exec in the last column for reference.

What Spellbook is

Spellbook bills itself as "The complete contract AI suite" and is designed for in-house teams and law firms. It works as a Microsoft Word add-in and in Google Docs, redlines "with every suggestion tracked," and says it is trusted by 5,000+ legal teams.

The suite covers Review, Draft, Ask, Playbooks, Compare and Associate, which handles multi-document work. Spellbook's announcement page, last updated October 7, 2026, says Autonomous Contract Management is generally available, carrying contracts from intake to a searchable repository after signature, though the site menu still offers early access.

• Price: not published. Spellbook prices by license headcount and gives a custom quote after a demo. About $350 per user per month is reported by Gavel customers.
• Trial: 7 days free. Spellbook's help center says self-serve trials expire with no charge, while sales-assisted trials may convert to a paid subscription, and larger organizations may get extended trials.
• Benchmarking: Compare to Market checks terms against "real market data from thousands of similar agreements." Access is free if your anonymized deal statistics join the shared pool ("Give to Get"); keeping your data out while still drawing on the full pool costs extra ("Pay to Get").
• Research: Ask answers legal questions with citations from public databases, including CourtListener, CanLII and Justia.
• Security: SOC 2 Type II, with HIPAA, GDPR and European Union AI Act compliance listed; agreements negotiated with OpenAI and Anthropic for zero data retention, which Spellbook says keeps its model providers from training on your data; and customer data stored in Canada and the United States.

Limits: Spellbook is built around contracts, so a litigation group would need another tool. The Playbook Build Service appears only in the in-house package, and a price quote requires a demo.

What Harvey is

Harvey says top law firms and in-house teams "trust Harvey with their highest-stakes work," and that it is "designed for firms of every size." Its homepage counts 3,500+ law firms and in-house legal teams, 85+ countries and 80+ Am Law 100 firms using Harvey, and on September 9, 2026 it announced a $550 million funding round at a $15.5 billion valuation.

The platform spans research in Knowledge, bulk review in Vault, Contract Intelligence and practice areas from litigation to transactional work. Harvey for Word drafts from precedents, flags clauses that break your playbook and applies accepted suggestions as tracked changes, and an Outlook add-in brings Harvey into email.

• Price: not published. Harvey's homepage, Word add-in page and mid-sized firm page all lead to "Request a Demo."
• Trial: we found no free trial on Harvey's site; every page we checked leads to a demo request.
• Research: Knowledge lists licensed partners including Ask LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer. Harvey's help center says Ask LexisNexis is a paid add-on that doesn't require an existing LexisNexis subscription.
• Scale: a vault holds up to 100,000 documents, and review tables pull data points from thousands of documents at once.
• Security: annual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audits, ISO 42001 and ISO 27701 listed, Zero Data Retention required of model providers, and no training on inputs, outputs or uploaded documents.

Limits: you can't see a price or start a trial before talking to sales, LexisNexis content costs extra, and Harvey recommends Windows for its Word add-in, with Mac users directed to Word Online.

Spellbook vs Harvey: the differences that matter

Scope: a contract suite or a whole-practice platform

Spellbook stays with transactional work: review, drafting, playbooks, benchmarking and, through Autonomous Contract Management, intake and a post-signature repository. Harvey lists litigation and transactional practice areas and offers research through licensed partners and Vault for use across the firm. Harvey is stronger on breadth, and Spellbook is the more focused purchase for a group whose AI work is contracts.

Pricing, trials and contract terms

Neither vendor posts a price. Spellbook quotes by team size after a demo, about $350 per user per month is reported by Gavel customers, and its help center says monthly subscriptions can be canceled at any time and end with the current billing period, while annual ones run to the end of their term. Harvey's site shows no figure or terms. Spellbook is stronger here because a lawyer can test it for 7 days before any sales call.

Microsoft Word redlining and playbooks

Both put AI edits into Word as tracked changes. Spellbook's playbooks hold rules and fallbacks and add redlines "in your name," and its in-house package includes a Playbook Build Service. Harvey's playbook review checks each clause against a standard position and fallbacks, labels it Acceptable, Needs review or Not acceptable, and applies the edit you choose as a redline, with designated Playbook managers maintaining the rules. The two are close on playbooks, and Spellbook has the edge for teams that also work in Google Docs.

Legal research

On the sources each vendor publishes, Harvey is stronger for research. Knowledge connects queries to licensed databases such as Ask LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer and Lefebvre, plus the open web, and Ask LexisNexis covers federal and state case law, statutes and regulations, with Shepard's showing whether a case is still good law. Spellbook's Ask answers research questions from the public legal databases listed on its data sources page, such as CourtListener and CanLII, with a citation to each source.

Market benchmarking

Spellbook is stronger on outside market data. Compare to Market checks a contract's terms against data from thousands of similar agreements, filtered by agreement type, jurisdiction and deal context. Harvey's Contract Intelligence compares a live negotiation with terms you accepted in your own executed deals and tracks where positions drift from market, which helps a team with a long deal history.

Large document sets and connectors

Harvey is stronger for diligence and bulk review. A Harvey vault holds up to 100,000 documents, and its Connector Library lists iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and Box. Spellbook's Associate plans and runs multi-document projects such as data room reviews and disclosure schedules, and its integrations include iManage, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Spellbook if your lawyers mostly draft and negotiate contracts in Word or Google Docs, want terms benchmarked against market data from similar agreements, and want a 7-day trial before talking price.
• Choose Harvey if you want one platform for litigation, research and transactional work, want case-law research through licensed sources such as Ask LexisNexis, or review document sets in the tens of thousands.
• Consider Gavel Exec if you want playbook-driven contract review in Word with a listed price of $160 per user per month, and want each lawyer to start on 25 free queries without a credit card.

A third option: Gavel Exec

Some lawyers on this shortlist want contract review in Word at a price they can see before a demo, without buying a platform built for the whole firm. Gavel Exec is AI contract review and drafting software that runs inside Microsoft Word as an add-in and on the web. It returns a full-agreement markup in Word as tracked changes ranked by priority, with the reasoning for each edit, and its web app runs batch analysis and compares several documents at once.

• Playbooks: use the attorney-written playbooks that ship with it, or generate rules from a checklist, spreadsheet playbook or signed agreements (.docx, PDF or .csv), then share Projects and Playbooks with read-only or edit access.
• Price: $160 per user per month, or $1,740 per user per year, with 25 free queries per user and no credit card. The monthly plan is billed month to month, with no long-term contract.
• Benchmarking: the web app tags each provision on-market, off-market or missing, with filters for jurisdiction, industry and company size.
• Security: SOC 2 Type II. Gavel's contracts with its AI model providers, OpenAI included, require Zero Data Retention, and customer data, prompts and documents aren't used to train models. Data is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States unless a customer picks European Union, Canada or Australia hosting.

At a regulated financial services firm, Legal Counsel Omar Nakadi puts the saving at 40 to 60% of review time per contract.

Limits: Gavel Exec doesn't include a case-law research database, and litigation and e-discovery fall outside what it's built for, so it won't stand in for Harvey's research or Vault. It doesn't track obligations or renewals the way Spellbook's repository and Harvey's Contract Intelligence do, it doesn't connect to iManage or NetDocuments yet, and redlining a specific document or building a playbook needs the Word add-in.

For one-on-one detail, see Spellbook vs Gavel Exec and Harvey vs Gavel Exec.

How to test Spellbook and Harvey side by side

1. Sort your AI work by practice group. List what your transactional, litigation and research lawyers would use each week. If contract drafting and negotiation dominate, start with the Spellbook trial; if research and litigation carry real weight, put the Harvey demo first.
2. Run the trial while the demo gets scheduled. Spellbook's 7 days go fast, so pick one contract type and load your positions into a playbook on day one. Ask Harvey during the sales process whether you can test it on your own documents.
3. Use the same negotiated agreement in both. Give each tool the positions you actually took, then compare its tracked changes with the markup you sent. In Harvey, run playbook review in Word; in Spellbook, run Playbooks and Compare to Market.
4. Put the same pricing questions to both in writing. Ask for the per-user price, seat minimums and term length, whether Ask LexisNexis (Harvey) costs extra, what Spellbook charges to use Compare to Market without contributing your own data, and whether a sales-assisted trial converts to a paid plan.

More comparisons: Spellbook alternatives, Harvey alternatives, our guide to the best AI contract review tools and the full list of Gavel comparisons.