Spellbook vs Iqidis (Irys): contract suite in Word or research-led platform

Spellbook vs Iqidis at a glance

Iqidis now sells its product under the name Irys, and this page uses what irys.ai publishes today.

Iqidis is now Irys: what Spellbook's briefs say and what irys.ai shows

The iqidis.ai domain redirects to irys.ai, the site footer reads "Irys is a product of Iqidis, Inc.," users still sign in at core.iqidis.ai, and Legaltech Hub and Capterra both list the product as "Irys (formerly Iqidis)."

Spellbook's Spellbook vs Iqidis brief, last updated September 1, 2026, labels the product "Iqidis (now rebranded as Irys)." That brief and its Harvey vs Iqidis brief, last updated November 10, 2026, describe a web-based platform with a Word add-in on the product roadmap and price it at "$329 to $399 per user, per month," and the Spellbook vs Iqidis brief says certifications such as SOC 2 Type II "were not highlighted in product materials." On irys.ai as of November 12, 2026, the Word add-in has shipped since April 10, 2026, the pricing page lists $299 and $329 plans plus a free plan, and the security page shows ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II badges.

Where the lawyer works: a Word suite or a matter workspace

Spellbook is built so a transactional lawyer rarely leaves the document. Review, Draft, Ask, Playbooks and Compare run as a Word add-in, there is a Google Docs version, and Associate handles multi-document projects. Irys describes itself on its own comparison page as "a matter platform that spans research, drafting, review, and finished work product": the center of gravity is a web workspace of Matters, a Library, a Workbench and Intake and Sign modules, with a Word add-in attached.

The Irys Word add-in is included on every plan, but its docs describe a narrower tool than Spellbook's. Chat mode takes questions about the open file or the matter behind it. Work mode applies AI revisions as ordinary tracked changes. A review card lists each change with its own Accept and Reject, alongside Accept all, Reject all and Review each, and Word's own Review tab works on them too.

Spellbook has the edge for a lawyer who negotiates clause by clause inside Word and keeps files in iManage or SharePoint. Irys has the edge for a lawyer whose day moves between research, a brief, a contract and email, since it lists integrations with Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, OneDrive, Slack and Clio and keeps a matter's documents and authorities together.

Legal research: curated public sources or a research engine with a cite check

Spellbook's Ask tab has a Legal Sources mode that restricts answers to public databases you pick by country. Its help center lists CourtListener, Case.law, Cornell Law, Justia, GovInfo and EDGAR for the United States, Justice Canada, CanLII and SEDAR for Canada, EUR-Lex and national sources across Europe, and legal information institutes from BAILII to AustLII. Citations link to the statute or case, and the article says Spellbook is "starting with well-known public legal databases" and adding sources by jurisdiction. Irys, in its own Spellbook comparison, puts it this way: "Spellbook does not position itself as a comprehensive case-law research system."

Irys treats research as a core product. Its Workbench docs describe case law search across U.S. case law, with each case numbered, a Sources & Citations panel, and the option to request the original court PDF. Cite Check matches each citation in a pasted text or a matter document against "the case-law database," checks reporter, volume, page, year and court, compares the proposition cited against the matched case, and marks each one Pass, Warning or Fail. Irys states the limits: a Pass "does not tell you the case supports the point it is cited for," and whether an authority is still good law "remains the attorney's judgment."

Two caveats. Irys does not name its underlying case law provider; its glossary says only that it "integrates data from multiple legal-source databases." And Spellbook's source list covers far more countries than Irys's U.S. case law search. For a U.S. litigator, Irys's case law search and Cite Check fit the work more closely.

Redlining, playbooks and market data

This is Spellbook's home ground. Review flags risks and adds tracked redlines to the contract "in your name," as Spellbook puts it. Playbooks hold "detailed rules and fallbacks," shared playbooks are an add-on, and in-house customers get a Playbook Build Service. Compare to Market benchmarks a term against "thousands of similar, anonymized agreements," and Spellbook also publishes a 2026 State of Contracts report built on the same anonymized contract data.

Irys redlines through a different mechanism. Its Redline and Compare tool takes two versions of a document and returns a Word file with tracked changes plus a change summary, and its Drafting Assistant runs operations such as Rewrite, Simplify or a custom instruction, every edit as a tracked change. The Teams plan lists "firm-wide playbooks," but none of the public docs we read explain how a playbook sets the positions a review enforces, and Irys publishes no market benchmarking.

For a lawyer who negotiates NDAs, MSAs and leases against known positions, Spellbook's public documentation covers more of this workflow. Ask Irys to demonstrate a playbook-driven review before assuming parity.

Price transparency: a quote after a demo or a published rate card

Spellbook publishes no price. Its pricing page says the price depends on how many team members share a license, law firms get a 7-day free trial, and in-house teams are pointed to a demo. Gavel customers who have been quoted report about $350 per user per month, and Spellbook's briefs describe its subscriptions as annual.

Irys publishes a full rate card. A Free plan allows 3 AI messages a day and 25 MB of storage. Irys Lite is $19.99 per month with 12 messages a day. Irys One is $299 per month for one attorney with unlimited matters, documents and queries, or $3,049 per year, with a 7-day trial and no credit card. Irys Teams costs $329 a seat each month for groups of 2 to 25 and adds shared workspaces, firm-wide playbooks and admin controls. Above 25 seats, and for deployments in your own cloud, Irys says pricing, including any minimum, is agreed to the scope of each deployment. Irys says the rate you sign is the rate at renewal.

A worked example for a five-lawyer transactional group over a year: Irys Teams comes to $19,740 (5 seats at $329 for 12 months). Spellbook has no published figure; at the customer-reported $350 per user per month the same group would pay about $21,000. Gavel Exec on annual billing comes to $8,700 (5 users at $1,740).

Security and deployment

Both vendors list SOC 2 Type II. Spellbook's security page adds HIPAA controls with a signable business associate agreement (BAA), GDPR, CCPA and PIPEDA compliance, an independent legal opinion from CMS Law placing it in the EU AI Act's low-risk category, and zero data retention agreements with both OpenAI and Anthropic. Customer data sits in Canadian and U.S. data centers, with AWS as the primary provider.

Irys lists ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and CPRA, says its architecture was audited by Guidepost Solutions, and states that "Your documents, prompts, and outputs are never used to train AI models." Model calls are "zero-retention with model providers," data travels over TLS 1.2 or higher and rests under AES-256 encryption, and cancelled accounts stay exportable for 90 days before deletion. Its security page names no hosting region and no model provider; the enterprise page lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and DeepSeek alongside local models, and offers deployment in your own cloud account, VPC, on-premises or air-gapped.

Irys is stronger for a firm that must keep processing inside its own environment. Spellbook is stronger for a buyer who wants named model-provider agreements and a documented EU AI Act position today.

Firm size and practice mix

Spellbook says 5,000+ legal teams use it and sells by license headcount, with dedicated support for teams over 10. Irys says 300+ legal teams use it, lists solo, small, mid-size, large and in-house segments on its homepage, and caps the self-serve Teams plan at 25 seats. Irys shows Dentons, Michelman & Robinson and Falls Counsel among its customer logos and testimonials, and its practice pages span litigation as well as corporate and contracts.

Spellbook's Harvey vs Iqidis brief, last updated November 10, 2026, says of Harvey and Iqidis together that "Neither platform is well-suited for solo practitioners or small law firms," citing per-seat licenses and potential user minimums. As of November 12, 2026, Irys's pricing page lists single-user plans from free to $299 and states there is no seat minimum. Spellbook's stronger argument is scope: its Iqidis alternatives brief says broad legal operating systems "often fail to excel at the specific, high-value tasks," and for contract negotiation that criticism is worth testing.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Spellbook if contract negotiation in Word or Google Docs is the work you want AI for, you want playbooks with fallbacks and market benchmarking, you keep files in iManage or SharePoint, and you can accept a price that arrives after a demo.
• Choose Iqidis (Irys) if your practice mixes research, litigation drafting and contracts, you want a citation checker and matter-level context, you need a published price or a free plan to start, or you may need the software deployed inside your own cloud.
• Consider Gavel Exec if you want whole-agreement, playbook-based redlining in Word, benchmarking by jurisdiction and industry, and a published price of $160 per user per month, billed month to month, with 25 free queries per user before any sales conversation.

A third option: Gavel Exec

Gavel Exec is Gavel's 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. It returns a redline of the entire agreement as priority-ranked tracked changes and explains the reasoning behind each one.

• Playbooks: start from built-in playbooks that Gavel developed with corporate and real estate attorneys, or let Gavel Exec generate rules from your own checklist, playbook spreadsheet or executed agreements in .docx, PDF or .csv. Playbooks and Projects can be shared read-only or with edit rights.
• Benchmarking: in the web app, every provision gets an on-market, off-market or missing label, with jurisdiction, industry and company-size filters.
• Price and trial: $160 per user per month, or $1,740 per user per year, billed month to month without a long-term contract. Each user gets 25 free queries, no credit card, no sales call.
• Security: SOC 2 Type II certified. Zero Data Retention agreements cover every AI model provider Gavel uses, OpenAI among them, and no customer data, prompts or document content trains AI models. Details on the Gavel security page.

Martin Algie of MIA Contract Lawyers in Australia says a first-cut review now takes him roughly 5 hours instead of roughly 15.

Limits: Gavel Exec includes no case-law research database, and it is not designed for litigation or e-discovery, so a litigator would pair it with Irys or another research tool; Relativity, Gavel's parent company, covers litigation and e-discovery. It has no native iManage or NetDocuments integration today, which Spellbook offers, and redlining a specific document requires the Word add-in.

The head-to-head pages Spellbook vs Gavel Exec and Irys vs Gavel Exec go deeper on each pair.

How to test Spellbook and Iqidis side by side

1. Start both trials in the same week. Spellbook's trial runs 7 days; Irys One also runs 7 days with no credit card, and a Free plan with daily caps is available. Install both Word add-ins on the same machine.
2. Redline one closed agreement in each. In Spellbook, load your positions into a playbook and run Review. In Irys, open the same file in the Word add-in and give Work mode the same instructions, then compare the two sets of tracked changes against the markup you actually sent.
3. Run the same research question through both. Ask a jurisdiction-specific question in Spellbook's Ask with Legal Sources selected and in Irys Workbench with the courts named, and open every citation. Then paste a brief with a few wrong cites into Irys Cite Check.
4. Put the pricing questions in writing. Ask Spellbook for the per-user price, minimum term, and the cost of shared playbooks. Ask Irys which plan includes playbooks, what happens above 25 seats, and where your data is hosted.
5. Collect the security paperwork. Request both SOC 2 Type II reports, Irys's ISO 27001 certificate and Spellbook's EU AI Act opinion, and get each vendor's zero data retention terms into the contract.

Keep comparing with Spellbook alternatives, Irys alternatives, our guide to AI contract review tools and every Gavel comparison.