Spellbook vs Ivo: market data or your own contracts

Spellbook vs Ivo at a glance

Every Spellbook and Ivo cell is drawn from that vendor's pages; the right-hand column adds Gavel Exec for comparison.

What Spellbook is

Spellbook markets itself as "The complete contract AI suite," and its site description names transactional lawyers as the core audience. It runs as a Microsoft Word add-in, integrates with Google Docs, and counts 5,000+ in-house teams and law firms as users. Review marks up a contract "with every suggestion tracked," Draft works from scratch or from saved libraries, Ask answers questions and can search public legal sources such as CourtListener and CanLII, and Associate runs multi-document tasks.

Two newer products widen the suite. Compare to Market (listed as Market on Spellbook's feature page), announced in a Spellbook post last updated January 13, 2026, measures key terms against market data from thousands of similar agreements, right inside Word. Autonomous Contract Management, announced as generally available in a post last updated October 7, 2026, gathers incoming contracts from Gmail, Outlook, Slack and intake forms, routes them against your playbook rules and files every agreement once it's signed. Its repository lets you search the full contract history with cited answers, build tabular reports and add AI-generated columns, and it keeps monitoring each contract up to its renewal date.

• Price: Spellbook keeps its rates off the site, sizes each quote to how many team members a license covers, and shares it in a demo. Expect about $350 per user per month, reported by Gavel customers.
• Trial: 7 days free from the website, with extended trials possible for larger organizations. Spellbook's help center says website trials expire after 7 days and don't convert into paid subscriptions.
• Plans: a Law Firms plan and an In-House Teams plan, both with the Word add-in and Associate; the in-house plan adds a Playbook Build Service. The help center describes monthly subscriptions you can cancel at any time, as well as annual terms.
• Security: Spellbook reports SOC 2 Type II and lists HIPAA, GDPR and European Union AI Act compliance, has negotiated zero data retention with both OpenAI and Anthropic, and keeps customer data with cloud providers in Canadian and United States data centers.

Limits: Spellbook doesn't publish a price, and its January 2026 launch post says Compare to Market is free only when you contribute aggregate statistics from your contracts to the shared pool; keeping your data out of the pool costs an extra fee. Its help center also says only a playbook's creator can edit it, so colleagues clone a playbook to change it.

What Ivo is

Ivo sells "Contract AI for the whole enterprise," aimed at in-house legal and business teams, and its homepage calls it "the #1 choice for Fortune 500 legal teams." Its Review add-in works in Microsoft Word and Google Docs, can run up to three playbooks in a single review, and adjusts its logic depending on whether you're reviewing the counterparty's paper or their redlines on yours. One click produces a configurable issues list, summary report or email memo.

Ivo is designed around your company's own contract history. Benchmarks compares each clause with your previously executed agreements, filtered by counterparty type, industry and governing law, and flags a provision that falls below your median. Intelligence holds a repository of up to one million contracts per organization, Assistant answers questions and researches law across more than 100 sources, and Collaborate routes agreements from intake through approval, negotiation and signature.

• Price: not published. Ivo custom-quotes based on deployment scope, users, contract volume and integrations, and sends buyers to a demo.
• Trial: none listed on Ivo's site. On onboarding, its Review page promises you can "Get started in just one week."
• Playbooks: Playbook Builder drafts a playbook from contracts, templates and guidance in your Ivo repository or from up to 15 uploaded files, and each position cites the contract it came from. You can also start a playbook from scratch, and Ivo's solutions attorneys help with playbook building.
• Security: Ivo is certified to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, the AI management standard, and states that customer data never trains its AI models.
• Customers and funding: Ivo names IBM, Atlassian, Uber, Canva and Meta among its customers and announced a $55 million Series B, led by Blackbird, in January 2026.

Limits: Ivo publishes no price and lists no trial, so evaluation starts with a demo. Benchmarks needs at least 10 comparable executed contracts in a category, and Ivo says meaningful benchmarks usually appear at around 25 to 50 agreements.

Spellbook vs Ivo: the differences that matter

Benchmarking: the market or your own history

This is the sharpest difference between the two. Spellbook's Compare to Market shows how a term stacks up against thousands of similar agreements, with breakdowns by industry, jurisdiction and deal type. Ivo Benchmarks shows how a clause compares with what your company has already signed and drafts toward your 50th-percentile position. Spellbook is stronger when you need to know what the market will accept, and Ivo is stronger when consistency with your own precedent matters most.

Who each is built for

Spellbook sells one plan for law firms and another for in-house teams, and says it is designed for both. Ivo's product summary names in-house legal teams, legal operations, general counsel, commercial counsel and procurement as its users, and Ivo's llms.txt, last updated July 2026, calls it "purpose-built for in-house legal departments at scaled enterprises" and says it is not meant for solo practitioners or small law firms. Collaborate brings business teams in through Salesforce and Slack, while Spellbook reaches them through Greenlight for procurement and Autonomous Contract Management intake from Slack, email and forms. A law firm will find a ready-made plan at Spellbook, while Ivo is the stronger fit for a legal department that wants the rest of the company inside the same workflow.

Pricing, trials and buying

Neither vendor lists rates, so the practical difference is how you get in the door. Anyone can open Spellbook's 7-day trial from its website, and its help center describes month-to-month subscriptions alongside annual terms. Ivo's route runs through a demo and a custom quote, with no trial listed, and its llms.txt says there are no self-serve or month-to-month tiers. Spellbook is the easier of the two to try before a sales conversation.

Playbooks

Both build playbooks from documents. Spellbook can start from a model Word or PDF document, a plain-language description or starter playbooks generated by legal experts, and each rule can carry fallback positions, a risk level and a named approver. Ivo's Playbook Builder works from your repository or up to 15 uploads, turns additional uploaded contracts into fallback positions and cites the source of each position, and Review can apply three playbooks at once. Both can start a playbook from scratch. Ivo is stronger when your positions already live in executed agreements, and Spellbook gives you more starting points when they don't, including a plain-language description and expert starter playbooks.

Beyond review in Word

Both vendors now sell more than an add-in. Spellbook's Associate handles multi-document work, and Autonomous Contract Management takes in contracts from email, Slack and intake forms, files each signed agreement and lets you search that history with cited answers and tabular reports. With Ivo's Intelligence, you describe in plain English what to pull from a repository of up to one million contracts, including contracts synced from systems such as SharePoint and Google Drive, and chart the results as dashboards, and Assistant can work across that repository. Ivo is stronger for questions about a large portfolio you already hold, and Spellbook is stronger for a suite that starts with drafting in Word and captures contracts as they come in.

Security and data handling

Both report SOC 2 Type II. Ivo says it never trains AI models on customer data, and Spellbook says zero data retention keeps its model providers from training on or storing your data. Ivo adds ISO 27001 and, since September 2026, ISO 42001 for AI management, which makes it the stronger choice for a security team that requires either. Spellbook lists HIPAA, GDPR and European Union AI Act compliance on its security page, and it is more specific in public, naming OpenAI and Anthropic as the providers bound by its retention terms and saying where customer data is stored, so ask Ivo for the same details through its Trust Center.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Spellbook if you're a transactional lawyer at a firm or in-house, you want drafting, redlining and multi-document work in one Word add-in, and you want to see where your terms sit against the market. You can test it for 7 days before talking to sales.
• Choose Ivo if you run an in-house legal team, you want review, benchmarks and playbooks built from the agreements you've already signed (Benchmarks needs at least 10 comparable contracts per category), and you want to query and chart a large existing portfolio, up to one million contracts, from one repository.
• Consider Gavel Exec if you want a price you can see before any sales conversation, billed month to month, a trial of 25 free queries per user with no credit card, playbook rules any lawyer can generate from a checklist, a spreadsheet or signed agreements and share with read-only or edit access, and market benchmarks you can narrow by company size as well as jurisdiction and industry.

A third option: Gavel Exec

Gavel Exec is AI contract review and drafting software that runs inside Microsoft Word as an add-in and on the web. It shares ground with each product above. As with Spellbook, both firms and legal departments buy it and it reads terms against market data; as with Ivo, your signed agreements can become the source of its playbook rules. It redlines the whole agreement as tracked changes ranked by priority, adds margin comments, lists missing terms and explains each change.

• Playbooks: any lawyer can write rules by hand, have Gavel Exec draft them from an executed agreement, a checklist or a spreadsheet uploaded as .docx, PDF or .csv, or begin with defaults that practicing attorneys wrote. Colleagues get read-only or edit rights playbook by playbook.
• Benchmarking: in the web app, provisions are labeled on-market, off-market or missing, and you can narrow the comparison to a jurisdiction, an industry or a company size.
• Price: $160 per user per month, or $1,740 per user per year, with 25 free queries per user and no credit card. Teams of 10 or more seats can ask for discounted pricing. The monthly plan is billed month to month, with no long-term contract.
• Security: Gavel holds SOC 2 Type II, has Zero Data Retention agreements in place with the AI model providers it uses (OpenAI is one), keeps documents and prompts out of model training, and hosts in the United States unless you choose its European Union, Canada or Australia option.

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

Limits: Gavel Exec has no Google Docs add-in, which matters if your team drafts there, and it keeps no contract repository, so obligations and renewals go untracked across a portfolio. Case-law research needs a separate tool, you need the Word add-in to redline a particular document or build a playbook, and native connections to iManage and NetDocuments aren't offered yet.

For each product against Gavel Exec alone, see Spellbook vs Gavel Exec and Ivo vs Gavel Exec.

How to test Spellbook and Ivo side by side

1. Pick two agreements you've already closed. Use one on the counterparty's paper and one on your paper that came back with their redlines, so you can see Ivo's two review modes and Spellbook's playbook review on the same files.
2. Line up the trial and the demo. Spellbook's website trial lasts 7 days, so start it the week of your Ivo demo. Ask Ivo to load enough executed agreements for Benchmarks to work: at least 10 comparable contracts in the category you're testing, and Ivo says results become meaningful at around 25 to 50.
3. Run the same clause through both benchmarks. Put a limitation of liability or indemnity clause through Compare to Market and Ivo Benchmarks, and note whether the market view or your own history would have changed the position you took.
4. Get the commercial terms in writing. Ask each vendor for the per-seat price, any seat minimum, the contract length, and what the price covers, such as Spellbook's Playbook Build Service, Ivo's solutions attorney support and access to Collaborate.

More comparisons: all Gavel comparisons, Ivo alternatives, Spellbook alternatives, Spellbook vs Harvey, Spellbook vs GC AI and our ranking of AI contract review tools for lawyers.