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Frustrated with Spellbook? We review the top Spellbook alternatives legal professionals are using, as we compare their accuracy, features, pricing, and how to switch easily.
Easy intake and document automation to auto-populate your templates.
If you're evaluating Spellbook alternatives, chances are you've already tried it and found that the output doesn't quite match the marketing. Spellbook's "10x faster" promise sounds great until you're spending just as long cleaning up its suggestions as you would have reviewing the contract yourself. The redlines feel generic. The "preference learning" never seems to learn your actual preferences. And the "Compare to Market" feature gives you data that's interesting but rarely actionable for your specific deal.
You're not alone. A lot of legal teams start with Spellbook and realize they need something more precise, a tool that understands how their team negotiates, not just what the average contract looks like.
This guide breaks down five alternatives to Spellbook, comparing features, AI architecture, pricing, and practical fit for legal teams that need contract review AI that actually delivers practice-ready results.
Best for: In-house legal teams and law firms that need AI contract review with real playbook depth, accurate market intelligence, and redlines that are actually good enough to send to the other side.
Gavel Exec is an AI-powered contract review and drafting assistant that works directly inside Microsoft Word. It redlines contracts, applies custom playbooks, drafts new provisions, and compares clause language against proprietary market data — all built in partnership with practicing deal lawyers. Over 2,000 legal organizations use Gavel, from solo practitioners to Am Law 100 firms and in-house teams at companies of every size.
The core frustration with Spellbook is that the redlines don't feel like your redlines. They feel like what a generalist AI thinks a contract should look like, informed by what thousands of other people did. Gavel Exec solves this by combining three things that Spellbook doesn't:
1. Pre-built playbooks developed by practicing attorneys across a range of contract types — NDAs, vendor agreements, SaaS contracts, asset purchase agreements, and more. These aren't vague checklists. They follow a structured three-part format for every provision: the requirement (your position), how to identify issues (what the AI looks for), and redline guidance (the specific edits to suggest, including preferred language and fallback positions). You get value on day one — and you can build fully custom playbooks to encode your exact standards.
2. Better market data. Gavel maintains proprietary market intelligence across industries, jurisdictions, and company sizes for a variety of document types. Spellbook's "Compare to Market" relies on anonymized user data — essentially an average of what its users have done. Gavel's market data is curated and structured, so when you want to know what's market for a limitation of liability cap in a mid-market SaaS deal in California, you're getting data that's actually filtered and useful, not a blended average across every deal type.
3. Deep understanding of your context. This is where Gavel Exec really separates itself. The platform can pull from your repository of documents — your executed contracts, your templates, your prior redlines — and use that context to understand how your team negotiates. It learns your voice, your positions, your fallbacks. The result is redlines that are surgical and practice-ready. They read like something a senior associate who's worked with your team for years would produce. Spellbook's "preference learning" promises something similar but rarely delivers at this level of precision, because it's learning from individual edits rather than understanding your full body of work.
This is ultimately what matters. You can have all the features in the world, but if the redlines require heavy cleanup, the tool is creating work instead of eliminating it.
Gavel Exec's redlines are more surgical because the AI has more context to work with. It knows your playbook positions. It has relevant market data for this specific deal type. And it understands your organization's patterns from your document repository. When all three of those inputs converge, the model doesn't have to guess — it can produce precise, defensible edits that reflect how your team actually handles these provisions.
Spellbook's approach — inferring your preferences from past edits and benchmarking against anonymized market data — leaves more room for the AI to improvise. And in contract work, improvisation is exactly what you don't want.
Gavel Exec uses frontier AI models combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured playbook data, proprietary market intelligence, and your organization's document context to ground every output. The three-layer approach — playbooks + market data + your documents and experience — means the model has explicit instructions, relevant benchmarks, and organizational memory working together. More context means more precision, which is why the redlines come back tighter and more usable than what you'll get from tools operating with less information about your specific situation.
For more on how AI tools fit into legal workflows, check out our guide on rules-based automation vs. generative AI.
Gavel Exec is $145/month per user on an annual plan, or $160/month with no lock-in. Both include free onboarding, training, and unlimited support. That's roughly half the cost of Spellbook, which runs $300–350/month per user with minimum contract terms.
You can also start with 25 free queries per user to test the platform before committing. Start your free trial →
Best for: Firms already deep in the Thomson Reuters ecosystem that want AI layered on top of Westlaw and Practical Law.
CoCounsel is Thomson Reuters' AI legal assistant. It recently crossed one million professionals with access across 107 countries — though that figure includes anyone whose Thomson Reuters subscription gives them CoCounsel access, not necessarily active contract review users.
As a Spellbook alternative, CoCounsel's strength is research breadth. If your workflow involves toggling between contract review and case law research, having both in one ecosystem has advantages. The next-generation version entering beta in 2026 promises agentic workflows — describe a task and CoCounsel builds a plan, retrieves from Westlaw, analyzes documents, and delivers structured output.
The tradeoffs are significant. CoCounsel is part of a much larger (and more expensive) Thomson Reuters stack, and getting full value typically means you're also paying for Westlaw and Practical Law. The contract review capabilities specifically — playbooks, redlining, clause-level analysis — are less developed than what you'd get from a purpose-built contract review tool. The platform operates through its own portal rather than natively in Word, which means more context-switching. And while Thomson Reuters touts its 4,500 subject matter experts, the actual redlining experience hasn't matched the precision of more focused competitors.
For teams that primarily need contract work, CoCounsel can feel like paying for an entire law library when you needed a contract specialist.
Best for: In-house teams that want pre-built playbooks out of the box and need something usable immediately without weeks of configuration.
LegalOn has been growing quickly — over 6,000 customers globally, SoftBank-backed, and recently raised a $50M Series E. Its core pitch is speed to value: the platform ships with 50+ attorney-built playbooks covering common contract types, so you can start reviewing on day one without building anything yourself.
As a Spellbook alternative, LegalOn is more structured in its playbook approach, which is an improvement. But the pre-built playbooks are generic by design. They represent what LegalOn's attorneys consider standard — which may not align with your organization's positions on indemnification, limitation of liability, IP ownership, or any other provision that actually matters in your deals. And unlike Gavel Exec, LegalOn can't pull from your document repository to understand your team's specific patterns and preferences. Customization tools exist, but they don't go as deep.
LegalOn has also been expanding into matter management and AI agents, which broadens the platform but adds complexity. Some users report that the risk flagging can be noisy — lots of flags, not all of them actionable — which creates its own version of the "cleanup problem" that sends people looking for alternatives in the first place.
Best for: Large enterprise in-house teams (Fortune 500) that need AI redlining combined with contract portfolio intelligence.
Ivo raised $55M in Series B funding in early 2026 and counts Uber, Shopify, Atlassian, Reddit, and Canva among its customers. The company claims its redlines win 80-85% of competitive evaluations, and users report 75% time savings on contract review.
What distinguishes Ivo from Spellbook is its contract intelligence layer. Beyond individual contract review, Ivo can analyze your entire contract library without manual tagging, discover relationships between agreements, and surface patterns across your portfolio. For large enterprises managing thousands of contracts, that's useful.
Ivo's playbook onboarding is hands-on — the company assigns dedicated attorneys to translate your positions into structured playbooks. That white-glove approach can deliver good initial results, but it also means you're dependent on Ivo's team to build and maintain your playbooks, which can slow things down when your positions change or when you need to spin up a new playbook quickly.
The real limitation is scope. Ivo is built exclusively for in-house teams, not law firms. If you're a firm looking to share AI-powered playbooks with corporate clients, or a mid-size team that doesn't need full enterprise infrastructure, it's not designed for you. And the enterprise focus means smaller teams may find the pricing and complexity more than they need.
Best for: Solo practitioners and small firms that want litigation and contract tools in one affordable subscription.
StrongSuit rebranded from Callidus Legal AI in late 2025 and is the most affordable option on this list. It covers both litigation and transactional workflows, with a proprietary database of over 11 million US cases, automated case validation, and contract review tools — starting at $149/month.
As a Spellbook alternative, StrongSuit's appeal is breadth and price. If you're a litigator who also handles contracts, or a small firm that can't justify separate subscriptions for research, drafting, and contract review, the consolidated approach has merit.
But StrongSuit is fundamentally a litigation platform that added contract review. The playbook infrastructure is underdeveloped compared to Gavel Exec, Ivo, or LegalOn. There's no proprietary market data for contract benchmarking, and no ability to pull from your document repository for context. The contract redlines are functional but lack the precision and practice-readiness you'd get from a tool built specifically for transactional work. The company has about 1,000 customers and is still building credibility in the contract AI space.
If contract review is your primary need, a specialized tool will deliver meaningfully better results.
If you're frustrated with Spellbook's output quality, the fix isn't just switching to any competitor — it's finding a tool that's designed to solve the specific problems you're experiencing. Here's what to evaluate.
This is the only question that ultimately matters. A tool can have every feature on the planet, but if you're spending 30 minutes cleaning up every review, it's not saving you time. Gavel Exec produces surgical redlines because it has more context — your playbook positions, curated market data for the specific deal type, and your organization's document history. More context, more precision, less cleanup.
Spellbook's "Compare to Market" tells you what the average contract looks like. But your indemnification position probably shouldn't be the median of thousands of anonymized contracts. You need a tool that starts from your standards, uses market data as context (not as the primary driver), and can pull from your actual documents to understand how your team handles specific provisions.
Some tools (LegalOn) give you pre-built playbooks but make deep customization harder. Others make you build everything from scratch. Gavel Exec offers both: pre-built playbooks for immediate use, the infrastructure to build deeply customized playbooks, and the ability to learn from your document repository over time. That combination is what actually scales.
Ivo is purpose-built for enterprise in-house teams. CoCounsel skews toward firms with Westlaw subscriptions. StrongSuit targets small firms and litigators. Gavel Exec serves both in-house teams and law firms across corporate law, real estate, and a wide range of transactional practice areas. Make sure the tool actually fits how your team works.
Spellbook runs $300–350/month per user with minimum contract terms and no published pricing. Gavel Exec is $145/month annually or $160/month with no lock-in — roughly half the cost, with onboarding and support included. When the less expensive tool also produces better redlines, the decision gets pretty straightforward.
Gavel Exec puts your team's actual negotiation positions at the center of every review. Pre-built playbooks. Proprietary market data filtered by industry, jurisdiction, and company size. AI that learns from your documents and drafts in your voice. Surgical redlines you can actually send to the other side. All inside Word.
Start with 25 free queries. No credit card required.
Spellbook relies on anonymized market data and "preference learning" from your past edits. Gavel Exec goes deeper: pre-built playbooks for common contract types, proprietary market data filtered by industry, jurisdiction, and company size, and the ability to pull from your document repository to learn how your team actually negotiates. The output difference is noticeable — Gavel Exec produces tighter, more surgical redlines that reflect your positions, not a market average.
Gavel Exec comes with pre-built playbooks developed by practicing deal lawyers. Start reviewing contracts immediately, then customize or build new playbooks as you go. Gavel's team also provides free onboarding and training to help your team get set up.
Yes. Gavel Exec can pull from your repository of executed contracts, templates, and prior redlines to understand your team's negotiation patterns, preferred language, and fallback positions. The more context you give it, the more precise the output.
Gavel Exec is $145/month per user on an annual plan, or $160/month with no commitment. Spellbook runs approximately $300–350/month per user with minimum contract terms. Gavel includes onboarding, training, and support in every plan.
Gavel Exec is focused on AI-powered contract review, redlining, and drafting. Gavel also offers Gavel Workflows, a separate rules-based document automation platform for generating documents from templates and managing intake. They work well together but are independent products — you can use either on its own.
LegalOn's pre-built playbooks get you started fast, but the redlines often need heavy cleanup. This guide compares 5 LegalOn alternatives for 2026 — including Gavel Exec, CoCounsel, Ivo, StrongSuit, and Spellbook — by features, AI architecture, pricing, and redline quality.
Not getting the contract review you want from Ivo? We review 5 alternatives to their AI contract review, including features, pricing, training data, and more.
Contract AI for renewable energy lawyers accelerates review of PPAs, EPC contracts, interconnection agreements, and project finance documents. Energy-focused AI like Gavel Exec helps identify bankability issues, flag non-standard risk allocation, and produce clean redlines and negotiation memos without replacing legal judgment.
