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Harvey vs Spellbook
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
The real difference here is whether you can buy it this week. Pick Spellbook when the bottleneck is contracts and you want to start now: it works inside Microsoft Word with risk flagging, one-click redlines and drafting, on a paid plan you sign up for after a short trial. Choose Harvey when the job is a firm-wide deployment at document scale, where Vault queries across large matter sets. Harvey publishes no price and offers no self-serve signup; it arrives through procurement.
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Side by side
- Summary
Harvey is an enterprise generative-AI platform for legal and professional-services work. It handles research, drafting, summarisation and document review through a suite of Assistant, Vault, Knowledge, Agents and Contract Intelligence. Vault is the document engine: it stores, organises and bulk-analyses large sets and queries across up to 100,000 documents in a single vault, which suits discovery, due diligence and any matter that turns on reading a great deal at once.
Harvey publishes no pricing and has no self-serve path. Every deployment is a negotiated enterprise agreement priced on seat count, firm size, integrations and deployment scope, quoted through sales. Third-party reports and buyer accounts place annual contracts in the low-to-mid six figures, with reported per-seat rates differing by an order of magnitude between sources; Harvey confirms none of these figures publicly. The practical implication is that evaluating Harvey is a procurement exercise with a sales cycle and a negotiated commitment, not a tool you trial on a card.
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Its edge over a general assistant is specialism and grounding: it is built for legal and professional-services material, and through Vault it works from a matter's own documents rather than open-web recall. That makes it a platform for teams producing legal work product at volume, not for the occasional legal question.
- Best for
- Enterprise legal research, drafting, summarisation and document review
- Vault: bulk-analysing up to 100,000 documents per set
- Firm-wide deployments bought through an enterprise agreement
- A suite spanning Assistant, Vault, Knowledge, Agents and Contract Intelligence
- Querying across large legal document sets in one place
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Harvey holds confidential matter material at scale, so the data questions belong inside procurement rather than after it: agree vault access, retention and what may leave the firm with your risk and compliance owners as part of the agreement, and treat rollout as an access-control decision as much as a purchase.
- Summary
Spellbook is an AI legal assistant that works inside Microsoft Word, where contracts actually get drafted and negotiated. It reviews agreements with risk flagging and one-click redlines, drafts new contracts from a firm's templates or from scratch, and answers questions over documents with citations.
Playbooks encode a team's negotiation standards for consistent review, Spellbook Associate extends it into agentic multi-document work, and Compare to Market benchmarks deal terms against similar agreements. Security fits legal material: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA and PIPEDA compliance, and Zero Data Retention agreements available.
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It is a paid product with a short trial, aimed at legal teams, firms and founders with steady contract flow. The assistant accelerates the work; a qualified lawyer still owns every contract before signature.
- Best for
- Contract review with risk flags and one-click redlines inside Word
- Drafting agreements from firm templates or from scratch
- Encoding negotiation standards as playbooks for consistent review
- Multi-document transactional work through Spellbook Associate
- Legal teams and founders who negotiate contracts weekly
- Cost
- Paid only
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Spellbook's security posture is stated plainly. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR, CCPA and PIPEDA compliant, and Zero Data Retention agreements are available so customer contracts are not used for model training. Contracts are among the most sensitive documents a business holds, so confirm the retention and training posture in writing before uploading privileged or client material. And the boundary the tool cannot move stands: it is not a lawyer, its output is not legal advice, and a qualified lawyer owns every contract before signature.
Pricing
- Harvey
- No published price
- Spellbook
- No published price
By area
Where each one pulls ahead, area by area.
| Area | Harvey | Spellbook |
|---|---|---|
| By job | ||
| Legal & compliance | Harvey is an enterprise platform bought through an agreement with minimum seat commitments, not a tool a smaller firm can sign up for and use the same day | Spellbook holds the negotiation standard steady across people: playbooks mean the third reviewer marks up the same clause the same way as the first, and Compare to Market turns whether an indemnity is normal into an answerable question |
| By task | ||
| Writing & research | Harvey approaches drafting and research as an enterprise platform across the full matter, sold through an agreement rather than a self-serve subscription | Spellbook makes the revision standard explicit and repeatable, which is the difference between an assistant with style preferences and one with positions, and a short trial is the whole of the commitment |
Common questions
Can a small firm just sign up and start today?
With Spellbook, yes. It is a paid product with a short trial, aimed at legal teams, firms and founders with steady contract flow, and it runs inside Microsoft Word where those contracts are already drafted and negotiated. Harvey works differently: the public site offers only a demo request and a customer login, pricing is unpublished, and there are minimum seat commitments from the start. A solo or small firm that wants legal AI this week buys Spellbook.
How much does Harvey cost?
There is no official figure to quote: Harvey does not publish pricing, and evaluation runs through an enterprise agreement rather than a signup page, with minimum seat commitments from the outset. Third-party accounts place annual contracts in the low-to-mid six figures, with Harvey confirming nothing publicly. That makes it a considered procurement, not a self-serve purchase. Spellbook, by contrast, is a paid product you can trial briefly and then buy directly. If a stated, self-serve price is what you need to move, that points you to Spellbook.
Which one suits reviewing very large sets of documents?
That is Harvey's Vault, its document engine, which stores, organises and bulk-analyses large sets and can query across up to 100,000 documents in a single vault, scoped to the matter files it holds. It suits discovery, due diligence and matters that turn on reading a great deal. Spellbook is contract-centric: it reviews agreements, drafts from templates or scratch, and answers questions over documents with citations, with Spellbook Associate extending into agentic multi-document work. Remember a qualified lawyer owns every contract before signature.
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Tool facts last checked August 2026