Harvey vs. Ivo: A 2026 Comparison

Harvey and Ivo differ in scope: Harvey is a firm-wide legal platform and Ivo is a contract-specialist product. Harvey is built for law firms and enterprise legal departments, and covers research, due diligence, litigation, and transactional work. Ivo is built for in-house legal teams, and covers the commercial contract from the redline through the executed agreement. Both Harvey and Ivo review contracts against playbooks, and neither Harvey nor Ivo publishes a price. The choice between Harvey and Ivo turns on how much of the legal function the tool is meant to carry.

Key takeaways

1. Harvey is a platform for the whole legal function. Harvey spans agents, document analysis, legal research, shared workspaces, and contract review, aimed at large law firms and enterprise legal departments.
2. Ivo is a contract-specialist product for in-house teams. Ivo ships four named products covering review and redlining, agentic assistance with legal research, portfolio intelligence, and contracting workflow.
3. Both Harvey and Ivo review contracts against playbooks, so playbook support is not a point of separation.
4. Neither Harvey nor Ivo publishes pricing. Harvey is quoted per seat with a minimum commitment. Ivo is quoted on deployment scope and declines to endorse third-party estimates.
5. Both hold SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. Harvey adds ISO 27701 for privacy information management, ISO 42001 for AI management systems, and AIUC-1 for artificial intelligence (AI) agent security, safety, and reliability.

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What is Harvey?

Harvey is a legal AI platform built for law firms and enterprise legal departments. It is organized as a set of named products that share one workspace rather than as a single review tool, and the scope runs well past contracts into legal research, due diligence, and litigation support. The company raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation.

Harvey features

Harvey features are delivered as six named products:

1. Bulk document analysis (Vault): stores and analyzes up to 100,000 documents per vault, including files, email correspondence, and queries, and extracts key terms across the document set
2. Legal and regulatory research (Knowledge): answers complex legal, regulatory, and tax questions across domains
3. End-to-end task execution (Agents): runs multi-step legal work from a single instruction
4. Contract review and intake (Contract Intelligence): triages inbound contracts, auto-reviews them against playbook positions, and flags deviations for a reviewer
5. Cross-organization collaboration (Spaces): shared, permissioned workspaces for legal teams working across organizations
6. Adoption analytics (Command Center): usage analytics and benchmarking for the team leading an AI rollout

The document ceiling is published on the Harvey Vault product page.

Harvey pros and cons

Pros

1. A document ceiling sized for due diligence: a matter that arrives as tens of thousands of files fits inside a single vault
2. Research and contract work in one platform: a lawyer moves between a regulatory question and the agreement without changing tools
3. The broader certification set of the two: the compliance list covers privacy and AI management, not only security

Cons

1. Breadth carries configuration overhead: a platform spanning research, litigation, and contracts takes setup and change management before a team is using all of it
2. A seat minimum rather than a single seat: the annual commitment is the number to size
3. Scope beyond commercial contracts: the litigation and research products are not the ground a contracts-only team works on

What is Ivo?

Ivo is an AI contract intelligence platform for in-house legal, legal operations, and procurement teams. The platform is built around the commercial contract rather than around the practice, and the four Ivo products cover review and redlining, agentic research, portfolio analysis, and contracting workflow. Ivo raised a $55 million Series B in January 2026 led by Blackbird.

Ivo features

Ivo features are delivered as four named products:

1. Contract review and redlining (Ivo Review): works inside Microsoft Word and Google Docs, produces targeted Track Changes rather than full-clause rewrites, and reconciles overlapping playbooks in one review
2. Agentic assistance and research (Ivo Assistant): runs multi-step research tasks from a single instruction, answers questions across a contract repository, and conducts cited multi-jurisdiction legal research
3. Portfolio intelligence (Ivo Intelligence): identifies amendments, addenda, and superseding agreements, consolidates them into the governing version, and works across existing contract lifecycle management systems and repositories
4. Contracting workflow (Ivo Collaborate): routes intake, approvals, negotiation, and signature

Ivo Review also benchmarks proposed language against a company's own comparable executed agreements, filtered by contract type, governing law, party role, and industry. That is negotiation-history benchmarking rather than an external market data set, and the distinction matters when a counterparty asks what is market. Both drafting surfaces and the playbook reconciliation are documented on the same product page.

The research scope sits in a separate product. Ivo names more than 100 sources on the Ivo Assistant page, including the Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR database, the United States Code, and the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, and returns answers with citations back to those sources.

Ivo pros and cons

Three of the four products are generally available, and Ivo Collaborate remains in early access as of October 2026.

Pros

1. Two drafting surfaces, not one: the review product meets lawyers in both Microsoft Word and Google Docs
2. Playbooks built from a team's own paper: the system creates them from existing templates and executed contracts, with citations back to source language
3. Relationship mapping over contracts a team already holds: amendments, addenda, and superseding agreements are identified without restructuring the repository

Cons

1. Scoped to contracts: a firm that needs litigation or broad practice support looks elsewhere
2. The workflow product is not generally available: Ivo Collaborate is in early access, which is a timing risk for a team buying for that capability
3. No published pricing: budgeting takes a sales conversation before a number exists

What are the main differences between Harvey and Ivo?

The main differences between Harvey and Ivo are scope, drafting surface, contract review, legal research, benchmarking, certifications, and how each is priced. Harvey is the broader platform and Ivo is the contract-specialist product:

Harvey and Ivo serve different buying situations. A firm consolidating a practice onto one platform is evaluating Harvey's range; a team raising contract throughput on top of systems it already runs is evaluating Ivo's, and Ivo Intelligence connects to those systems rather than replacing them.

How much do Harvey and Ivo cost?

The cost of Harvey and the cost of Ivo are both quoted rather than published. Harvey is quoted per seat with a minimum commitment, and Ivo is quoted on deployment scope, so any Harvey or Ivo price figure in circulation is a third-party estimate rather than a rate card.

Harvey pricing

Harvey does not publish standard pricing, and estimates vary by firm size, count, and deployment scope. Harvey is quoted per seat with a minimum commitment, and our own analysis of Harvey AI pricing collects what teams report being quoted and where the third-party estimates come from.

Ivo pricing

Ivo prices on deployment scope, user count, contract volume, and integrations rather than on a published tier structure, so budget planning for either tool starts with the implementation conversation rather than a rate card available today. The number is quoted after a demonstration of the team's own contracts and workflow.

Questions to ask Harvey and Ivo before signing

The same questions shorten either evaluation:

1. What is the seat floor, and does it apply in year one? A minimum commitment sets the real entry price regardless of the per-seat figure quoted
2. What is included before add-ons? Research integrations, implementation, and playbook build are the line items that move an annual number
3. What happens at renewal? Ask whether annual increases are modeled into the multi-year total, and at what rate
4. Who runs implementation, and what does it cover? Playbook build, repository migration, and integration work are the steps that decide whether a rollout lands in the quarter it was budgeted for

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How do Harvey and Ivo handle security and data?

Harvey and Ivo both publish their security controls and certifications, and both hold SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.

Harvey security

Harvey undergoes annual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audits, and the Harvey security program also lists ISO 27701 for privacy information management, ISO 42001 for AI management systems, AIUC-1 for AI agent security, safety, and reliability, and coverage of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Harvey requires zero data retention from the model providers behind the platform, which means prompts and outputs are not kept by the underlying model vendors.

Ivo security

Ivo security covers SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification. Ivo states that it complies with GDPR and CCPA, and that it does not train AI models on customer data. Current certification scope sits in the Ivo Trust Center rather than in marketing pages, and Ivo makes the full SOC 2 Type II report, the ISO 27001 certificate, and the penetration test summaries available there under a non-disclosure agreement.

ISO 42001 certifies a management system for AI specifically, which is a distinct question from the information security scope that SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 cover.

Which should you choose, Harvey or Ivo?

The choice between Harvey and Ivo follows the kind of team doing the buying rather than which product reviews a contract better.

Choose Harvey if you are buying for a practice

A firm running due diligence across tens of thousands of documents, handling litigation alongside transactional work, and wanting legal research in the same platform is buying what Harvey is built to be. The budget needs to support a seat minimum, and the rollout needs an owner. A team that cannot support that commitment can compare alternatives to Harvey on entry point.

Choose Ivo if contracts are the bottleneck

Ivo fits a lean legal or procurement function with rising agreement volume, playbooks it wants enforced consistently, and contract data spread across systems. Ivo is bought to raise contract throughput, not to replace a practice platform. If both products are on the shortlist for in-house legal work, scope is the question that separates them.

Where Spellbook fits for contract work

Harvey and Ivo offer two different scopes, and a team that negotiates its own paper every day may find that neither scope is the one it needs. Ivo in particular covers the contract lifecycle, including a repository and a workflow layer that a team with working systems may not want to replace.

Where each one fits: Harvey suits a firm consolidating research, due diligence, and contracts onto one platform. Ivo suits an in-house team rebuilding its contract operation end to end. Spellbook suits a team that wants drafting, review, and market evidence inside the document the team is already editing, without adopting a new system of record.

Spellbook is priced custom per seat by the size of the team, with a free seven-day trial that needs no sales conversation.

What Spellbook does for contract review

Spellbook runs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs and is built around the contract from first draft through signature:

1. Playbook-led review (Review): applies a team's own positions to incoming paper and returns redlines as Track Changes for a lawyer to accept, reject, or rewrite
2. Drafting from your own precedent (Draft): revises and generates clauses from a team's existing agreements
3. Contract questions with citations (Ask): answers questions about an agreement with citations back to the clause, across 130 or more legal research sources
4. Market benchmarking (Compare to Market): checks a position against more than 270 clause types drawn from over 20 million real market contracts
5. Multi-document execution (Associate): runs multi-step work across a whole document set from one instruction

Ivo and Spellbook benchmark a clause against different reference sets. Ivo compares a clause against agreements the company itself has signed, which answers what a team has accepted before. The Compare to Market feature runs a clause-level comparison against a processed set of more than 20 million executed contracts across more than 270 clause types, scored against more than 2,300 defined benchmark standards, and each result traces back to the agreements it scored. A market benchmark answers what counterparties across the market are currently accepting. Building a contract playbook is the step that makes either kind of comparison useful.

What Spellbook is not: it is not a litigation or broad practice platform, which is the ground Harvey covers, and it is not a contract repository or workflow system of record, which is part of what Ivo Intelligence and Ivo Collaborate cover. It holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance, and more than 5,000 in-house teams and law firms across 80 or more countries use it.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Harvey legal AI cost per month?

Harvey publishes no pricing. It is quoted per seat with a minimum commitment, and what a team is quoted depends on seat count, contract length, and which research integrations are added. The number to size is the minimum commitment rather than the per-seat figure.

Is Harvey good for litigation?

Harvey markets a litigation solution alongside the transactional and in-house solutions, and the per-vault document ceiling is sized for disputes where discovery volume is the constraint. Ivo positions itself around commercial contracts rather than litigation, and publishes no litigation solution.

What is the best AI software for contract drafting?

No single product is best for every team. The answer depends on where the drafting happens. A tool that works inside Microsoft Word or Google Docs suits lawyers who draft in the document, while a platform approach suits a firm that wants drafting alongside research and due diligence. Comparing contract redlining tools on the drafting surface each one supports narrows the shortlist quickly.

Does Ivo work in Google Docs?

Yes. Ivo Review runs in both Microsoft Word and Google Docs, and the wider platform also includes a repository product and a workflow product that sit outside the drafting surface.

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See how Spellbook handles your contracts

Harvey covers a practice and Ivo covers the contract lifecycle. If the work you need help with is the agreement itself, review contracts against your own positions in Word and Google Docs, and start a free seven-day trial.