Spellbook is a strong, focused product: AI contract drafting, review, and redlining that lives inside Microsoft Word, with transactional playbooks and a completed SOC 2 Type II report. It runs roughly $100–$300 per seat per month with a 7-day trial. If you are a pure transactional lawyer who lives in Word, it may be exactly right. If you do litigation, manage matters and deadlines, or just want a free way to start, here are the honest alternatives.

Where Spellbook stops

It's contracts-only. No litigation workflow, no matter management, no court-day math.
No case-citation validation. Great for clause language; not built to check the cases in a brief.
No free plan. A 7-day trial, then a per-seat subscription.

The alternatives

Draftiro — when you need more than contracts

Draftiro is an AI-first legal workspace: drafting, research with citation validation against CourtListener, conflict checks with an audit trail, and jurisdiction-aware deadline math. Crucially, it also ships a Microsoft Word add-in, so you keep the in-Word workflow Spellbook users like — but you also get litigation and matter management around it. It starts free (no card), with paid tiers from $29/mo. Full Draftiro vs Spellbook comparison.

CoCounsel — for heavy document review

If your transactional work skews toward large-scale due-diligence review, CoCounsel (~$225–$500/user/mo) reviews very large document sets well — but it's a research/review tool, not a Word-native drafting assistant, and it costs more.

Stay with Spellbook if…

Your entire practice is transactional contract drafting in Word.
You rely on Spellbook's specific playbook and fallback-language libraries.
A completed SOC 2 Type II report is a hard procurement requirement today (Draftiro's SOC 2 Type II is in progress, not yet complete — we won't claim otherwise).

The honest bottom line

Spellbook is the better pick for a dedicated contracts desk that never leaves Word. Draftiro is the better pick for litigators, generalists, and solos who need contracts and matters, research, conflicts, and deadlines — with a Word add-in so you don't lose the editing surface. Start with the comparison.