A2J Author vs ClauseBase
A2J Author
a2jauthor.org
ClauseBase
clausebase.comSide by side
| Figure | A2J Author | ClauseBase |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Legal Forms Software | 8.0 (#11) | 8.4 (#7) |
| Integrations | The product history describes compatibility with LawHelp Interactive and HotDocs for assembling guided interviews with document templates. | Named integrations include iManage, LawVu, Corporify and Contractify, with additional integrations available through APIs or on request. |
| Purpose | A2J Author lets non-technical court, legal services, and law school staff build web-based guided interviews that help self-represented litigants complete court documents. | ClauseBase provides legal drafting and review tools for creating, refining, and reviewing documents, with its tools available within Microsoft Word. |
| Self-hosting | Organizations can self-host the A2J Viewer, A2J DAT, and guided interviews, but generating documents from HotDocs templates requires LawHelp Interactive or a HotDocs server. | Enterprise plans can include on-premise hosting, data-at-rest encryption, segmentation, logging, API access and white labelling. |
| Support | The site provides a technical-problems contact form that requires users to log in or register to view it. | The company says its support desk is staffed by legal engineers with contract-drafting experience and offers onboarding support. |
Plans
In their own words
A2J Author
A2J Author lets court, legal services, and law school staff create web-based guided interviews to help self-represented litigants complete court documents. Authors use a graphical flowchart map to arrange dialogue and branching questions. Document tools include a template automator for basic documents and the A2J Document Assembly Tool for creating templates. CALI offers free hosting on A2J.org for interviews and templates intended to assist litigants; organizations can also self-host the A2J Viewer, A2J DAT, and interviews. The system is browser-based, and the project history says version 7.0 opened the source under the GNU Affero General Public License. Authors can create Section 508 and WCAG2-compliant interviews when using the latest Viewer and following the accessibility checklist. The free plan is for legal aid organizations, government entities, courts, and other nonprofits using the software non-commercially, with a registered and authenticated account. HotDocs templates cannot be published on A2J.org. When self-hosting, generating documents from HotDocs templates requires LawHelp Interactive or a HotDocs server.
ClauseBase
ClauseBase provides legal drafting and review tools for creating, refining and checking documents, including tools within Microsoft Word. ClauseBuddy can turn a template or document into an interactive questionnaire that generates customized, consistent documents. Its AI review and proofreading tools identify risks, errors and inconsistencies. Clause Finder lets teams build searchable clause libraries and insert stored clauses into Word documents. ClauseBuddy is available as Word and Outlook add-ins and as a standalone web application. Listed integrations include iManage, Contractify, Corporify, Google Maps, company database lookups, drag-and-drop and API options. ClauseBase says it is ISO 27001:2022 certified. Its production servers are hosted in Germany, with hourly encrypted database backups stored in Paris. For typical questionnaire templates, business data sent to generate a PDF or DOCX is deleted within 60 to 120 seconds. The company says it does not use customer data to train or fine-tune its own AI models. Its focus is drafting, not contract storage or archiving, and it does not supply its own ready-made legal templates. Pricing is available by contacting ClauseBase.