CanLII vs CourtListener

CanLII is a nonprofit service offering free online access to Canadian judicial decisions and legislative documents. Its collections include court judgments, decisions from many federal and provincial administrative tribunals, consolidated statutes and regulations, and annual statutes across Canadian jurisdictions. Search supports full text, title, citation and note-up queries, with filters, facets and sorting. RefLex links cited decisions and legislation available on CanLII. The Commentary collection includes secondary legal materials such as books, journals, articles and reports, while CanLII Connects hosts community case commentary and summaries. Registered myCanLII users can save and organize research in folders and set alerts. Search+ accepts natural-language research questions and returns results with contextual extracts and relevance indicators; it requires a free myCanLII account and has a daily usage limit. CanLII serves legal professionals and the general public. Its terms prohibit systematic downloading of published documents, including through crawlers, plug-ins, extensions and connectors. CanLII says personal information is kept in a secure computer environment with restricted access and that it strives to store it in Canada. Search+ queries and interactions are stored locally in the browser for history and are not retained in CanLII's systems.

CourtListener is a web-based legal research service with a searchable archive covering opinions from U.S. federal and state courts, oral arguments, judges, judicial financial records, and federal filings. Its RECAP Archive includes nearly every federal case, hundreds of millions of docket entries, and tens of millions of legal documents. Search tools cover case law, dockets, and citations, and alerts can track topics, people, companies, citations, and other searches. Free Law Project also provides REST APIs, bulk data files, webhooks, database replication, and an MCP server through which AI assistants can access CourtListener data and APIs. The project is built on open source technology. The free non-member plan includes five docket alerts, unlimited daily opinion search alerts, five daily RECAP search alerts, five Pray & Pay requests, and API limits of 5 per minute, 50 per hour, and 125 per day. Paid tiers list higher limits. Complimentary EDU and qualifying LSO memberships are also available.