Top 10 Ironclad Alternatives for Contract Lifecycle Management Software

Legal departments, RevOps teams, and contract managers in every business are adopting technology on a larger scale, especially tools that can help streamline one of the stickiest parts of the business: contracts.

The market for contract management has been growing steadily over the last few years. In 2021, the contract management market size was valued globally at $965B and is projected to reach almost $3000B by 2030. 

For teams that are considering contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions, there are hundreds of vendors to choose from. One of the more popular solutions is Ironclad. While theirs is a powerful tool, there are many other Ironclad alternatives that might better suit your budget, business size, and workflow.

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What Is Contract Lifecycle Management Software?

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is the process of managing an organization’s legally binding agreements with employees, clients, and business partners at each stage of the contract process. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software is a technology that helps businesses streamline and automate the contract process.

Many businesses still manually manage their contracts using spreadsheets and emails. This can increase their risk of poor contract storage and not knowing where contracts are or what’s in them, making it incredibly difficult to fulfill contractual obligations. Luckily, CLM software helps centralize most contract operations, enabling full awareness of the status of your contracts at all times.

Most CLM solutions share a standard set of features — contract creation, redlining, review, approval, etc — but each tool has unique draws that might appeal to your specific needs. 

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What to Look for When Assessing CLM Providers

When choosing a CLM provider, going with the most popular tool or the one with the largest market share can be tempting. However, like most other tools or processes, your choice of CLM vendor should be based on the needs and goals of your business. Specifically, it would be more practical to assess potential CLM vendors by how well they support your business, the ease of implementation, and whether or not they can grow with your business. 

and Let’s dive into what that means.

Quality of Support

Most CLM providers offer some form of support — but not all support is created equally. Whereas some vendors will give you the white glove, and hands-on treatment, others will provide you with some documentation and a few videos to get you ramped up. As you make this big decision, determining the kind of support you’ll need — and how much you’re willing to pay for it — is crucial in choosing the right vendor for you.

Alignment With Your Contract Process

Each company has its own way of doing things. While there are similarities across most businesses within an industry, there are also significant distinctions in each company’s inner workings. As you map out what an ideal contract process looks like to your team, ensure that the vendor you choose can support your vision in theory and in practice.

Ease of Implementation

Implementation can be a sore spot for many businesses trying to onboard a contract management solution and is often the reason most vendor relationships fail. As you assess CLM providers, be sure to research their implementation process. That way, you’ll be able to determine if it’s aligned with your needs, available resources, and capacity.

Promising Partnership

It’s important that your chosen vendor aligns with your business, not just in the present day but in your longer-term vision. As part of your assessment, evaluate whether or not the company will be able to scale with you as you grow and how you feel about its own growth trajectory. In the case of CLM, it’s important that you don’t just choose a vendor, but a business partner who will support your growth.

While Ironclad could meet these criteria, it’s not a foregone conclusion. Be sure to do your own research and communicate with your stakeholders about what’s important to you.

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Top 10 Ironclad Alternatives

Here are the top 10 Ironclad alternatives to consider before choosing a contract management solution.

Contractbook

Contractbook is a CLM provider based in Denmark that caters to sales and RevOps teams at growing SMB businesses across the globe.

Contractbook enables businesses to manage every part of the contract management process in one centralized location — before, during, and after signing — and offers a library of templates to take the headache out of contract creation. Our platform features tons of integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, and others, that can help you get your teams on the same page.

Contractbook helps businesses organize their most important contracts, automate contract workflows, and facilitate seamless collaboration, both internally and externally.

Juro

Like Ironclad, Juro is a CLM software provider that caters mostly to mid-market tech companies. Their all-in-one contract automation platform that helps businesses streamline stages of their contract management process, from contract creation to execution.

Their suite of integrations allows users to integrate their CLM solution with foundational business tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and others. 

LinkSquares

Based in Boston, Massachusetts, LinkSquares is a contract management solution powered by AI. They boast a full-suite, end-to-end CLM solution that allows users to manage each stage in the contract process from a centralized location. 

Their product suite is broken into three major features: Finalize, which helps streamline the pre-signature process, Sign, which enables eSignatures, and Analyze, which extracts data and provides AI-powered insights into your contracts.

Evisort

Evisort, a San Francisco-based software provider offers AI-powered CLM that helps companies transform their business with contract intelligence. Evisort serves SMB, mid-market, and enterprise companies alike in the healthcare, software, and real estate industries. Even more, they’ve analyzed over a billion contract data points, and their AI has been trained on millions of contracts.

Evisort’s platform allows users to draft, negotiate, analyze, automate, and report on contracts. They also enable internal collaboration and sport several pre-built integrations.

PandaDoc

Whereas Ironclad — and the other companies listed here — specialize in CLM, PandaDoc is more of a document generation generalist. PandaDoc, which comes with built-in eSignature capabilities, can help teams manage proposals, forms, and contracts in their simple, easy to use platform.

For companies that are in early growth stages and don’t need all the bells and whistles of ended-to-end CLM, PandaDoc is a great choice for streamlining important business documents. 

DocuSign CLM

DocuSign was the original eSignature company, providing ways to digitally sign documents when the world was still hooked on manual signing. In the last few years, DocuSign has expanded its offerings to include CLM, helping companies manage their digital contracts better. 

DocuSign CLM allows you to move your contracts through the sales process faster and combined with its other products like document generation, clickwrap, identity verification, and more.

itsIcertis

While Icertis offers features that can help users through each stage of the contract process, their biggest claim to fame is contract intelligence. Using their platform, businesses can automate their contract workflows and transform data into actionable insights.

Icertis’ AI-powered CLM helps businesses standardize their agreements, centralize contract management for better visibility, and improve data governance for contract fulfillment.

Lexion

Built with operations teams in mind, Lexion helps companies automate and streamline workflows. Lexion’s platform centralizes the contract lifecycle and enables business-critical integrations with tools like Microsoft Word, Teams, and DocuSign. 

In addition to a contract repository and workflow automation, Lexion also comes equipped with AI capabilities, which allows businesses to draft and negotiate contracts quickly to get deals done faster.

DealHub.io

DealHub.io helps businesses to streamline their revenue generation engine. While its offering isn’t specific to contract lifecycle management, CLM is a crucial part of their revenue machine, along with CPQ, DealRoom, and Billing.

For businesses that haven’t fully developed their legal function, DealHub.io is a perfect tool to help you manage contracts efficiently while also accelerating deals. 

Conga

Conga is an end-to-end contract lifecycle management provider that helps businesses simply and refine their contract process to get the most value from them. Conga’s product suite includes CPQ, document generation, and a Salesforce integration. 

In addition to the contract lifecycle, Conga also manages the “revenue lifecycle,” which improves compliance and visibility, helping businesses close deals faster while lowering risk.

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In Summary

Choosing a CLM vendor is not a task to be taken lightly. Whatever solution you adopt will likely continue to serve your company for years to come, so it’s crucial that you do your due diligence when assessing alternatives. 

There are lots of Ironclad alternatives in the market for you to choose from that probably suit your specific business needs better. Contractbook, for example, is a powerful tool that helps sales and RevOps leaders improve efficiency and close deals faster.

See it in action — learn more about Contractbook, or request a demo today!