Do I need contract lifecycle management, or just a contract repository?
If a lawyer negotiates contracts that arrive from outside your company, you need contract lifecycle management: redlining, clause libraries, approval workflow and obligation tracking. If what you actually want is to know what you committed to and when it renews, you need a repository, and CLM is an expensive way to get one. The price gap is the tell: Concord publishes $499 a month including five users, Ironclad and Juro quote by conversation, and a repository that comes with the tool sending your documents costs nothing extra.
Asked because you are choosing a tool? DocuDeal is free for 3 documents a month, $149 on Pro for the whole workspace with unlimited users.
Competitor figures on this page were read from each vendor's own published pricing page on 2026-09-17. Prices change; check theirs before deciding.
The question that decides it
Does someone redline contracts that arrive from outside? If yes, that is legal work with real volume and CLM exists for it; nothing in a sales document tool substitutes. If no, and your contracts are ones you write and send, then negotiation workflow is a feature you will never open and you are buying it to solve a filing problem.
What a repository actually has to do
Four things, and they are not many. Extract the terms from a signed document without anybody tagging it. Store the notice period as a number so an alert can be computed backwards. Let you filter across everything rather than opening one PDF at a time. Warn you before the notice window closes rather than on the renewal date. A repository that needs manual tagging stops being current after about a month.
Why teams end up looking at CLM anyway
Usually one incident. Nobody knew when an agreement renewed, it auto-renewed, and the search that followed was for contract management software, which returns platforms built for a different buyer. The incident is real; the category the search returns is aimed at legal departments.
Running both is legitimate
Plenty of companies should. Sales writes and sends commercial paper and keeps its own repository; legal runs negotiated inbound contracts through a CLM. The boundary is roughly whether a lawyer touches the document before it goes out.
| You need | If | Typical published price |
|---|---|---|
| CLM | A lawyer negotiates inbound third-party contracts | Concord from $499/mo incl. 5 users; Ironclad and Juro by quote |
| A repository | You want to know what you agreed and when it renews | Included with the tool that sent the document |
| Both | Sales sends its own paper and legal negotiates inbound | Both, and the boundary is who touches it first |
Concord's published entry plan read from concord.app/pricing on 17 September 2026. Ironclad and Juro publish no price on their pricing pages.