A Draftable alternative for clause-level work
Draftable is a document-comparison product with support behind it. This is a free page for comparing a clause. The honest question is which job you have.
Calling this an alternative to Draftable is only fair with a qualification attached, so here it is first: for comparing documents, it is not one. Draftable is a document-comparison product; this is a page that compares two pieces of text. If you are looking for something to replace a document-comparison product, keep looking, and the honest recommendation is to look at the established ones.
What Draftable is
Draftable compares documents — Word, PDF, PowerPoint and more — and shows the differences between two versions, including changes across formats. It comes as a desktop application, a web version and an API, with the desktop version processing documents locally.
It handles long agreements, preserves layout, deals with the parts of a document that have no textual representation, and produces output that can be exported and circulated. It is a paid product, which means there is a company behind it, a support address that answers, and a security posture a firm's IT department can review. For a practice that compares documents all day, that combination is the product.
What this is
Redline Pad is a single page that compares two pieces of text you paste into it and marks the result the way a redline is marked. It is free, needs no account, and installs nothing. The comparison runs in your browser, so the text is not uploaded — a claim you can check in your developer tools rather than take on trust.
What it is for is the small job: a clause somebody pasted into an email, a paragraph that came back rewritten, a definition you want to check word by word before you reply. Work that would take a minute if you could just see the difference, and ten minutes if you have to save two files first.
It has no view on documents. It cannot open one, cannot produce one, and knows nothing about the clause it is comparing beyond the words in front of it.
Side by side
| Draftable | Redline Pad | |
|---|---|---|
| Compares | Documents — Word, PDF, PowerPoint and more | Two pieces of text you paste |
| Scope | A whole agreement, including layout and formats | A clause or a paragraph |
| Output | A comparison you can export and circulate | A redline on screen, and four ways to copy it |
| Support | A company, a support address, an SLA where you have one | One developer and a feedback form |
| Cost | Paid, with a free online option | Free |
| Setup | An application, or an account for the web version | None — open the page and paste |
Which to use
Use Draftable, or Litera, or Word's own Compare, when you have documents. That covers every comparison that has to be handed over, every pre-signature check, and anything where numbering, schedules or layout could have moved. It is the majority of the comparison work in a transactional practice by some distance.
Use this for the clause in the email, right now, for nothing. It is a smaller claim than a product page usually makes, and it is the true one.