The contract management software market is hot right now.
Organisations seem to have finally realised that they’ve suffered from having a “desk drawer” approach to contracts. Being able to manage your contracts in one place, author them, approve them and sign them is a massive productivity boost. Not only that, it also offers a single source of truth, having all of your contract documents and contract management data in one place.
While this article focuses on procurement contract management software, some of these platforms also have features for Sales and Legal. This is important when considering contract management software for mid-market businesses. If you’re not an enterprise company, any software you purchase needs to be versatile, easy to use and fast to implement.
Contract management software covers a pretty broad spectrum.
In this article, we’re going to focus on answering two specific questions:
- Which contract management software solutions are best suited to mid-market businesses?
- And what do they offer in terms of features and product, as well as what differentiates them?
This is not sponsored content
No provider has paid us to be part of this list. Ask yourself when reading other similar articles whether this is also true of them…
13 top Contract Management software for Mid-Market companies
When we researched this list, we deliberately tried to stay away from more specialist tools focusing on one area of pre-signature contract management. For example, you won’t find any solutions here that just focus on contract signature, or contract authoring.
They may have these features built in to some extent. However, what you’ll find with the 13 solutions included in this list are a mix.
We’ve got more rounded, contract lifecycle management software solutions which can be used as a stand-alone software in here. But then we also included a couple in here which are a bit more specialist, focusing on one or two specific aspects of contract management.
If you’ve used any of these yourself, we would love to get your feedback on what you think. We plan to refresh the article a couple of times a year, as solutions are constantly adding features and new solutions come onto the market.
All of these solutions we have listed are easily within reach for businesses with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. Which leads us nicely onto the next question.
What is considered a mid-market business?
For the sake of this article, we would consider any business above $50 million and below $1 billion in annual revenue to be a mid-market business.
Below $50 million we define as a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). The European Union takes a very similar definition.
SMEs are unlikely to see a decent ROI on contract management software, unless it’s a lower-priced software with relatively basic contract repository functionality.
Mid-market businesses, on the other hand, could invest in this software and easily see a quick return if they have the right change management and procurement talent in place.
Above $1 billion businesses are typically a target of established, source-to-contract and contract lifecycle management suites. I’m referring here to the likes of as SAP Ariba, GEP and Coupa procurement software for the suites, and the likes of Icertis and Ironclad for the full-stack CLM plaftorms.
So, let’s get started!
1. SimpliContract
SimpliContract is a SaaS-based, AI-powered end-to-end enterprise contract authoring and lifecycle management platform.
Contract authoring features enable you to democratise and accelerate contract authoring with standardised templates, dynamic approval workflows, and automated deviation and version tracking.
Its CLM Platform helps organisations accelerate revenue, reduce risk, improve compliance, reduce expenses and boost productivity.
A contract repository centralises all your contracts – new and historical – into an intelligent and secure digital repository that understands your search requirements and contract lifecycle.
You can turn contracts into rule books for business operations, project planning, and financial analysis with SimpliContract’s contract management features.
Enterprise integrations make contracts work as a team with other business systems and applications to get efficiencies across the board.
SimpliContract’s analytics and insights promise to keep you on top of contract operations, clause usage, key milestones, consumption levels, and performance metrics. All while data extraction features leverage AI to read and analyse contracts, tag metadata, find pricing information, and evaluate risks.
2. CobbleStone
CobbleStone Contract Insight® contract management software is an Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system selected by thousands of contract admin, legal, and procurement professionals.
It offers a user-friendly software solution for managing the entire source to contract process.
We did a Live Demo stream with Cobblestone back in October 2022.
CobbleStone Contract Insight is an AI-enabled platform that has been helping both large and small organisations better manage their contracts for over 20 years, spanning numerous industries including government, healthcare, education, legal, banking, pharma, retail, and many others.
You can use Contract Insight to manage everything from contracts (drafting, authorising, signing, and tracking), to compliance, workflows, vendor management, and risk governance.
It creates custom and ad-hoc contract management reports, increases visibility through its dashboards and calendars, and leverages AI to deliver data extraction, field mapping, and clause matching features.
For large enterprises, CobbleStone offers Contract Insight Enterprise Edition, and for smaller organisations there’s Contract Insight Express Edition.
Contract Insight is backed by artificial intelligence and can automate and streamline the entire contract lifecycle with user-friendly features and administration.
3. Trackado
Trackado is a Swedish scaleup offering a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution.
Intended to serve companies of any size, in all industries – wherever legacy contracting systems need to be updated.
Trackado offers document repository features. These centralise all your company’s documents, giving you a top-down view of the entire contract portfolio.
Users are able to upload files directly, or via links from their own networks or cloud storage.. Once linked to the systems, all contracts are readily indexed and searchable.
Trackado’s built-in dashboards aim to provide convenient insights into upcoming activities – keeping users up-to-speed on recent costs, revenues and contract additions.
The platform also offers a partners module. This allows all contract parties to access shared information and details from a single location.
Trackado’s milestone tracking enables users to register key contract milestones, including reviews and cancellations. These can then be assigned to specific users, who are kept up to date with automatic deadline reminders.
4. Trakti
Trakti is a contract negotiation and management platform integrated with blockchain, and specifically focusing on contract authoring.
Created for procurement, sales, legal, and HR, it automates your templating, negotiation and obligation management processes – supporting the entire contract management life cycle.
Trakti transforms your Word templates into adaptive, automated and interactive legal templates thanks to smart contracts and the Blockchain. Users are able to use all of Trakti’s negotiation processes with no limitations.
The platform can activate and manage evaluations, electronic signatures, reviews, payments and obligation management with one click in a single, certified, end-to-end solution. It manages RFX, Tenders, Auctions, bilateral and multilateral contract negotiations in the cloud, all with full security and access control. Additionally, a user-friendly comparison view facilitates easy communication and information sharing among team members.
Trakti accelerates your contractual flow and integrates the deployment of smart contracts for payment automation and obligation management, all thanks to the power of the blockchain.
5. Terzo
Terzo is a vendor relationship platform focusing on contract lifecycle management (CLM).
It aims to address the challenges of complex vendor ecosystems by offering a CRM-like platform built for buyers, instead of sellers.
Positioning itself as “the world’s first VRM platform that transforms vendors into partners”, Terzo promises to break down silos, connect stakeholders and unite teams both externally and internally.
Vendor 360, Terzo’s intelligent vendor management platform, provides a holistic view of your supplier ecosystem. Smart contract features bring AI- powered auto-extraction to your contract analytics. Meanwhile, spend insights allow you to quickly compare actual vs. committed spend, so teams can consolidate the portfolio and eliminate redundant vendors.
Additionally, custom no-code workflows allow you to prioritise purchases for demand management – digitally transforming the way your teams collaborate, with end-to-end visibility.
Terzo aims to empower enterprises in unlocking hidden strategic opportunities, providing insights that allow them to drive innovation, improve governance, increase collaboration and optimise performance.
6. Raindrop
Raindrop Systems Inc is a well-established and rapidly growing US software company, providing a Business Spend Management and Source to Contract solution.
Its platform leverages ML and AI to ensure visibility and control of spend. It also automates the procurement workflow and is easy to implement.
The company aims its solutions to the challenges of start-ups, medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises alike.
Raindrop’s Contract Lifecycle Management module offers a comprehensive solution for digitising, comprehending, and efficiently handling contractual obligations within an organisation. It converts contractual metadata into digital format and enhances it with relevant contextual information. This enables business stakeholders to gain visibility and valuable insights, enabling them to actively manage their contractual commitments.
Utilising AI, a cadence workflow engine, a supplier collaboration framework, and seamless digital signature integrations to streamlines the contract execution process. Not only that, but it also empowers end users with robust analytics and an exceptional digital interface.
We’re a Raindrop partner here at Procurement Software. If you’d like to see a demo of what it can do, just fill out a few details here and we’ll be in touch.
7. Leeway
Leeway offers contract repository solutions to finance, legal, sales and procurement organisations.
It helps companies to reduce the time spent on contract management and giving them more control and visibility over legal and financial risk.
For legal teams, Leeway offers a “Smart Personal Assistant”, designed to eliminate repetitive tasks. An ongoing negotiations dashboard increases efficiency and reduces time consuming back-and-forths while automating internal workflows.
Sales teams benefit from an optimised and intuitive document template manager, with one-click send from the platform. Meanwhile, real time task management gives you full visibility on negotiations.
Leeway’s solutions for financial teams allow them to store and access important data at any time, keeping track of your customers and suppliers with automated deadline tracking and customisable internal workflows.
It stores all your contracts on a secure platform and improves your follow-up with our automatic reminders
8. Inhubber
Inhubber is a contract management and digital signature platform powered by blockchain and AI. It boasts “the world’s highest security and 100% AI automation”.
Inhubber enables you to create, sign and store contracts securely. It simplifies contracts, making them easy to understand, manage and interact with. It eliminates inefficiencies caused by manual contract analysis and approval processes. At the same time, it also provides AI-powered management of contractual obligations and deliverables.
The platform improves business flow, using the AI as a digital assistant to support you in contract search and contract analysis, as well as reminding you of deadlines and dates.
A contract repository is also built in to securely store all of your contracts in one single platform.
The platform’s own digital signature approves Zip, Excel, multimedia (video), and any other file formats.
End-to-end encryption provides a uniquely secure way to sign and store contracts, eliminating the need for dedicated servers and VPN connections.
9. Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper is a UK-based supplier management and contract lifecycle management platform.
It focuses on its cloud-based system, its reliance on collaboration, clear actionable data, obligation and compliance tracking, email alerts and, chiefly, ease of use.
Gatekeeper’s Head of Content and good friend Daniel Barnes was a guest on The Procuretech Podcast in Series 3.
The core modules provide contract and supplier visibility and control, advanced analytics, and facilitated workflow.
Several additional modules can provide solutions for employee management, personal vendor registration portal, scorecards, spend management, risk management, as well as offering integrations for NetSuite and Salesforce.
10. Evisort
Evisort offers innovative solutions for contract lifecycle management and contract analytics, as well as a central contract repository in one end-to-end platform.
Use cases include vendor contract management, regulatory compliance and third party risk-management.
The platform is developed by attorneys and data scientists from Harvard and MIT with performance and deep AI understanding in mind. Evisort uses proprietary AI to create out-of-the-box algorithms that analyse, organise, and provide actionable insights on your contracts.
Evisorts CLM tools allow you to scale people, simplify contract administration, and streamline workflow.
Contract Analytics protect profitability, mitigate risks, and increase business agility by visualising key metrics.
Contract Repository & Integrations drive user adoption by integrating with your existing systems. Access all your contracts from one secure location.
Evisort’s Contract Intelligence Platform allows central management of contracts, real-time visibility into agreements, and streamlined document collaboration.
11. Concord
Concord is a US-based scaleup offering a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution.
As an all-in-one CLM platform, Concord enables you to create, negotiate, sign and manage contracts.
It supports users through the entire contracting process, from online negotiation, to e-signature and follow-through.
Concord’s collaboration features allow you to edit, redline, and comment on documents alongside your teams and third parties.
Its automated approvals automatically direct the right documents to the right person within your organisation. While email alerts and automatic reporting help to proactively manage deadlines and renewals.
The software integrates easily with Salesforce, Dropbox and Google Docs. It also offers data security tools to keep your information safe.
Concord aims to get you to agreements faster-saving time and money and making your business more agile.
12. Contract Safe
ContractSafe is a California-based startup, offering cloud-based contract repository software.
It helps users to easily keep track of their documents while streamlining and automating tedious contracting processes.
The platform especially seeks to satisfy businesses of all sizes, offering products at various levels from Basic, all the way up to Enterprise. All plans are available with a short free trial, along with options to pay either monthly or annually.
ContractSafe provides contract management and an easily-searchable contract repository.
This means the software can quickly find the document you need by searching from all available sources – including scanned documents.
In addition, the platform provides easy email reminders and reporting to keep you ahead of deadlines. It also allows for unlimited users per subscription.
ContractSafe’s software is cloud-based and SOC2 certified, so your data is completely secure.
13. Avvoka
Avvoka is a cloud-based platform offering legal document generation, contract automation and authoring.
It offers solutions for in-house legal, law firms, and business teamsDesigned for companies that want end-to-end contract automation, enabling you to automate the creation, storage, execution, and data-tracking of standard-form legal documents.
Their Chief Growth Office, Giles Thompson, was also guest on The Procuretech Podcast:
Its visual, intuitive document automation allows you to rapidly build and draft documents, with features including a visual automation wizard, an advanced conditionality builder, and libraries for clauses, questions and complex logic.
Avvoka can generate contracts using a questionnaire, API, or your existing data systems. It allows internal real-time collaboration, and negotiation with counterparties directly on the Avvoka platform. All with comprehensive version tracking and auditability.
Live document data capture gives you insights from the negotiation of documents: Run reports across your contracts, track negotiation trends, and spot where you’re seeing pushback on certain clauses.
Avvoka aims to give you all the information you need to start creating better precedents.
Which is the best Contract Management software for you?
Start with the end in mind!
What type of contract management activities do you want to digitise and possibly automate?
Do you need AI-driven features such as document generation or digitisation of metadata? Or do you need to prioritise the process automation of more routine tasks, such as authorisation and signature?
Finally, what are the biggest concerns and headaches that keep your Legal or IT departments up at night. They may be different to those of Procurement. However, you’ll almost certainly need them as allies to get a budget for contract management software approved.
Also, don’t forget the importance of UI/UX and ease of implementation. If the wider organisation will need access to the data in there, then choose a platform which makes it easy for them to log in, search and find this.
When it comes to pricing, all of them will be dependent upon your specifics. Whether it’s level of customisation, number of users or whether you’re able to buy different features as a modular structure.
Be careful about those which offer pricing on a per user / per seat model. If your business scales, or if you want the whole organisation to digitise their contracts, then this could be an impediment. Enterprise licenses with unlimited users, on the other hand, could well be an enabler.
If you’d like to have a chat about how we can help you source the best contract management software for your requirements as a mid-market business, then schedule an intro call. It would be great to learn more about what you’re looking for!
