The Legora alternative question usually turns on one thing: whether you want an AI layer over the work, or a system that also runs the money underneath it. Legora is the first. Writford is the second, and it publishes its prices.
Legora is a strong product with real customers, and firms buying legal AI shortlist it for good reason. This page is written for the point at which you are comparing, so it sticks to what each company publishes about itself and says plainly where the honest choice runs against us.
What Legora says it is
Taken from legora.com on 10 September 2026, in their words rather than ours.
The headline is "Legal work, without limits. Collaborative AI for exceptional lawyers", and the product is described as "the collaborative AI powering lawyers to review and research faster, draft smarter, and advise with precision". The platform is the Legora aOS, "the agentic operating system for legal work".
The capabilities the product page names are jurisdiction-aware legal research grounded in real sources, structured citations, document understanding, tabular review at scale, firm-wide search across a DMS and knowledge bases, agentic workflows, and delivery to clients through a portal. There are Word and Outlook add-ins. The audience is law firms and in-house teams, across M&A, litigation, banking, tax, insurance and the public sector. The about page states 30+ markets and 1480+ customers.
That is a serious legal AI platform, described clearly, and nothing here disputes any of it.
The fork: AI over the work, or AI on the same record as the money
Here is the distinction that actually decides this comparison, and it is a category difference rather than a criticism.
Legora's product page names review, research, drafting, workflows, search and client delivery. It does not name time recording, billing, invoicing, client ledgers, the client account, bank reconciliation, VAT returns or legal accounting. That is not an oversight. It is a different product category, and a firm buying an AI layer to sit over an existing practice management system is buying exactly the right thing.
Writford is the other shape. Matters, clients, documents, time recording, disbursements, invoices, aged debtors, the client ledgers, the three-way reconciliation, the VAT return and the AI are one system reading one set of records.
Why that matters in practice, and it is not an abstraction:
A client ledger cannot go overdrawn. The balance decrement is atomic and refuses unless the matter already holds the money, so the overdraw is prevented at the moment of posting rather than found afterwards on a report. An entry on an exception report and an outright refusal are very different answers.
The reconciliation compares three figures, not two. The bank statement, the cash book and the total of the individual client ledgers all have to agree. Two out of three is how a shortfall hides. Month-end will not complete while either variance is anything but zero.
The cashier sees every matter and edits none. Read access and write access are two separate permissions rather than one combined firm-access switch, which is the only honest way to build that role.
The client account guide and the three-way reconciliation guide go through both properly.
So if your firm already runs a practice management system it is happy with and wants better AI on top, an AI layer is the right purchase and this page is not trying to talk you out of it. If you are replacing the whole thing, the question is whether the AI and the ledger read the same file.
What Legora publishes that we do not
This is the fork that runs against us, and it deserves stating rather than burying.
Legora's site publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, alongside GDPR and HIPAA compliance and a commitment of zero AI training on customer data.
Writford does not hold SOC 2 or those ISO certifications today. What we do publish is on the security page: UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 compliance, ICO registration ZC119995, processing in UK regions including the AI inference itself, TLS 1.2 or better in transit with strong encryption at rest, a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement, a named list of sub-processors, and the same commitment that client files, prompts and answers are never used to train AI models.
If your firm's procurement requires a SOC 2 report or an ISO certificate, that is a real requirement and we cannot meet it today. Say so early in any evaluation rather than discovering it at the end.
One jurisdiction, on purpose
Legora describes 30+ markets. Breadth like that is a genuine strength and a different design goal from ours.
Writford is built for the law of England and Wales and nothing else. The research retrieves from UK sources. The accounts are built around the rules an English or Welsh firm is actually inspected against. The compliance screens ask the questions those rules ask. Nothing has been generalised to also suit somewhere else.
That is a trade, and the honest version is: a firm with cross-border work, or work in Scotland or Northern Ireland, is better served by something built for that. A firm entirely in England and Wales gets a product with no compromises made on its behalf.
How quickly can you get to a number
Legora's site publishes no pricing and invites you to book a demo. That is the ordinary model for enterprise legal AI sold with onboarding around it, and for a large firm a scoped quote often fits better than a list price would.
Writford publishes everything. Standard is £828 per seat for a one-year term, every plan includes the full AI, and credits and storage are pooled across the firm rather than rationed per seat. There is a 14-day free trial that needs no card. The pricing page carries the current figures and the one, three and five year terms. Writford is sold on those terms rather than as a rolling monthly subscription, which is worth knowing before you compare a monthly figure against anybody else's.
So the difference is not better or worse, it is how fast you can answer your own question. You can know our cost today and have the software open with your own matters in it this afternoon.
How to compare them properly
Four questions settle most of these decisions, and none is about feature lists.
What are we actually replacing? An AI layer and a practice management system are different purchases. Decide which one you are making before you compare anything.
Who owns the client account risk? Ask what happens when somebody posts a payment a matter cannot fund. Only one answer stops the thing the rules exist to prevent.
What does procurement require on paper? If a SOC 2 report is mandatory, find that out in week one.
What is the real annual figure for our shape of firm, with everything switched on? In writing, from both, for the same number of seats.
If you want the wider view first, the best legal AI tools guide covers the category and the practice management guide covers what replaces what.