Filevine and Clio both sell software that runs a law firm, and the shortlist that puts them side by side is almost always a plaintiff or litigation practice deciding whether to stay on general practice management or move to something built for case workup.
The axis most buyer guides use — customization against speed of setup — is real but secondary. The one that decides the bill is this: Clio charges for the people, Filevine charges for the work. Clio is a per-seat subscription. Filevine is a seat price with a meter grid on top, and the meters count projects, depositions, tasks, and client portal invitations. A twelve-person personal injury firm carrying 2,000 open files and a twelve-lawyer general practice carrying 300 matters pay roughly the same to Clio and very different amounts to Filevine.
What changed in 2026
Both vendors bought their way into legal research from opposite ends, so “it connects to your research tool” no longer separates them.
Clio closed a $1B acquisition of vLex alongside a $500M Series G at a $5B valuation and shipped Clio Work, a research and drafting product running on Clio Library — over 1 billion documents from 100+ jurisdictions, with a citator called Cert. Filevine raised $400M led by Insight Partners at a roughly $3B valuation in September 2025, acquired Parrot (now Depositions by Filevine, carrying the MedChron medical-chronology tool) and Pincites (now LOIS for Word), then shipped LOIS Console on 2 June 2026 and LOIS Legal Research on 22 June 2026.
The two research products are different shapes. Clio Library is a corpus you search. LOIS Legal Research is a passage-level citator: it checks whether one proposition you selected inside an opinion is still good law across millions of US federal and state precedential opinions, pairing citation-graph analysis with semantic retrieval so it can surface a case that undercuts the proposition without citing the original. If the job is finding authority, Clio’s corpus is the larger asset. If the job is confirming that a sentence already in your brief still holds, Filevine answers the narrower question more directly.
Where Filevine wins
Medical records are a first-class object. MedChron turns record dumps into treatment chronologies, which is the single largest labor line in a PI file. It ships with LOIS Expert rather than as a separate integration.
Deposition work is native. Depo CoPilot records and works up depositions inside the matter, and Filevine sells deposition services alongside the software — a workflow Clio has no answer for.
LOIS Console acts instead of answering. Launched 2 June 2026, it writes back to the system of record: setting tasks, moving deadlines, updating calendars, generating documents, refreshing contacts, running reports. Clio’s in-plan AI answers questions about a matter; it does not move your deadline chain.
Intake is a licensed product, not a form. Lead Docket handles lead routing and conversion with 100 LeadsAI summarizations and 100 automation actions per user per month, plus texting numbers at $20 per month.
Reporting is built for matter volume. Periscope ships as its own subscription — 15 raw datasets with 10 user licenses at the Enterprise tier, 3 at Small Business.
Where Clio wins
You can price the entry tier without a call. Starter is $49 per user per month, published. Filevine publishes no price anywhere on its site.
Accounting is in the subscription from the floor tier up. Bank sync, receivables, and trust and operating reconciliation come with Starter rather than as a module.
It fits a mixed practice. Filevine’s product DNA is plaintiff-side. A firm running PI alongside family, estate, and business work gets one system in Clio instead of one system plus exceptions.
Nobody has to administer it. Filevine’s configurability is the reason firms on it end up with a dedicated system administrator. That is a salary, and it belongs in the comparison.
Court rules are priced per firm. Additional jurisdictions run $10 each per firm per month, or $120 a year — a per-firm line rather than a per-seat one.
Pricing reality
Neither vendor lets you build a quote from the website. They fail differently, and the difference is what you should plan around.
Clio publishes exactly one number: $49 per user per month for Starter. Core, Signature, and Elite are all “get pricing” or “book a demo,” and Clio’s own FAQ places AI on Core and above — so the single tier you can price yourself is the one tier without AI in it. Clio Work is demo-gated too.
Filevine publishes no prices at all, but it does publish its meters, which is more useful for modelling a bill than a headline seat rate. From Filevine’s product specifications:
Base-platform AI is metered at three chats per user per month, after which access is restricted until the next cycle.
LOIS Assistant, Advanced, and Expert are priced per Project against a contracted annual minimum on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. Unused projects do not roll forward.
LOIS Legal Research is per user per month and is not included in any base subscription.
Depo CoPilot is an annual per-deposition tier. A recording of 10 minutes or more counts as one deposition, and each deposition is confined to a single day — so a two-day deposition counts as two.
Automation and LOIS Workflows are sold in annual Task tiers, with overage fees above the tier.
The client portal is licensed per active client invitation, counted as a unique email and case-number pair.
Model both against case volume, not headcount. Ten Clio Starter seats is $5,880 a year and you can confirm that today. Ten Filevine seats is unknowable from the website, and the seat line is not where the money is.
The trap to avoid
Filevine’s trap is the project meter meeting plaintiff-practice reality. A Project counts as active until it is archived, and PI files stay open for years behind liens, fee disputes, and minors’ settlements. A firm that sizes its annual minimum on new matters per year and then never archives drifts into overage against a definition it agreed to before it understood. The guard: count non-archived matters older than 24 months in your current system before signing, write an archiving policy, and size the minimum against a closed-file rate you can hold. Use-it-or-lose-it cuts both directions — over-buying is not refunded either.
Clio’s trap is reading the $49 headline as the price of the thing you are evaluating. Starter has no AI, and the capabilities that make Clio competitive against Filevine — Clio Work, and Clio Grow at Elite — sit behind quotes. The guard: request Core, Signature, Elite, and Clio Work pricing in the first week, before a trial has absorbed your evaluation time.
Verdict
Pick Filevine when case workup is the work — medical-record-heavy PI, mass tort, or class action, where chronologies, demand packages, and depositions are the product; when matter volume runs into the thousands; and when someone will own configuration full-time.
Pick Clio when the practice is mixed or non-contingency; when the firm is under about fifty lawyers and wants billing, trust accounting, and accounting in one subscription instead of a module list; when nobody will administer the system; or when you have to size a budget this quarter.
Pick neither when the firm is defense-side and time-and-billing at scale is the real constraint, where Aderant or Elite 3E is the category; or when the buyer is an in-house legal team, since both products put trust accounting and firm billing at the center. If published numbers on every tier matter more than capability, MyCase prices all three of its plans — see Clio vs MyCase.
Default when you cannot separate those conditions: Clio. Not because it beats Filevine on capability for a plaintiff shop — it does not — but because you can start at a known price while the Filevine decision is a case-volume model you should build with real archived-matter counts rather than settle from a shortlist. Move to Filevine when the trial shows the constraint is chronologies, demands, and depositions rather than matters and invoices.
Filevine and Clio both sell software that runs a law firm, and the shortlist that puts them side by side is almost always a plaintiff or litigation practice deciding whether to stay on general practice management or move to something built for case workup.
The axis most buyer guides use — customization against speed of setup — is real but secondary. The one that decides the bill is this: Clio charges for the people, Filevine charges for the work. Clio is a per-seat subscription. Filevine is a seat price with a meter grid on top, and the meters count projects, depositions, tasks, and client portal invitations. A twelve-person personal injury firm carrying 2,000 open files and a twelve-lawyer general practice carrying 300 matters pay roughly the same to Clio and very different amounts to Filevine.
What changed in 2026
Both vendors bought their way into legal research from opposite ends, so “it connects to your research tool” no longer separates them.
Clio closed a $1B acquisition of vLex alongside a $500M Series G at a $5B valuation and shipped Clio Work, a research and drafting product running on Clio Library — over 1 billion documents from 100+ jurisdictions, with a citator called Cert. Filevine raised $400M led by Insight Partners at a roughly $3B valuation in September 2025, acquired Parrot (now Depositions by Filevine, carrying the MedChron medical-chronology tool) and Pincites (now LOIS for Word), then shipped LOIS Console on 2 June 2026 and LOIS Legal Research on 22 June 2026.
The two research products are different shapes. Clio Library is a corpus you search. LOIS Legal Research is a passage-level citator: it checks whether one proposition you selected inside an opinion is still good law across millions of US federal and state precedential opinions, pairing citation-graph analysis with semantic retrieval so it can surface a case that undercuts the proposition without citing the original. If the job is finding authority, Clio’s corpus is the larger asset. If the job is confirming that a sentence already in your brief still holds, Filevine answers the narrower question more directly.
Where Filevine wins
Where Clio wins
Pricing reality
Neither vendor lets you build a quote from the website. They fail differently, and the difference is what you should plan around.
Clio publishes exactly one number: $49 per user per month for Starter. Core, Signature, and Elite are all “get pricing” or “book a demo,” and Clio’s own FAQ places AI on Core and above — so the single tier you can price yourself is the one tier without AI in it. Clio Work is demo-gated too.
Filevine publishes no prices at all, but it does publish its meters, which is more useful for modelling a bill than a headline seat rate. From Filevine’s product specifications:
Model both against case volume, not headcount. Ten Clio Starter seats is $5,880 a year and you can confirm that today. Ten Filevine seats is unknowable from the website, and the seat line is not where the money is.
The trap to avoid
Filevine’s trap is the project meter meeting plaintiff-practice reality. A Project counts as active until it is archived, and PI files stay open for years behind liens, fee disputes, and minors’ settlements. A firm that sizes its annual minimum on new matters per year and then never archives drifts into overage against a definition it agreed to before it understood. The guard: count non-archived matters older than 24 months in your current system before signing, write an archiving policy, and size the minimum against a closed-file rate you can hold. Use-it-or-lose-it cuts both directions — over-buying is not refunded either.
Clio’s trap is reading the $49 headline as the price of the thing you are evaluating. Starter has no AI, and the capabilities that make Clio competitive against Filevine — Clio Work, and Clio Grow at Elite — sit behind quotes. The guard: request Core, Signature, Elite, and Clio Work pricing in the first week, before a trial has absorbed your evaluation time.
Verdict
Default when you cannot separate those conditions: Clio. Not because it beats Filevine on capability for a plaintiff shop — it does not — but because you can start at a known price while the Filevine decision is a case-volume model you should build with real archived-matter counts rather than settle from a shortlist. Move to Filevine when the trial shows the constraint is chronologies, demands, and depositions rather than matters and invoices.