Compare / Ironclad
Sandstone vs Ironclad: Where a CLM Ends and Legal Work Begins
Ironclad runs the contract lifecycle — intake forms, approval routing, redlining, native e-signature, repository, renewals, and obligation tracking, with its Jurist agents layered across them. Sandstone works on the legal requests that arrive before a contract workflow exists: the questions and reviews coming in from sales, procurement, and HR. Many teams have both problems.
Sandstone vs Ironclad
| Capability | Sandstone |  Ironclad |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | AI-native operating system for in-house legal work | Contract lifecycle management across create, review, sign, store, analyze, and fulfill |
| Scope of work covered | Every request that reaches legal, contracts included | Contract workflows, pre- and post-signature |
| Intake | Requests captured from Slack, email, and business systems in whatever form they arrive | Intake forms routed into configured approval workflows |
| Triage | Agents interpret intent and route by expertise and capacity, with context attached | Routing driven by the workflow the request was launched into |
| Business context | Counterparty history, prior decisions, and relationships surfaced before work starts | Contract data and metadata within the repository |
| Redlining and drafting | Playbook-driven, attorney-controlled | Jurist agents for drafting, review, and redlining, including inside Microsoft Word |
| E-signature | Native | Native |
| Repository and obligations | Contracts connected to matters, counterparties, and obligations | Repository as system of record, with renewal and obligation tracking |
| CLM coverage | Replaces a CLM for teams that want intake, execution, and system of record in one platform, and runs alongside one where an existing investment makes that the better call | Full contract lifecycle management |
| Permissions across systems | Permissions mapped across every connected integration, so rules hold consistently wherever a document came from | Controls within the Ironclad platform |
| Internal collaboration | Legal works a request together in the app or the plugins, with comments and drafts staying behind the scenes until you choose otherwise | Collaboration within contract workflows |
| Acting back in source systems | Replies and actions go back to Slack, procurement, and contract systems under a shared team identity, with permissions mapped across those integrations centrally | Two-way sync with Salesforce |
| Best fit for | Teams whose bottleneck is the volume and variety of inbound legal work | Enterprises with high contract volume and mature legal operations |
Based on publicly available information as of September 2026. Names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. If anything here is inaccurate or out of date, contact us and we'll update it.
Frequently asked questions
It can, and whether it should depends on where you are. Replacing makes sense when the CLM is functioning mainly as a repository with approvals, adoption outside legal is thin, and you'd rather run one system. Running alongside makes sense when there's deep post-signature obligation management across a large legacy portfolio, when procurement or finance operate inside the CLM too, or when you're mid-term on a multi-year agreement. For most Ironclad customers the answer is alongside — it tends to be well embedded with procurement and sales, and Sandstone integrates with it.
A CLM handles work once it's a contract workflow. Sandstone picks up what's upstream of that: the message in an ask-legal channel about whether a clause can be changed, the procurement question that never becomes a contract, the review request that arrives as an email forward. Requests that do become contracts hand off from there.
Contract AI works once something is a contract. Sandstone works on everything before that: the question in Slack, the procurement query that never becomes a document, the review forwarded by email. The useful test is what share of your team's week is contract workflow and what share is everything else.
Sandstone connects to the CLM rather than replacing it, so there's no migration and no second repository. Ask us for a timeline against your own request mix and we'll put it in writing.
