Agiloft vs Malbek: how they compare in 2026

The models are the engine of a core capability layered on a product that would still function without them. AI Trainer, ConvoAI Document Q&A, the GenAI Prompt Lab, generative redlining and Screens are sold as AI Applications on top of a contract lifecycle management platform whose workflows, repository, approvals and integrations predate them; the Services Agreement defines AI Applications as functionality made available as part of the subscription and specified in the order, and the Supplemental Terms govern them as an add-on class. Remove the models and the CLM stands. Home page, news releases, Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

The models are the engine of a core capability layered on a product that stands without them. Malbek's own framing is an AI-charged CLM: the platform underneath is contract creation, workflow, approvals, repository, milestones and clickwrap, and the AI arrives as separately named and separately sold modules, Malbek AI for insights and recommendations and BusinessIQ for portfolio-level commercial intelligence. The pricing page confirms the separation by making modules one of the four variables a quote is built from. Remove the models and a functioning contract lifecycle management system remains, which is the distinction this band draws. Checked 4 September 2026.

Grounding is real and documented with links to source, short of a testable accuracy figure. ConvoAI Document Q&A ties each answer to the passage in the contract that supports it and lets the user jump to the highlighted text, which the vendor calls white-box AI; Services Agreement section 9.3(c) states that AI features exhibit varying degrees of accuracy and the Supplemental Terms require the customer to check output independently. No test set, benchmark or evaluation is published. The primary-authority limbs do not apply to a tool that reads the customer's own contracts. February 2025 release, Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

Grounding is described architecturally rather than asserted as a slogan. The security FAQ sets out an Ensemble LLM architecture deploying specialised AI agents in a cross-validating chain configuration, combining proprietary Malbek AI and ML models with foundation models reached through AWS Bedrock and Azure, which the vendor states ensures well-grounded and cited results. A cross-validating chain is a real control and is more than most records on this axis publish. What is missing is measurement: no accuracy figure is published, no test set is described, no evaluation is linked, and no failure mode is named anywhere, including hallucination. Grounding to primary authority does not bite on a contract lifecycle product, where the corpus is the customer's own repository, and is not counted either way.

A written commitment that the models work alongside a reviewing person, with real review surfaces, short of the full control structure. Generative redlining proposes insertions and deletions against approved clause language for a negotiator to accept, the vendor's own product lead describing it as best used on substantive differences and not on minor edits; AI Trainer lets a firm decide what the review model looks for; ConvoAI answers link to source for verification; Services Agreement section 2.3(c) makes the customer solely responsible for evaluating output. What is not published is a threshold at which any AI Application acts without a person or a stated route back after a wrong output beyond the customer's own review. January 2024 launch coverage, Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

Autonomy is claimed and oversight is not described. The platform is marketed on eliminating manual effort across the contracting process, streamlining negotiations, shortening review cycles and surfacing timely recommendations, and a published customer testimonial states that approximately 80 per cent of that customer's templates no longer require legal review. Nothing published describes what the system does unattended versus what a human approves, no review surface is named, no threshold is stated at which a matter returns to a lawyer, and no account is given of what happens after an output is wrong. The word recommendations implies an advisory posture but no control structure sits behind it. Searched the home page, platform and module pages, the security and compliance page and the plans page on 4 September 2026.

Scale claims stand in for named deployments on the surfaces read. The vendor states a 99.6 per cent implementation success rate without a method and describes customers as some of the largest companies; a customer stories page and Pacesetter awards exist in the navigation and were not opened, and are the rebuttal route. News releases and navigation read 6 September 2026.

Real deployment evidence with substance, short of assessable measurement. Named customers appear as logos including EDF, SurveyMonkey, Aptean, Articulate, Lighthouse, TIBCO, Cetera, J.D. Power and Darden. Testimonials carry names and roles rather than initials: Ellen Kranz, Senior Contracts Specialist, states approximately 80 per cent of templates no longer require legal review and describes contracts being active within minutes or hours; Adrienne Schaal, Director of Legal Operations, describes a Salesforce integration configured in minutes and field mapping without IT; Jeff Peduto, SVP Operations, describes 90 days notice before renewal dates. Malbek was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contract Life Cycle Management. What holds this at B is that the figures sit inside quotations with no method, date or baseline, and the separate by-the-numbers panel, including 120 per cent retention and 90 per cent recommending, states no basis, sample or date for any figure.

Four of the five limbs are in the published agreement and the privilege limb is absent. No training: Services Agreement section 2.3 and Supplemental Terms section 1 provide that customer data is not used to train AI Applications or AI Models without the customer's explicit prior written consent, and section 4.3 extends that to developing or improving the services at all. Segregation at the level an in-house buyer requires: the platform is offered single-tenant or multi-tenant by order, and section 2.2 confines Agiloft's use of customer data to providing and maintaining the services. Retention and deletion: section 14.3 deletes customer data within thirty days of termination and section 4.2 allows export at any time. Third-party model providers: Microsoft Azure OpenAI is named as sub-processor with its temporary abuse-monitoring storage of input and output disclosed, and AI service providers are defined as those on the published sub-processor list. Nothing addresses privilege or work product. Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

Substantive published commitments on confidentiality and training use, short of the full picture. The security and compliance FAQ is specific where most vendors are vague: client inputs, outputs, embeddings and training data are stated never to be shared with other customers, never accessible to the large language model vendor, never used to improve or train future models, and never used to enhance third-party products, with the same commitments said to be imposed on partners, subcontractors and sub-processors. Enterprise-grade data isolation is asserted, supported by role-based access controls with field-level permissions, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and AES-256 encryption. The limb this band commonly finds missing, what the underlying model provider may retain, is answered here rather than absent. What is not published is retention or deletion, and privilege and work product are not addressed at all, which is defensible for a corporate CLM whose buyer is an in-house department rather than a firm but is still an unmet limb. The commitments also live on a marketing FAQ rather than in an agreement a buyer can read, because the terms of service did not render.

A real position on advice versus tooling, short of a supervision dimension framed for lawyers and of jurisdiction limits. Services Agreement section 9.3(b) states that Agiloft is not an attorney or law firm or a substitute for one and does not provide advice, explanation, opinion or recommendation about legal rights, remedies, defences, options, selection of forms or strategies; section 9.3(c) and the Supplemental Terms state that AI output may be inaccurate and must be checked independently. The buyer is legal and procurement teams, and nothing describes how the product supports a supervising lawyer's duties or names a jurisdiction limit beyond export control. Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

The marketing describes the product in terms that displace legal review while no position on the advice line is published anywhere reachable. A featured customer quotation states that approximately 80 per cent of that customer's templates no longer require legal review and that sales teams start contracts and mark them active after signature within minutes, and the departmental pages sell contract handling directly to sales, procurement and finance. Against that, no disclaimer, no statement of what the product is and is not, no competence or supervision language and no jurisdiction limit was located on the home page, the platform and module pages, the security and compliance page or the plans page. The terms of service is the surface most likely to carry a disclaimer and it did not render, so the possibility that one exists there is not excluded; the grade rests on what the marketing does say rather than on that gap. Checked 4 September 2026.

Transparency claims and incorporated third-party policies without a governance framework, testing regime or accountable owner. The vendor markets white-box AI that shows its reasoning by linking answers to source, the Supplemental Terms bind customers to the Microsoft AI Code of Conduct, OpenAI usage policies and AWS responsible AI policy, and section 3 warrants that usage-data insights are anonymised; no responsible AI framework of Agiloft's own, ISO 42001 or equivalent, pre-release testing description or statement about uneven output is published on the surfaces read. Supplemental Terms and news releases read 6 September 2026.

What is published under the AI heading is security rather than governance, and the two are different subjects on this axis. The AI safeguards answer is genuinely detailed, naming defences against instruction override attacks, data exfiltration through format manipulation, output format hijacking, CSV injection, multi-stage attack chains and delimiter confusion, which is a more specific account of LLM attack surface than most records carry. None of it addresses governance: nobody inside Malbek is named as accountable for AI outcomes, no pre-release evaluation of model output is described, no testing results are published, and there is no responsible AI statement, no ISO 42001 and nothing whatever on bias or uneven output across contract types or counterparties. The release process answer describes QA certification and change control for the platform generally, which is software governance rather than model governance.

Substantive published policy covering most of the ground. Retention and deletion: Services Agreement section 14.3 deletes customer data within thirty days of termination unless law requires longer, and section 4.2 gives export at any time. Sub-processors: a sub-processor list is published at a stated URL, AI service providers are defined by reference to it, and section 16.2 commits to emailed notice of updates to it; Microsoft's temporary storage of AI content for abuse monitoring is disclosed. Access control: section 5.1 commits to organisational, physical and technical precautions against access by employees and subcontractors, with detail in a security page and trust portal not opened. Incident practice: section 5.3 gives the customer a reporting route; a notification commitment sits in the DPA, which was not opened. Services Agreement and Supplemental Terms read 6 September 2026.

Substantive published policy covering most of the ground. Access control is set out in detail: a zero trust approach, AES-256 encryption, role-based access controls with field-level permissions, single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, continuous monitoring and threat detection, background checks on personnel, regular security awareness training and a security team monitoring systems around the clock. Incident practice is stated, with a structured response plan prioritising transparency, and third-party audits and penetration testing are said to run regularly. A business continuity and disaster recovery plan is described in outline, with the full policy available under NDA. What is missing from the set is retention and deletion, which are not stated anywhere reachable, and the subprocessor list, which exists but sits inside the Vanta-hosted trust centre and did not render. Checked 4 September 2026.

What the vendor stands behind is published and specific, and it goes further than most: Services Agreement section 10.1 gives an indemnity for intellectual property infringement and a second indemnity for unauthorised disclosure or misuse of customer data resulting from a breach of the or security obligations, with exclusions in 10.2 and mitigation remedies including a pro-rata refund; section 11 caps each party at twelve months' fees, raises the cap to three times for breaches of the security, confidentiality and compliance sections, and excludes gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud and the indemnities from any cap; section 9.2 warrants material conformity with a repair-or-refund remedy; and the Supplemental Terms state that AI output is as-is and that Agiloft has no liability for any damages arising from use of output. No insurance is stated. Services Agreement version 1.2 of 22 July 2026 and Supplemental Terms read in full 6 September 2026.

No allocation of loss could be located on any reachable surface, and the note records why rather than asserting the vendor is silent. Malbek publishes terms of service and a privacy policy at malbek.io/terms-of-service and malbek.io/privacy-policy, both served through its own Klix clickwrap module, and both return the page frame with no body. The full retrieval ladder was run and recovered nothing: both www and non-www forms, with the non-www redirecting to the same shell; the site navigation and footer inventoried; the security and compliance page read in full as the substitute surface, which addresses training, isolation, access control and certification but carries no indemnity, cap, warranty or insurance position; the Vanta-hosted trust centre and subprocessor register, which return metadata without body; and on 4 September 2026 a search built on distinctive clause language, which returned only Malbek's own published commentary about limitation of liability and indemnification clauses in general drafting practice, authored by its General Counsel, and nothing from Malbek's own agreement. That commentary is about contracts at large and is not evidence of Malbek's contractual position. The grade records what a reader can establish from published material as located on 4 September 2026. It is not a finding that the agreement is silent, and a successful retrieval of the terms would be applied as an amendment with its own date.

Real integrations, documented, with depth described in general terms. The Integration Hub is an embedded integration platform powered by Workato that the vendor states connects Agiloft to hundreds of other systems through connectors and recipes, with public help documentation at the Agiloft wiki; Third-Party Services are addressed in the Services Agreement. What a firm must configure and which systems sync in which direction are not described on the surfaces read; the integrations page and wiki were not opened. Supplemental Terms, Services Agreement and navigation read 6 September 2026.

Documented integrations into the systems contracting actually runs through, with depth described. More than 50 integrations are published and organised by type across CRM, ERP, e-signature, storage and SSO, with a browsable directory. The Salesforce connector is described to the level this band asks for: a productized native connector enabling complete bi-directional data synchronisation, configurable in minutes, and a customer quotation independently describes mapping new fields as business needs change without IT involvement. Named targets include NetSuite, SAP, Coupa, Slack, OneTrust, Adobe Sign, DocuSign and Azure OpenAI. Malbek Marketplace is a no-code drag-and-drop interface for configuring connections, which answers what a customer must set up, and a REST API is published for targets without a productized connector. The plans page states which integrations are complimentary and which cost extra, which is a configuration fact most vendors omit.

The tenancy model is stated in the agreement and residency is partial. The Services Agreement defines the core platform as available on a single-tenant basis, a dedicated cloud environment for one customer, or a multi-tenant basis, and the order selects between them; an EU Data Act addendum exists for EU customers. No region list, hosting provider or processing location for the AI providers is stated on the surfaces read; the security page and trust portal are the rebuttal route. Services Agreement read 6 September 2026.

Neither limb this axis needs is published. Data residency options are listed as a data protection feature but no region is named, no set of options is enumerated, and nothing states where a given customer's data would sit. Tenancy is not addressed at all: no statement describes whether the platform is single or multi-tenant or how customers are separated at the infrastructure level, and the closest published detail is the assertion of enterprise-grade data isolation on the security page, which is a claim rather than a tenancy model. Hosting on AWS is named, which identifies the infrastructure provider without answering either limb. Searched the home page, the platform and module pages, the security and compliance page and the plans page on 4 September 2026.

Independent audits are stated in the agreement with a named route to the reports, short of a report reachable without asking. Services Agreement section 5.2 states that Agiloft has completed audits by an independent auditor of the design and effectiveness of its security controls and that customers may obtain the reports through the trust portal at trustportal.agiloft.com, where they are confidential information. The audit standard, auditor and coverage period are not named in the text read, the portal was not opened, and whether a prospect can obtain a report self-serve is not established, so the lower access tier is graded. Services Agreement read 6 September 2026.

Malbek's security and compliance page, last modified 14 April 2026, states that it is SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 Type II certified in its own right, which is a first party claim about Malbek rather than about its host. That distinction matters on this record because the certifications separately listed on the same page, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 1, 2 and 3, are expressly AWS's for the cloud infrastructure and are not credited to Malbek. The page also records regular third party security audits and penetration testing with independent auditors evaluating the security posture, background checks and annual security awareness training for personnel, round the clock monitoring by a dedicated security team, and a structured incident response plan. Compliance is claimed with GDPR, CCPA, CFR 21 Part 11 and GxP. It holds at B because none of the accessible evidence limbs is met: no certifying body or auditor is named, no report date, observation period or scope statement is published, no report is offered at any access tier, and the disaster recovery policy is stated to be available only under NDA. The trust centre at trust.malbek.io is hosted on Vanta and returned metadata with no body. On the third party verifiability test a buyer cannot check either certification against a register without contacting Malbek.

Providers and change notice are published and the models are not named. The Supplemental Terms name Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service as the provider behind certain AI Applications and disclose that Microsoft temporarily stores input and output for abuse monitoring with human review of flagged content; the incorporated acceptable-use policies are Microsoft's, OpenAI's and AWS's, which identifies the provider set; AI service providers are defined as those on the published sub-processor list and section 16.2 commits to emailed notice of changes to that list. No model is named and no inference location is stated. Supplemental Terms and Services Agreement read 6 September 2026.

The architecture is described rather than asserted. Malbek's security and compliance page, last modified 14 April 2026, publishes an Ensemble LLM architecture deploying specialised AI agents in a cross validating chain configuration, combining proprietary Malbek AI and ML models with foundation models reached through AWS Bedrock and Azure. So a buyer can establish that both in house and third party models are in use and by what route they are reached, and Azure OpenAI appears among the integration logos on the plans page. The same page states that when external large language model APIs are used, Malbek adheres to each provider's terms and engages only vendors meeting its data protection standards, and that client inputs, outputs, embeddings and training data are never accessible to the LLM vendor and never used to improve or train models. A subprocessors page is published at malbek.io/sub-processors and was not opened in this pass. What keeps this at B rather than above it: no individual model is named, the foundation model providers behind Bedrock and Azure are not identified, no location is given for inference as distinct from hosting, and no commitment to notify customers when a model or provider changes was located.

The unit and structure are stated in the agreement without a figure on the surfaces read. The Services Agreement prices by order with use limits by type and number of users, prorated mid-term increases, add-on services priced separately, thirty-day payment terms and a choice of single-tenant or multi-tenant platform; a pricing page exists in the navigation and was not opened on 6 September 2026, and is the rebuttal route in either direction. Services Agreement read 6 September 2026.

The unit and structure are stated without the figure, which is this band's second limb. The plans page publishes the four variables a quote is built from: user types, number of users, modules, and Malbek connections. The pricing FAQ adds that customers pay only for what they need against a custom quote estimated on those inputs, that some integrations are complimentary while others carry additional cost, and that implementation is scoped per customer from a few datapoints. Support, training and the help centre are stated to carry no additional cost, with monthly training included. What is not published is any number, any band, any tier name or any feature split between packages, so the shape of the model is visible and its scale is not. A VendorPricing row is written on the published structure.

Segment and coverage are described with substance and one limit is stated. Solution pages address legal and procurement functions and seven industries, the buyer is enterprise, and the platform is offered single-tenant or multi-tenant with an EU addendum; the Services Agreement bars use for high-risk activities, which is a stated boundary. No contract type or practice area is named as unsupported and no law firm use is described. Navigation and Services Agreement read 6 September 2026.

Segment coverage is described with substance and the boundary is left open. Four buying departments each carry their own solution page, Sales, Legal, Procurement and Finance, with a stated purpose for each, and four industries each carry their own page, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail, with regulated-agreement handling called out for life sciences and high-volume supplier and promotional contracting for CPG. Compliance coverage extends the picture with GDPR, CCPA, CFR 21 Part 11 and GxP named. The buyer is a corporate enterprise rather than a law firm, and law firms are neither claimed nor excluded. What is missing is the edge: no contract types are enumerated as supported, no organisation size is stated, government use is not addressed, and nothing says where the product stops.