Centari vs Syntracts: how they compare in 2026

Centari sells the database its AI builds. The Deal Reasoning Engine reads a firm's credit agreements, limited partnership agreements and M&A closing sets and turns them into structured, citation-backed data points, and the platform overview describes multi-stage reasoning that resolves defined terms, traces cross-references and evaluates conditional logic in sequence rather than skimming a document as flat text. Everything else a firm buys runs on that output: precedent search, market benchmarking, Views dashboards, Projects grids and the Centari Intelligence sidebar. The MCP server and Microsoft Copilot integration let a firm's other AI tools query the same data, and they belong to the integration picture rather than to what Centari itself generates. Remove the models and there is nothing in the database to search or chart.

Syntracts exists to pull defined fields out of contracts with models built for each customer and to deliver that structured output into the firm's other systems; the review screen and the API carry the models' output. Its releases describe outputs structured to schemas the firm defines and sent through an API into dashboards and AI assistants, and the company has described further uses such as demand letters and due diligence. Without the models there is nothing to deliver.

Every extracted value comes back with a citation, and nothing about accuracy is measured. The platform overview says each data point traces to its source language and connects to related provisions across the deal documents, with a verification view for checking it, and the 24 August 2026 release post says the Centari Intelligence sidebar answers with citations to the source language that a partner can open in one click. The method behind the extraction is described rather than asserted: defined terms resolved, cross-references traced, conditional logic evaluated in sequence. What a buyer cannot weigh is performance. The site claims attorney-level precision and unmatched accuracy with no test set, no score and no failure mode named, so the only check on a given field is the firm's own reviewer. The citations run to the firm's own agreements rather than to primary law.

A promise of no hallucinations leads the home page, resting on custom trained LLMs that are said to ensure accurate outputs, alongside headline statistics for data extraction accuracy without a figure; the releases call the output highly accurate and verifiable. In an Artificial Lawyer interview of 21 October 2025 the company put accuracy above 90 percent, and at 95 percent as measured by customers, without a test set or method. Syntracts publishes no test set or error rate on its own pages, and nothing describes how an extraction links back to the clause it came from.

Centari is built around people checking what the AI extracts, and it gives a firm a way to track that checking. The 24 August 2026 release post describes the product as designed for human in the loop verification and introduces Tasks, which gathers every open verification step across Databases and Projects so an owner can assign reviewers and see which data points a person has checked. The platform overview describes a verification view beside each extraction. Projects are kept apart from the governed record: nothing in a Project writes back to a Database. What is not published is where the system itself draws a line. Nothing says when extraction stops or flags low confidence, and nothing says what unverified output must not be used for, so those rules are left to each firm.

Users confirm each extraction and correct errors in Syntracts' review interface, with corrections used to improve the models over time. Its June 2025 release says outputs are structured to match schemas the firm defines, requiring no post processing or human in the loop review. Nothing commits that a lawyer or knowledge manager reviews output before it enters a database or an AI assistant, and no threshold, limit or audit trail is described.

Centari names large law firm customers and puts senior people on the record, but publishes no measured result. The homepage, platform overview and For Law page carry attributed endorsements from Fried Frank (Global Head of Innovation and Knowledge), Willkie (Counsel, Asset Management), Ropes & Gray (Counsel), Wilson Sonsini (Senior Manager of KM) and Gilbert + Tobin (Partner, Corporate Advisory), and from Sentinel Global's general counsel on the fund side. The blog lists a Gilbert + Tobin case study dated 30 April 2026 describing a firm wide M&A deployment, and announcements of the Fried Frank and Ropes & Gray adoptions. No figure for time saved, accuracy or outcomes is published. The case study links on the site did not open a readable page on 20 September 2026, so the detail of the Gilbert + Tobin deployment could not be read. What is on the record is endorsement by named senior users, not a measured result.

Syntracts' June 2025 release announces a multiyear enterprise partnership with an unnamed AmLaw 25 firm after a six month pilot, and its October 2025 release describes the partnership as awarded after competitive evaluations. The June release also says Syntracts was one of two companies selected for A&O Shearman's Fuse incubator, a program selection rather than a customer result. Both releases claim contract profiling time cut by at least 80 percent, shrinking reviews of several hours to under 30 minutes and to near zero in workflows integrated through the API, with no customer or method. The October release announces a $5.3 million seed round led by Hyperplane with Khosla Ventures, Top Harvest Capital, Fortitude Ventures, Myriad Venture Partners and Point72 Ventures.

The commitments about client material are specific, and they live on a security page rather than in a contract. The security page states that customer data is siloed and never commingled, with single tenant deployments available, and that it is never used to train or fine tune the underlying models. It says data is encrypted in transit and at rest with bring your own key supported, and that access can be controlled down to the data point with SSO and ethical wall integration. The Terms of Use dated 16 September 2025 say nothing about customer content and state that they sit alongside any other agreement. That other agreement is not published, so a buyer cannot read any of these promises as a term before signing. Nothing addresses privilege or work product in the deal documents a firm uploads, how long they are held, or what OpenAI and Anthropic, named as AI providers in the Trust Center, may retain. For a product that ingests a firm's whole deal history, that last gap is the one a general counsel will raise first.

The product runs within the customer's own systems, per the home page, and the releases say no data leaves client systems or reaches outside language models or APIs, and that each customer's models are built for that customer. Customer documents are the source of the synthetic data used to tune those models, and Syntracts says only synthetic data, never the customer's data, is used for tuning. No privacy policy, terms or agreement is published, and privilege and work product are not addressed by name.

Section 4 of the Terms of Use, dated 16 September 2025, is direct about what Centari is not. It states that the company is not a law firm, attorney, staffing firm or lawyer referral service, that nothing on the service is legal advice, that no attorney-client relationship arises, and that employees who are licensed attorneys are not practicing law in that capacity. The audience is professional throughout: transactional practices, knowledge teams, in-house legal and investment funds. The other half of the question is untouched. Nothing addresses how a supervising lawyer should treat extracted terms that feed advice, negotiation positions or the External Views dashboards a firm shares with its own clients, and no jurisdiction limits are stated.

Nothing states what the product is and is not, that its extractions are not legal advice, or how it supports the supervising lawyer's duties, and no terms are published to say otherwise. Syntracts describes the product as built for BigLaw and corporate legal teams, and no limit by jurisdiction or user is stated.

What Centari publishes is how a firm checks the AI's work, not how Centari builds and controls it. Calibration of each firm's taxonomy by domain experts is described on the homepage and the For Law page, an account team of attorneys and engineers runs it, and the 24 August 2026 release post describes the Tasks verification workflow. That tooling helps a firm govern its own use; it says nothing about how Centari tests and controls its models. No accountable owner inside the company is named, nothing describes what is tested before a release ships, no evaluation result is published, and nothing addresses whether extraction quality is uneven across document types, drafting styles, jurisdictions or languages.

No AI governance framework, accountable owner, testing before release or bias disclosure is published on Syntracts' home page or in its two 2025 releases. The company describes its models as trained on synthetic data derived from each client's documents and improved from reviewer corrections, without describing how a change is tested before it reaches a customer.

The controls protecting the data are published; what happens to a firm's documents afterwards is not. The security page states encryption in transit and at rest with bring your own key, siloed data with single tenant options, access control down to the data point, SSO and regular penetration testing, and the Trust Center lists security controls including a record of incidents and a subprocessor list. No retention period for uploaded deal documents or for questions put to the product is published, no deletion commitment applies on termination, and no incident notification timeline is published. The Privacy Policy dated 16 September 2025 covers personal information collected through the website and services rather than the contracts a firm loads, and no customer agreement or data processing addendum is published.

Syntracts keeps documents in the customer's environment and calls no outside model, so retention and deletion fall largely to the customer. No privacy policy, retention or deletion commitment, subprocessor list or incident practice is published for what Syntracts itself handles, such as support access or synthetic data made from customer documents. A trust center at trust.syntracts.com is linked, and Syntracts states a completed SOC 2 Type I audit.

What Centari refuses is published in full; what it stands behind is not. The Terms of Use dated 16 September 2025 provide the service as is and disclaim warranties of accuracy, reliability and fitness (section 15). They cap total liability at the greater of fees paid in the prior six months or one hundred US dollars (section 16), and require the customer to indemnify Centari (section 17). No indemnity runs the other way, no warranty attaches to extracted output, and no insurance position appears. The Terms state that they sit alongside any other agreement. That agreement, where an enterprise buyer's real allocation of loss would sit, is not published, so the only readable position allocates the risk of a wrong extraction to the firm.

No customer agreement or terms are published, so nothing states who bears the loss when an extraction is wrong, and Syntracts' site and announcements say nothing on it. No privacy policy or data processing addendum is published either.

The connections are named and none of them is documented. The platform overview says Centari's MCP Server makes a firm's deal intelligence available to the AI tools it already uses. The blog lists a 16 June 2026 announcement of that server and a Microsoft Copilot integration in one click, and the security page names SSO and ethical wall integration. There is no integrations page, no developer documentation and no API reference, and the June announcement does not open a readable page. Nothing states how deal documents get from a document management system such as iManage or NetDocuments into Centari, which is the step a firm has to plan and staff, or what the Copilot integration exposes to a user's assistant. Projects grids are described as exportable.

Syntracts' October 2025 release says that through its secure API, firms can pull documents from systems like iManage, NetDocs or SharePoint and organize them into structured data, and send the results back into the tools they already use, from dashboards to AI assistants, while keeping information in their own environment. Its home page says contracts can be ingested from the firm's document management system and results inserted into any existing database or workflow, and the company describes the platform as built around its API. No knowledge platform or assistant is named, what each connection moves in which direction is not described, and no API documentation is published.

The tenancy model is stated and the geography is not. The security page says customer data is siloed and never commingled, that single tenant deployments are available, that bring your own key encryption is supported, and that regional hosting and processing are available for customers around the world. No region is named, nothing says which arrangement or tier carries single tenancy, and nothing separates where the database sits from where OpenAI and Anthropic process the text of a firm's agreements. A firm with a UK or EU residency requirement would have to establish all of that in a sales conversation.

Everything runs within the customer's controlled environment, by the home page's account, and the releases describe full deployment on premises, with processing and storage both inside the firm's systems and no outside model calls. In an Artificial Lawyer interview of 21 October 2025 the company said that besides on premises hosting it can accommodate an Azure virtual private cloud or pure cloud. What differs between those options and the infrastructure required are not published.

Certification claims on Centari's homepage and security page cover SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, with regular third party penetration testing and a linked Trust Center hosted by Sprinto. Only part of the Trust Center could be read. The part that could be read shows a compliance section with two entries marked compliant, a list of controls and a subprocessor list. It names no auditor, report period or scope, and no route to obtain the reports, so the certifications stand as the vendor's statement until a buyer sees the reports.

A completed SOC 2 Type I audit is claimed on the home page, with ISO 27001 certification and a SOC 2 Type II audit still in progress. A trust center at trust.syntracts.com is linked. The Type I report is not offered on the site, no auditor or date is given, and the two further audits are not yet claimed as complete.

The providers are named; the models are not. Centari's Trust Center carries a subprocessor list naming OpenAI and Anthropic as AI providers and Google as a cloud provider. Only part of that list could be read, so it may name others. The marketing pages refer to 'our underlying AI models' and to a patent pending Deal Reasoning Engine without identifying either: no model, no version, and nothing about where the AI providers run. No commitment to tell customers when the models behind their extractions change is published on the security page, the platform overview or the Trust Center, which matters here because a firm's benchmarks are built on extractions made by whatever model was running at the time.

Syntracts says it uses its own stack of small open source language models, which its June 2025 release calls proprietary, tuned for each customer on synthetic legal data derived from that customer's own documents and run inside the customer's environment. Which open source models are used, and whether customers are told when they change, is not published.

Nothing about price is published, including the unit of charge. Checked the homepage, the full navigation and footer, the platform overview, the For Law and For Finance pages, the security and about pages, the Terms of Use and the blog: there is no pricing page, no tier names, no unit, no trial and no figure anywhere. Every route offered is a demo request. Section 13 of the Terms of Use reserves the right to charge fees for the services without stating what they are.

No price, tier or unit of charge is published, and access to Syntracts is by demo request. Neither 2025 release states a price.

Who the product is built for is set out clearly; where it stops is not. The For Law page addresses transactional practices and names partners, knowledge management, associates and business development as its users, and the For Finance page addresses investment funds across legal, investor relations, finance and compliance. Document types are named rather than implied: credit agreements, limited partnership agreements and M&A closing sets, with the work described as high stakes M&A, fund formation and financings. The demo form offers law firm, in-house legal, financial services and government. Nothing states what falls outside, such as litigation material, agreements in other languages, or deal types for which the firm's taxonomy has not been calibrated, and calibration is how every deployment starts.

Syntracts' customers are knowledge management teams at large law firms and corporate legal teams, and its October 2025 release describes the product as built for BigLaw and corporate legal teams, extracting defined data points from contracts to build deal profiles and knowledge databases. The company has also described use for demand letters and due diligence. What the product does not handle, by document type, language or firm size, is not stated.