HotDocs Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
I've used HotDocs in my law practice for more than 10 years. Love it. Very powerful. The more time you invest using it, the more you'll appreciate its many features and the better your templates will become.

Cons
My only warning concerns the new year-to-year subscription pricing requirement. How does that make sense for this kind of software? The software becomes helpful only after you make your own serious upfront investment of time to build HotDocs "templates". Without that investment, HotDocs will do nothing for you. Don't make such an investment without considering that, in future years, you'll have no guarantee that you'll be able to renew your HotDocs substription on a basis that makes sense. And without yearly renewals, you'll forfeit your own upfront investment of time in templates. But for the pricing scheme adopted by HotDoc's new owner, AbacusNext, I'd give HotDocs an overall rating of 5 out of 5. However, as it stands now, I suggest you look at other software. Perhaps XpressDox. Or, for less ambitious automation projects, consider TheFormTool or Pathagorus.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 3/10

Pros
Our firm works on a vast amount of forms that are specific to our individual clients needs - these are not fill-in forms, but documents ranging from 1 single page to 100+ pages. We use a sometimes complicated Answer File whereby HotDocs lets us quickly assemble a single document or multiple documents - I sometimes do 20 or more documents at a time. The amount of time that is saved being able to use HotDocs for this document assembly process is phenomenal.

Cons
If the answer to a variable is not readily available some end-users would like there to be a prompt on the draft document indicating what fields/questions have been left blank. For the person filling in the answer file those unanswered questions are known at the end of the answer file, but after assembly these documents are passed on for further editing and review and a reminder of what information was not available at the time of assembly would be helpful.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I can easily sell this program to anyone, and have in fact have turned several attorneys on to this program. It's a great way to automate your documents. It's logical. Is it complex? Sure it can be, but that gives the user a lot of options and makes it a powerful tool.

Cons
Cost prohibitive. For some reason HotDocs has elected to increase the price of HotDocs well beyond what they charged. From my understanding they want to have you pay a MONTHLY FEE where they used to just charge you a one time fee for the program. The price is too high for solo attorneys and small law firms. Bottom-line: Until Hotdocs can figure things out on the pricing, do not start using Hotdocs; there are other ways to get the same job done for cheaper, A LOT CHEAPER!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
This product's integration with Microsoft Word is outstanding. It is a fantastic scripting tool for document generation. I've also prepared some documents in WordPerfect and it seems entirely capable with that as well.

Cons
Hands down, the data entry interview is crude at best. It is probably ok for a developer who has never worked with another UI, but the "automation" it provides comes at a steep price - loss of control. If you want truly professional user interfaces, you'll have to write the front-end in some other language, write an "answer file" HotDocs can understand (which is not hard, it is very basic XML) and then let HotDocs work its magic to assemble the language in Word. When used that way, HotDocs is very powerful and flexible. When used in its native UI, it is fairly inflexible.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It is extremely flexible and can help you craft just about any document that you want. I prefer the desktop version to the cloud version. It just works every time!

Cons
I feel that HotDocs has been stagnating recently. Here are some things that they need to address: *Easy import/export of answer data to other formats. For example, if I use some other tool such as an online form, it should have the ability to import that data into an answer file. *It still doesn't support Hi-DPI displays. *It would be great it if could be more flexible in the storage of answer data. The ability to componentize the fields/answer data would be wonderful. As it stands, each template is limited to only one component file.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10