Three servers that a freelancer might reach for when a contract is due, doing three different jobs. @open-agreements/contract-templates-mcp fills real, named standard forms: the Common Paper set, the four Y Combinator SAFEs and seven NVCA venture financing documents. dingdawg-legal-agent reads a contract somebody sent you and scores it. Ours keeps the paragraphs you reuse as searchable clauses and assembles a document out of the ones you pick.
None of the three is legal advice, and ours says so on every document it writes.
| Fact | Ours | OpenAgreements | dingdawg-legal-agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tools | 10 plus license_status and license_activate | 3: list_templates, get_template, fill_template | 4: review_contract, legal_research, draft_clause, compliance_checklist |
| Transport | stdio (npx or .mcpb bundle) | stdio, plus a hosted endpoint at openagreements.org/api/mcp | stdio, backed by a remote API |
| Account or API key needed | No | None documented, for either the local or the hosted mode | Yes, DINGDAWG_API_KEY |
| What it holds | Your own clauses plus 25 generic starters, searchable | Named upstream standard forms with source and licence metadata | Nothing. It analyses text you send it |
| Clause-level search | Yes, ranked over titles, tags, categories and bodies | No. Whole forms only | No |
| Document output | .docx or markdown | .docx | None documented |
| Where the text goes | Your disk. No network call at all | Local stdio stays on your machine; hosted mode does not store filled documents | Sent to dingdawg.com for analysis |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 for the code; each template's content is licensed separately | BUSL-1.1, not an open source licence |
| Latest release read | publish pending; .mcpb bundle and clone-and-build | 0.9.0, published 2026-08-28 | 2.0.12, published 2026-07-15 |
| Cost | Free tier, Pro $19 once | Free | Free tier of 10 reviews a day; Pro $49 a month; $0.25 a call pay as you go |
Every row was read on 2026-09-03 from that project's npm registry record, the README inside it, or its published documentation. Neither competitor was installed or executed.
Pick it when you need a real standard form rather than a paragraph. This is the strongest competitor on this site and it deserves a plain description: its catalogue is upstream-authoritative documents with their source and licence recorded, including the Common Paper mutual NDA, cloud service agreements with and without an SLA and an AI variant, order forms, design partner and pilot agreements, the four YC SAFEs and seven NVCA venture financing documents. Around them sit jurisdiction guides citing primary law, 650 verbatim case excerpts linked to CourtListener, review checklists, installable agent skills, a Gemini CLI extension and a Cursor plugin manifest. It renders DOCX exactly as we do, it is Apache-2.0, it is actively published, and its CLI ran 7,391 downloads in the month read against 470 for the MCP package. If you are signing an NDA or raising on a SAFE, use it rather than us.
Two facts bound it. It has three tools and no clause-level search: it fills a whole form, it does not assemble a document from a library you maintain. And its legal guidance is United States only. Note also that the NVCA templates are not redistributed; for those it publishes transformation instructions rather than the source file, so some workflows download the official document at runtime, which its own privacy note states.
Pick it for the opposite direction of travel: the contract arrived and you want to know what is wrong
with it. It scores clause-level risk against specific sections, flags provisions that are missing,
identifies termination, confidentiality, governing law, force majeure and liability limitation clauses,
returns statute and case law citations with jurisdiction references, and emits a governance receipt per
call. We do none of that and are not attempting it. Price it before you install: the free tier is 10
reviews a day with basic analysis only, where draft_clause is template based and
legal_research is topic classification only; Pro is $49 a month for 100 calls a day, or
$0.25 a call pay as you go. Your contract text is sent to the vendor for analysis, and the package is
BUSL-1.1, which is not an open source licence.
Pick ours when your terms have already diverged from a generic form. After a few years the clauses
that matter are yours: the revision count you allow, the late fee you actually charge, the kill fee, the
jurisdiction you work in. A form filler cannot hold those and a review service cannot write them. This
server keeps them as clauses with {{variables}}, ranks a search over titles, tags,
categories and bodies so a title match beats a body mention, and assembles the ones you pick into a
numbered document. Twenty-five generic freelance starters across eleven categories are there to be
edited or deleted, and a deleted starter is not re-seeded. Everything stays on your machine and the
server makes no network call at all.
variables_list is the tool that makes this work: give it the clauses you picked and it
returns every variable they need and which clause needs it, before the document exists. Variables are
read in first-appearance order, declared ones first and then any the body uses without declaring, so a
clause written in a hurry reports what it actually needs.
A variable you do not supply is never left as raw braces, never blanked and never guessed. It is
printed as a visible bracketed prompt in the document, and the response returns the real names in
unfilled. The prompt prints with spaces for a measured reason: the shared document engine
parses inline markdown, so [late_fee_percent] reaches Word as
[latefeepercent], because the underscore pair is read as an italic marker and dropped along
with the word boundaries. That defect throws no error and does not look wrong enough to catch by eye.
The disclaimer is a constant in the source, prepended to the .docx, to the markdown and returned in the tool's own JSON response, so choosing a different output format cannot lose it. It reads: generic template, not legal advice, have a qualified lawyer review this document before you sign it. No clause here has been reviewed by a lawyer in any jurisdiction.
Ours, Claude Code:
claude mcp add clauses -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-clausesOpenAgreements, local or hosted:
claude mcp add open-agreements -- npx -y @open-agreements/contract-templates-mcp
claude mcp add --transport http open-agreements https://openagreements.org/api/mcpdingdawg-legal-agent:
claude mcp add legal -e DINGDAWG_API_KEY=your-key -- npx -y dingdawg-legal-agentPer client config paths for ours are on the setup pages, the product page is MCP Clause Library, and the walkthrough is in assembling a contract from your own clause library.
No. Our 25 starter clauses are generic freelance templates, not drafted for your country, your trade or your deal, and no clause has been reviewed by a lawyer. Every assembled document opens with a line saying so. OpenAgreements publishes real standard forms with their sources; dingdawg-legal-agent is an analysis service. Take any of their output to a qualified lawyer.
OpenAgreements. It carries the Common Paper mutual NDA and the four Y Combinator SAFEs as upstream-authoritative forms with their licences recorded, which is a different and better thing than a generic clause somebody wrote. Ours is for the terms that are specific to you.
Not with ours: every clause and every assembled document stays in your data directory and the server makes no network call at all. OpenAgreements says local stdio stays on your machine and its hosted mode does not store filled documents, with some field-selector workflows downloading an official source document at runtime. dingdawg-legal-agent sends the contract to its own service for analysis.
OpenAgreements is free and Apache-2.0. dingdawg-legal-agent has a free tier of 10 reviews a day with basic analysis only; Pro is $49 a month for 100 calls a day and pay as you go is $0.25 a call. Ours has a free tier and a one-time $19 Pro key with no subscription.
Every row comes from the npm registry record and README for @open-agreements/contract-templates-mcp and dingdawg-legal-agent, plus the OpenAgreements documentation at github.com/open-agreements/open-agreements, all read on 2026-09-03. Neither was installed, so the tool lists are as documented.