Contractbook vs Shortcut
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Contractbook builds out admin and permissions plumbing for larger CLM deployments.
Contractbook's recent work is concentrated on team administration. User Groups landed in late January, followed by group-level company permissions in March that lets admins assign company-wide capabilities to entire groups at once. The earlier Users page consolidation set up the surface this all attaches to. A small branding addition — company logo on outbound emails — rounds out the window.
The CLM is being shaped to support large companies with structured access policies, not just small teams sharing a workspace. Each release is removing per-user manual setup and replacing it with group-driven inheritance — a clear up-market move. Cadence is steady and tightly themed.
Expect SCIM/SSO depth to follow next, plus more granular role inheritance (per-Space, per-template). Audit logging or compliance-export features are a natural extension once group permissions stabilize.
Shortcut redesigns its API for AI agents and pushes Korey beyond its own walls.
Shortcut is making concrete bets on agent-based work. API v4 entered alpha on May 12 with explicit framing around expanded capabilities and 'agent compatibility' — a positioning shift, not just a version bump. Their in-house AI assistant Korey is expanding outward: right-click access in February, then a dedicated Chrome extension in April that runs on any webpage. Around the strategic work, smaller improvements (Teams on Roadmap, March's SLA Alerts) keep shipping, alongside feed-noise from brand-guide pages being scraped as if they were releases.
Shortcut is positioning itself as the project-management surface that AI agents naturally operate against, not just a PM tool with AI features bolted on. Korey is being pushed from in-app helper toward general-purpose web assistant; the API is being redesigned with external agent consumers in mind. That's a coherent strategic stance the bigger PM players — Jira, Linear, Asana — have not yet made as explicitly. Underlying release cadence stays steady, suggesting these are strategic plays, not panicked pivots.
Expect API v4 to surface MCP-style tooling endpoints and structured action surfaces aimed squarely at agent frameworks. Korey's Chrome extension is likely a stepping stone toward a 'Korey anywhere' positioning — deeper integrations with browser, email, and calendar are the natural next dominoes.
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