Conga vs Icertis 2026: CLM Features, Fit and Costs

Start with the contracting problem you must solve

Choose Conga first for evaluation when your central problem is connecting commercial contracting with Salesforce, document generation and the quote-to-contract process. Choose Icertis first when your priority is making agreements, obligations and contract intelligence usable across legal, procurement and finance. These are buying hypotheses, not an unconditional ranking: the deciding evidence is whether the quoted configuration handles your actual agreements and systems.

Contract lifecycle management, or CLM, is the coordinated management of agreements from request and drafting through negotiation, signature, obligations and renewal.

TL;DR: Conga deserves the first look for a commercially connected contracting program; Icertis deserves the first look for an enterprise contract intelligence program. Both require a scoped quote, implementation ownership and proof using your documents. Neither choice removes the need to govern templates, permissions and legal exceptions.

The corporate context has changed. Conga is a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, and its acquisition of the PROS B2B business closed on February 2, 2026, according to Thoma Bravo. That broadens the commercial portfolio; it does not mean every pricing, quoting or contracting component comes with your CLM subscription.

Icertis remains a private company with strategic holders including SAP and SoftBank, and its move from CLM toward the Vera contract intelligence product family is landing in 2026, according to MGI Research. The Icertis name remains relevant, but buyers should compare the current product components and contractual entitlements rather than rely on an older platform description.

Key Takeaways

• Evaluate Conga around the commercial handoff: approved deal information, document assembly, negotiation and downstream updates.

• Evaluate Icertis around the enterprise handoff: agreement data, obligations, portfolio questions and connections to business systems.

• Compare the exact edition, deployment and user permissions. A capability somewhere in a vendor portfolio is not evidence that your proposed subscription includes it.

• Both belong in the Quote-based pricing category for this guide. Request comparable scope and separate subscription costs from implementation, integrations and ongoing administration.

• Require demonstrations of failures as well as successful processing. Duplicate updates, missing documents and unauthorized access can matter more than a polished drafting screen.

Who this is for

This guide is for a contracts lead choosing a system of record or expanding an existing contracting program. It assumes that legal, business operations and IT can participate in the decision, because the software choice determines who maintains clause rules, how business data reaches agreements and how obligations become assigned work.

Red flags: nobody owns template and clause governance; required API or export access cannot be obtained; the procurement brief expects autonomous legal approval without accountable reviewers.

Those conditions can disqualify a proposed implementation even when the underlying software is capable. Resolve ownership before requesting a larger configuration. A missing process owner cannot be replaced by another integration, and a disconnected repository cannot become an operational control merely because it has a search interface.

How we evaluated the buying decision

Our weights below are an editorial decision framework, not research findings or measured vendor performance. They prioritize controlled contracting and integration over presentation polish. Adjust them before seeing vendor demonstrations, so an impressive feature does not quietly rewrite the requirements.

For your evaluation, use a buyer-defined scale from 0 to 5 for each criterion: unavailable, materially incomplete, substantial workaround, acceptable with configuration, demonstrated fit, or demonstrated fit with maintainable controls. Multiply the score by the criterion weight and divide by 5. The maximum is 100 points. These are scoring rules, not scores assigned to either vendor.

Treat a mandatory requirement separately from the weighted total. If an agreement cannot be exported with its amendment history, or a restricted document appears in an unauthorized search, reject that proposed configuration regardless of its score. Public product information establishes a shortlist; it cannot prove tenant-specific permissions, extraction accuracy or integration behavior.

Compare the same capabilities before comparing brands

The matrix normalizes capability areas rather than equating differently named modules. “Confirm scope” means obtain written entitlement and demonstrate the behavior in the proposed configuration. It does not mean that a missing marketing detail establishes a missing feature.

Do not read this as “Conga for sales, Icertis for legal.” Both can participate in broader contracting programs. The practical difference is which configuration makes your hardest workflow easiest to own. A Salesforce-centered process can still favor Icertis, and an obligation-heavy program can still favor Conga if the purchased scope and demonstrated behavior fit.

Normalize the repository test carefully. A successful keyword search is different from retrieving the governing agreement, its amendments and the correct effective terms. Likewise, a connector logo does not establish synchronization direction, field ownership, permission mapping or recovery after a failed update.

Conga: prioritize the commercial contract handoff

Conga's current service descriptions distinguish Activate and Accelerate on Salesforce from Activate, Accelerate and Transform on Advantage Platform; the Salesforce entitlement described covers 1 production org, according to Conga. The same document distinguishes approval, redlining and obligation entitlements. This is why the platform and edition belong at the top of the purchasing brief.

Best fit: a contracting program where sales data, document generation and legal approvals need a coherent commercial workflow. In your evaluation, trace approved business terms into the agreement and trace approved contract changes back to the relevant business record. Ask who owns a discrepancy when the quote and negotiated contract disagree.

The limitation to investigate is scope fragmentation. A buyer can recognize the Conga brand while referring to different products, deployments or historical editions. Ask the seller to identify the proposed deployment, licensed roles, required supporting products and excluded capabilities. Do not substitute an old comparison of Conga Contracts for evidence about the CLM configuration being proposed.

For implementation, assign a template owner, a business-data owner and an administrator before migration. Have legal approve the clause library and fallback rules, and have operations document authoritative fields. Start with an agreement family whose exceptions are understood. Expand after users can create, negotiate, approve and retrieve its history without improvised side processes.

Conga CLM rating: 4.7/5 across 281 ratings according to Gartner Peer Insights (2026). That aggregate is background evidence, not a prediction of your implementation. Its displayed coverage spans multiple markets, so it should not be treated as a controlled head-to-head score.

A proposed US Tech Automations workflow could sit above the selected CLM: an authorized CRM update triggers a comparison of approved commercial fields against contract metadata, discrepancies enter a legal review queue, and the output is a reconciliation record linked to both systems. Prerequisites include approved API or export access, stable record identifiers, field mappings and permitted writeback. Legal reviews substantive term differences before any correction is applied.

Icertis: prioritize contract intelligence across functions

Icertis presents 3 connected areas—Engage, Operate and Analyze—and names contract management, Vera Obligations and Standard and Advanced analytics components, according to Icertis. These are product areas to scope, not public subscription tiers with a published fee. Ask which components and integrations are included in the offered configuration.

Best fit: a program that needs to connect contract language with obligations, procurement decisions and portfolio questions across departments. Evaluate whether an agreement can become structured, attributable information that the assigned business owner can use. A summary is useful only if the user can inspect its supporting clause and understand whether an amendment changes the answer.

The limitation to investigate is the distance between the product vision and your purchased configuration. Require the seller to distinguish available functionality, configuration work and roadmap commitments. Ask how analytics results are shared, how extracted attributes are corrected and how existing records behave when the legal taxonomy changes.

Implementation should begin with a controlled document set and an agreed model for agreement families, amendments, business entities and obligations. Legal owns interpretation; operations owns fulfillment; IT owns system access and integration maintenance. Avoid importing a large repository before deciding what makes a record usable and who resolves incomplete or contradictory metadata.

Icertis rating: 4.7/5 across 218 ratings according to Gartner Peer Insights (2026). The displayed rating is an aggregate across markets. Matching headline ratings do not establish equivalent implementation effort, entitlements or suitability for your contract portfolio.

A configurable US Tech Automations design could use an approved obligation export as its trigger, reconcile each item against the relevant operational record, and produce an owner-assigned exception queue with source references and a processing history. It would require licensed export or API access, agreed obligation mappings and permission to access the destination system. A contracts specialist reviews ambiguous extraction; the business owner confirms fulfillment before the queue marks the obligation resolved.

Pricing and TCO: make both quotes describe the same job

Pricing checked October 10, 2026.

Conga is Quote-based: its official pricing page requests business-specific pricing rather than displaying a public numeric CLM subscription price, according to Conga. This guide does not substitute third-party starting prices for the vendor's current quote.

Icertis is Quote-based for this comparison: its official sales inquiry page directs buyers to discuss requirements without displaying a numeric subscription price, according to Icertis. A dedicated public pricing page could not be accessed during this research, so detailed pricing remains unknown until quoted.

Give both vendors the same requirements pack. Include the contract families in scope, user roles, source repositories, integration destinations, required reports and acceptance criteria. Require each seller to identify assumptions and exclusions. Otherwise, a lower quote may simply cover less work, fewer capabilities or a different deployment.

Separate subscription commitments from implementation services and your internal operating cost. Ask who maintains connectors after an upstream change, who updates legal playbooks and what support handles an integration incident. If a quote uses metered activity, obtain its definition, pooling rules, overage treatment and reporting mechanism without assuming that a similarly named allowance behaves identically across products.

Exit cost also belongs in the decision. Request an export demonstration covering documents, metadata, amendment relationships, audit history and obligations. Identify which information can leave in a usable format and which configuration must be rebuilt elsewhere. A data export that omits relationships can preserve files while losing the operational meaning of the repository.

Turn the shortlist into an acceptance exercise

Reported Icertis proof-of-concept coverage: 150 test cases according to MGI Research (2026). That is a reported customer example, not a minimum requirement or evidence of our own testing. The useful lesson is to define the expected result before evaluating the software.

The following counts are buyer-set sample targets, not published vendor limits or performance statistics. Use them as a compact starting worksheet and replace them with cases that reflect your agreements. They intentionally test failure handling and access boundaries alongside successful processing.

For each case, retain the input, expected result, observed result, reviewer and unresolved dependency. Run the exercise on the exact proposed configuration. A seller's promise that another module could solve a failed case belongs in the commercial discussion, not in the passed column.

Worked example: suppose an illustrative weekly intake contains 12 contracts, of which 3 have missing business-owner details and 9 can proceed; 12 − 3 = 9, and 9 ÷ 12 × 100 = 75% eligible for routing, not a measured automation result. In a hypothetical stack using HubSpot alongside either CLM, the reconciliation could retain the contact's hs_object_id, a property shown in the official contact response example, according to HubSpot. An authorized API or export supplies the contact reference; the proposed workflow holds incomplete requests for human review and outputs routed records plus an exception list. The contact identifier identifies a person, so a separate agreement identifier is required to prevent duplicate contract processing.

Count requests that are held, rejected or missing from an export as well as requests that route successfully. A workflow that reports only successful runs can look healthy while leaving work behind. Require an explicit unknown state whenever source access fails, so a disconnected system does not report that there are no exceptions.

Keep the orchestration decision separate from the CLM decision

Zapier, Make, n8n or an in-house integration can be a sensible alternative for connecting intake, status updates and review queues. These tools can support run histories, retries, error branches and audit evidence when configured. The buyer must design and own observability, idempotency, escalation, access controls and maintenance.

A proposed US Tech Automations configuration could define those responsibilities explicitly: stable keys prevent repeated actions, failed reads create visible exceptions, restricted data stays within approved access boundaries, and unresolved work reaches an accountable reviewer. Those are design commitments to validate, not claims of a current deployment or measured advantage. Proceed only when authorized interfaces and human review responsibilities are established.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations: use the CLM's existing workflow when it already handles the entire handoff; use an existing no-code connection when the task is simple and your team can maintain its controls; keep work inside the legal system when permission or confidentiality restrictions prevent an external orchestration layer from accessing the required data.

For adjacent buying exercises, readers can consult the dental membership platform comparison and the SaaS software selection guide. Keep their category requirements separate from CLM requirements. For an operational perspective on identifying exceptions before a reporting deadline, see the campaign underpacing recipe.

Questions to settle before signing

Is Conga better than Icertis for Salesforce users?

Conga merits early evaluation for a Salesforce-centered commercial workflow, but Salesforce use alone does not decide the winner.

Ask both vendors to demonstrate how approved deal data enters the agreement, how negotiations update business records and how conflicts are reviewed. Assess the proposed deployment and entitlements rather than choosing from the integration logo.

Is Icertis only for procurement contracts?

No, Icertis addresses enterprise contracting across functions, including legal and sales.

For a contracts lead, the useful question is whether the purchased configuration supports your agreement families and working habits. Require the same counterparty-paper and amendment tests that you would give Conga.

Can either platform approve legal deviations without review?

Do not assume that advertised AI assistance authorizes autonomous legal approval.

Define which actions may be suggested, which may be performed under an approved rule and which require a lawyer's decision. Preserve the document version, source clause, reviewer and approval history when accepting a deviation.

Which platform costs less?

A comparable vendor quote is required to determine which platform costs less for your scope.

Normalize deployment, roles, modules, migration, integrations and ongoing maintenance. Compare exclusions and usage definitions before drawing a conclusion from the subscription line.

What should disqualify either proposed configuration?

An unmet mandatory requirement should disqualify the configuration regardless of its weighted score.

Examples include unauthorized document exposure, missing amendment relationships, unworkable export arrangements or approval logic that cannot preserve legal accountability. Allow a revised proposal to address the failure, then repeat the affected acceptance exercise.

Should we replace the CLM to fix an unreliable handoff?

Replace the CLM only if its own capabilities or maintainability are the problem.

If contract creation, negotiation and storage already meet requirements, first examine the integration boundary. A corrected native workflow, maintained no-code connection or narrowly scoped orchestration design may solve the handoff without migrating the agreement repository.

Choose the platform your team can operate

Favor Conga when its quoted configuration demonstrably fits your commercial contract process and existing business systems. Favor Icertis when its quoted components demonstrably turn agreement information into useful enterprise obligations and intelligence. Choose neither yet if ownership, access or acceptance criteria remain unresolved.

Use this decision checklist before signing:

• Confirm the deployment, edition, user permissions and components in the order form.

• Have legal accept the drafting, deviation and amendment cases.

• Have IT accept permissions, synchronization, duplicate handling and recovery.

• Have the operational owner accept obligation assignments and unresolved exceptions.

• Compare the quotes against the same scope and confirm usable exit exports.

Complete the acceptance exercise and attach its unresolved items to the scope discussion. If the remaining problem is a cross-system handoff, see how US Tech Automations could configure reconciliation and review queues above the selected platform, subject to API access and human approval points.