Casepoint vs Relativity

Most eDiscovery comparisons turn on review speed or analytics quality. This one does not. Casepoint and Relativity both handle multi-million-document matters, both ship generative review, and both will pass a corporate security questionnaire. The decision between them is settled by two things that have nothing to do with the review interface: how high your data classification goes, and who signs the invoice. Casepoint runs at FedRAMP High with DoD Impact Levels 4, 5, and 6, and sells to agencies directly off a GSA schedule. Relativity runs its federal offering at FedRAMP Class C — the tier that replaced Moderate — and reaches most buyers through a certified partner who hosts the instance and marks it up. If your classification ceiling is above Moderate, the comparison is over before features are discussed. If it is not, the partner ecosystem is worth more than the authorization you will never use.

Where Casepoint wins

The authorization ceiling. Casepoint’s platform reached FedRAMP High authorization on 9 April 2025, and the vendor lists FedRAMP Moderate, DoD IL4, IL5, IL6, and GovRAMP alongside it. The authorization covers the whole suite — legal hold, cloud connectors, eDiscovery, FOIA, and Filestore — not a carve-out module. Relativity’s own federal page claims FedRAMP Class C controls on Azure Government Cloud and makes no DoD Impact Level claim at all. For a defense agency, an intelligence-community component, or a contractor handling controlled unclassified information above the Moderate line, that single asymmetry disqualifies Relativity regardless of how good aiR is.

FOIA and litigation in one system of record. The January 2025 merger with OPEXUS — the vendor behind FOIAXpress, ATIPXpress, and eCASE, under a Thoma Bravo majority investment — put public-records response, Privacy Act requests, and OIG case management on the same platform as litigation discovery. An agency running Relativity for litigation still buys a separate FOIA system, maintains a second custodian list, and reconciles two chains of custody. Casepoint is the only vendor here that collapses that into one authorization boundary.

Procurement route. Casepoint holds GSA MAS contract 47QTCA18D00BZ (IT Schedule 70 IDIQ, five-year base with three five-year option periods) and is also available through Carahsoft on NASA SEWP, Army ITES-SW2, and NASPO. A contracting officer can place an order directly. Relativity federal work generally routes through a partner or an integrator, which adds a subcontract, a hosting relationship, and a margin the agency pays but does not see itemized.

Where Relativity wins

Your matters are already there. When outside counsel and litigation service providers run the matter, the data lives in Relativity by default. Relativity’s directory of certified hosting, service, and developer partners has no equivalent — third-party partnership trackers count roughly 160 channel and technology relationships, on top of a developer program with more than 50 partners. Moving a live matter off that platform mid-case is a reprocessing and chain-of-custody problem you take on for no litigation benefit.

AI is bundled, not metered. RelativityOne now includes aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege, and aiR for Case Strategy at no additional cost, on a pricing model that eliminated per-seat user fees in favor of a single data fee. That removes the specific budget failure mode — a per-document AI charge that scales with a volume you cannot forecast at contract signature. Casepoint’s pricing page states the opposite structure in principle (“if you don’t use a product, you don’t pay for it”) but publishes no equivalent commitment on AI metering.

Third-party depth. Two decades of ecosystem development produced point-tools for production automation, specialized analytics, and compliance integrations that exist as Relativity applications and nowhere else. Relativity has also kept buying — Text IQ, VerQu, and Gavel in June 2026 — and runs Rel Labs as a development channel. If the matter needs a workflow nobody built natively, Relativity is where somebody built it.

Pricing reality

Neither vendor publishes a list price, but the federal record makes Casepoint the more legible of the two. Recent USAspending obligations: the Department of Veterans Affairs awarded $3,828,000 for a 12-month eDiscovery SaaS and maintenance contract running August 2026 to August 2027; the SEC’s discovery and storage environment ran $46,060,473 across two years; DHS/ICE obligated $6,792,363.73 over roughly three years. At the small end, USDA bought the same product on consecutive annual awards at $95,660, $125,660, $161,660, and $169,430. Read that as a working band: a single-department deployment near $100,000–$170,000 a year, a mid-size agency between $400,000 and $2.5M, and only the largest programs reaching eight figures.

Relativity at comparable scale — a mid-size corporate legal department’s active matters, inclusive of hosting and partner fees — lands in the $200,000–$600,000+ range annually. The headline data fee is not the invoice: the certified partner’s hosting, project management, and services sit on top, and the ratio of partner spend to Relativity spend varies more between buyers than the Relativity line item itself does. Casepoint’s schedule price is the invoice. Budget the two differently: Relativity’s uncertainty is in the partner layer, Casepoint’s is in renewal escalation.

Verdict

Pick Casepoint when a security control drives the decision: FedRAMP High, any DoD Impact Level, or GovRAMP for state and local work. Pick it also when FOIA, Privacy Act, or congressional-inquiry response needs to live in the same platform as litigation, and when a contracting officer needs a direct schedule buy rather than a subcontracted partner arrangement.

Pick Relativity when outside counsel and service providers already run your matters there, when the workflow depends on a third-party application that only exists in that ecosystem, or when bundled aiR at a single data fee is the cost structure your finance team can actually forecast. FedRAMP Class C is sufficient for the large majority of regulated commercial work, and buying above your classification ceiling is a real cost with no return.

If you cannot decide, the default is Relativity — unless you are a US federal agency or a defense contractor, in which case the default is Casepoint and the deliberation is short.

Pick neither if you are a mid-market legal department with no government exposure running standard litigation at modest volume. That is Everlaw or DISCO territory on UX and predictable per-matter economics, Logikcull for occasional self-serve matters, and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery when the data never leaves Microsoft 365. If your constraint is investigations analytics rather than authorization, read Reveal vs Relativity instead.

Watch-outs

• Relativity Server has a wall in it. After 1 January 2028, new matters and workspaces must be created in RelativityOne, with limited exceptions; existing on-prem workspaces continue to be supported. If your data-residency or air-gap requirement is what kept you on Server, that requirement now has a deadline attached. Guard: get the exception criteria and their expiry in writing before you renew Server, and price a RelativityOne or Casepoint migration into the same budget cycle.
• Casepoint has a 2023 incident in its record. In May 2023 the ALPHV/BlackCat group claimed roughly two terabytes of Casepoint data including government files. Casepoint’s investigation concluded the incident was limited to a transitory staging area serving a small subset of customers and did not reach its DoD, FedRAMP, or core systems. Guard: require that your data resides inside the authorized FedRAMP boundary as a contract term, not an architecture diagram, and ask for the third-party forensic summary under NDA during diligence.
• Casepoint renewals escalate visibly. The USDA series above is the same product at the same agency rising from $95,660 to $169,430 across four consecutive annual awards. Some of that is data growth, and you cannot separate the two from outside. Guard: fix per-GB rates in the base contract and cap the annual escalator before signing, not at first renewal.
• Relativity’s price is not Relativity’s total. Because the partner hosts and services the instance, a quote from Relativity and a quote from a certified partner are not comparable documents. Guard: require an all-in annual figure from at least two partners for the same data volume and matter count, and make the AI inclusion explicit in writing rather than assuming the bundled-aiR announcement covers your contract.