Every platform in this table dockets US trademarks. They differ on price, on whether they also handle patents, and on whether screening and watch come with the subscription or arrive as separate invoices.
At a glance
| Platform | From | Patents | Watch included | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alt Legal | ~$60/mo | Limited | Add-on | Trademark docketing, any size |
| DocketTrak | $125/mo | Yes | No | Small combined practices |
| FlexTrac | ~$160/mo* | Yes | Configurable | Firms wanting to define their own rules |
| AppColl | Vendor | Yes | No | Solo and small IP firms |
| Anaqua | On request | Yes | Yes | Corporate IP departments |
| DeadlineDocket | Vendor | No | No | Solos wanting reminders |
| Sealvo | $149/mo | No | Yes | Trademark-only practices |
Alt Legal, DocketTrak and Sealvo publish rate cards and those rows come from them. The starred figure is from third-party software directories, not the vendor — FlexTrac does not publish one. AppColl, Anaqua, TM Cloud and DeadlineDocket quote on request. Prices move and vendors reprice; verify before relying on any row, ours included.
Three questions that decide it
Do you file patents?
If yes, a combined platform avoids two systems. If no, a trademark-only product models trademark clocks natively rather than as a configuration of a generic matter.
What are you already paying for watch and screening?
This is where the comparison usually turns. Docketing priced against docketing puts Alt Legal first on cost. Docketing plus a separate monitoring subscription plus per-search screening fees is a different total.
Is anything checking your docket?
Malpractice carriers commonly expect two independent checks. A second system that reads the register directly will disagree with the first occasionally — and those disagreements are the entire point.
What the price column does not show
Sealvo is the more expensive line on that table at every tier — $149 against Alt Legal's $60 at entry, $349 against $195 in the middle, $799 against $295 at the top. There is no reading of those numbers that makes us the cheap option, and a comparison page that buried that would not be worth reading.
The difference is what each subscription is being asked to do. A docketing system in the conventional sense is a database of dates: something or someone enters a deadline, the system stores it and reminds you about it. The accuracy of that database is the accuracy of whoever typed into it. Sealvo computes the dates instead — it reads the register, applies the statutory rule for each clock, and produces the obligations a mark has whether or not anyone noticed them. The two products are priced differently because they are doing different amounts of work.
That distinction only earns the difference in a practice with enough marks that manual entry has become a real risk. Below roughly a hundred and fifty live marks, a careful paralegal with a calendar and a cheaper docketing subscription is a perfectly defensible setup, and we would rather say so here than sell you something you do not need. Above that, the arithmetic turns: one missed Section 8 on a mark a client has built fifteen years of goodwill into costs more than any subscription on this page, and there is no petition to revive a cancelled registration.
How to read any vendor's coverage claim
Every platform here will tell you it covers USPTO deadlines. The question worth asking in a demo is narrower: which clocks does it compute without being told, and which does it only store once a human enters them? Ask the vendor to open a mark nobody has touched and show you what it says the mark owes.
The ones that separate products are the clocks that depend on prosecution history rather than a single date on the face of the record. A Section 8 window is simple arithmetic from the registration date. An office action response is not: since December 2022 the standard period is three months with a three-month extension available, but Madrid 66(a) applications still get six, and knowing which rule applies means reading the application basis and the action itself. A statement of use extension depends on how many of the five requests have already been used. A petition to revive runs two months from a notice of abandonment that may never have been seen.
Those are the four to test. A system that handles all of them from the register is doing something a spreadsheet cannot; a system that needs them typed in is a reminder service with a price tag.
Searching rather than docketing?
This page compares systems that track what a mark owes after it is filed. If what you need is clearance and conflict screening before filing, that is a different market with different vendors — see how Sealvo compares to USPTO TESS and the search tools.