Drafty AI vs Visalaw.ai: Drafting Compared

Drafty AI vs Visalaw.ai: how the two products compare, including pricing differences and time on the market. Both are built specifically for immigration practice and both will draft a petition. The differences that matter most are how each one charges for the work, and how long each has been doing it.

Drafty AI was built by Nadine Navarro, a practicing immigration attorney, around production drafting from the start. That origin shows in how it is priced, and in how long it has been drafting real filings.

The Core Difference: Drafts Metered vs Matters Metered

Visalaw.ai counts documents. Its Core plan at $220 per month covers research, chat, document analysis, summarization and translation, and does not include drafting; drafting on Core is available at a published pay-as-you-go rate of $150 per draft. Its Pro plan at $480 per month includes ten petition or brief drafts per month.

Drafty AI counts cases. The plan starts at $250 per month for one seat and ten matters, where a matter is one client case. Inside a matter you can produce as many documents as the case needs, declarations, briefs, RFE responses, exhibit lists, cover letters, all for that one charge. Drafts are never metered. Matters beyond the first ten are $10 each, and the matter pool is shared across the whole firm rather than allocated per seat.

What a Document-Heavy Month Actually Costs

Take a practice running ten matters a month. In humanitarian and family work, a single matter rarely produces one document. An I-601A package might need a hardship brief, two or three declarations, an exhibit index, and a cover letter. Call it four or five documents per case, so forty to fifty documents in the month.

On Drafty AI that is ten matters, which is the $250 plan, and the document count is irrelevant to the bill. On Visalaw.ai Pro at $480 per month, ten of those documents fall inside the plan. What the remaining thirty to forty cost depends on terms Visalaw.ai does not publish on its pricing page, since the $150 pay-as-you-go rate is quoted against Core rather than as a Pro overage rate. Ask them directly before you budget.

How Long Each Engine Has Been Drafting

Drafty AI has been drafting immigration documents since June 2023. Visalaw.ai’s dedicated drafting product, GEN Drafts, reached general availability on November 1, 2024.

Time in production is not a feature, and it is worth being precise about what it buys. It does not make one tool inherently smarter. What it buys is the unglamorous accumulation of edge cases: the formatting quirk in a particular exhibit index, the phrasing that draws scrutiny in a hardship brief, the thousand small corrections that only surface when real attorneys file real cases and report what came back wrong. An engine that has been absorbing that feedback for longer has simply been wrong in more ways already, and been corrected.

Why Unmetered Drafts Change How Teams Work

The pricing model does not just change the invoice. It changes behaviour. A per-draft counter quietly discourages iteration: an associate who knows each regeneration has a price will accept a serviceable draft rather than push for a better one, and a paralegal will hesitate before trying a second approach to a difficult declaration.

Iteration is how a filing gets good. Drafty AI removes the counter entirely, so the only limit on how many passes a document gets is the attorney’s judgment about when it is ready. Across six studios covering drafting, case outline, RFE responses, exhibit lists, expert letters and translation, that adds up over a filing season.

What You Get at Drafty AI’s Entry Price

Every studio is included from the first plan. There is no tier where drafting is withheld and no per-document charge waiting behind it. Live legal research is integrated into the drafts themselves, with citations checked as part of the drafting flow rather than as a separate research session you run first. The matter pool is shared firm-wide, so a second seat at $100 per month draws on the same allowance rather than needing its own.

You can start without talking to anyone: a four-day trial with two matters, no card required. Subscribing unlocks a further seven-day trial on top of it.

See the full plan builder on our pricing page, compare the wider field in our guide to the best AI tools for immigration lawyers, or read how the drafting works in practice in our walkthrough on using AI to draft an RFE response. To see the output before committing to anything, our free AI tools for immigration attorneys need no account at all.