How Formable Cut Years of DOCX Development with Apryse

When Formable set out to build contract redlining directly into its platform, the team faced a major build-versus-buy decision: spend years developing Word-quality DOCX editing in-house or find an SDK capable of handling the complexity of real-world legal documents.

Formable benchmarked multiple DOCX editing solutions using complex contracts with different layouts, formatting, columns, logos, and other elements. According to co-founder and CEO Alex Shi, Apryse was the only solution that consistently delivered the DOCX fidelity the team needed.

With Apryse WebViewer and DOCX Editor, Formable built a working redlining prototype in two months. Shi estimates using Apryse allowed the company to ship one to two years faster than if it had attempted to build comparable DOCX editing technology itself.

Formable is a contract management platform covering e-signing, redlining, review, and editing. The platform also offers APIs to let software companies embed solutions directly into their own applications.

The company was founded around a gap its team saw in conventional e-signing platforms. While existing tools made signing an agreement easy, they did not always give both sides of a contract an equally simple way to review, revise, and negotiate the document before signing.

“We wanted to create software where the legal department on the other side of a contract could have real input into the agreement, through redlining and edits in a DOCX editor,” said Alex Shi, CEO and co-founder of Formable.

That meant DOCX editing could not be an afterthought. It needed to behave like a core part of the Formable product.

For legal teams, document fidelity is essential.

Contracts uploaded into Formable need to maintain the formatting and structure users expect from the original Word file. A misplaced element, altered layout, or formatting difference can create confusion and undermine trust in the document being reviewed.

At the same time, building a full-featured word processor was not where Formable wanted its engineering team spending its time.

“As a startup, we didn’t have the resources to build our own word processor,” Shi said.

The team needed an SDK that could deliver the editing experience and fidelity its customers required while allowing Formable’s developers to stay focused on building the broader contract platform.

Rather than relying on feature lists or vendor claims, Formable benchmarked DOCX editing technologies itself.

The team tested approximately 10 to 20 documents covering the types of formatting and workflows Formable expected its users to encounter.

“Our benchmark documents were pretty complex,” Shi said. “This was because there is no standardized NDA that all lawyers use. Some firms have a big logo at the very top of the file, other firms keep it really simple, black and white, text only. Other cases use two or more columns.”

The expectation was straightforward: what users saw in Microsoft Word needed to remain intact when the document was opened for editing inside Formable.

Fidelity became the primary evaluation criterion, alongside ease of integration. After completing its benchmarking, Formable chose Apryse.

The team also considered open-source libraries. While Formable saw value in the flexibility and customization they offered, the lack of dedicated support created additional risk for a capability this central to the product.

“We really value the open-source software movement,” Shi said. “I don’t want to say there’s no use for open-source libraries in the legal space, but because we wanted the full experience of a real word processor, Apryse was the best option for us.”

Formable embedded Apryse WebViewer and DOCX Editor directly into its React-based front end to power the contract redlining experience.

One of the most important capabilities was Tracked Changes.

For legal teams, seeing a change is only part of the requirement. Users also need to know who made it and whether it was accepted.

“Tracked changes lets us accurately capture who made what change and who accepted what, which matters a lot in a legal document where you need to be able to pinpoint who made certain changes,” Shi said. By embedding these capabilities directly into Formable, users can review and revise agreements without moving between separate document editing and contract management systems.

Formable initially used an Apryse trial key to test WebViewer and DOCX Editor during its benchmarking process. That allowed the development team to start building before committing to the technology.

“The free trial key allowed us to develop with the SDK without going through a whole sales process or having to talk to someone,” Shi said. “We could just play with it and develop for free.”

Because the team had already worked with the SDK during its evaluation, moving from testing into development was straightforward.

Within two months, Formable had a working redlining prototype and was able to begin putting the capability in front of users.

“We used ChatGPT to sift through Apryse’s sample code and documentation, which was pretty useful for getting started,” said Shi.

For Formable, the biggest impact was not simply adding another feature. It was avoiding the development effort required to build sophisticated DOCX editing technology from the ground up.

Shi estimates that using Apryse allowed Formable to ship one to two years faster than if the company had tried to replicate comparable functionality internally.

That time could instead be invested in the parts of Formable that differentiate its product, including the contract workflows and user experience surrounding the editor. The decision also reduced the engineering burden after launch.

When Formable encountered a rendering issue tied to a particular font, the Apryse solution engineering team reproduced the issue and resolved it. With an unsupported library, that troubleshooting and development work could have fallen back on Formable’s own team.

Formable is now seeing customers use its redlining functionality as part of the broader contract process, rather than moving immediately from document creation to signature.

“What we’ve seen is that a lot of our users aren’t just sending out contracts to be signed anymore,” Shi said. “They’re sharing agreements with the other party’s legal team for review and negotiation, resolving changes through redlining, and then moving the agreement to signing.“

That behavior reflects the problem Formable originally set out to solve: giving both sides of an agreement a way to participate in the contract before the signature stage.

Formable points to three areas where Apryse has contributed to the product:

Formable’s roadmap centers on covering the full contract lifecycle within its own platform, from AI-assisted contract editing through first draft, redlining, review, and signing.

“We want to build our entire ecosystem around legal agreements and contracts,” Shi said, “so whenever somebody needs a tool for any part of that lifecycle, they can come to us.”

As that roadmap develops, Formable is already evaluating additional Apryse capabilities, including redaction, PDF markup, and real-time collaborative editing.

If you’re interested in building advanced document editing and review capabilities into your own application, get started with an Apryse trial key.