Formable Builds Word-Quality Contract Redlining in a Few Months, Not a Few Years with Apryse SDK
Denver, Colorado, Nov. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Apryse, the leading provider of document processing technology, announced that Formable has embedded the Apryse Web SDK (WebViewer) and DOCX Editor to power contract redlining inside its platform. Using Apryse, Formable built a working prototype in two months, with the company estimating Apryse saved its team one to two years of development compared with building comparable DOCX editing in-house.
Formable is a contract management platform covering e-signing, reviewing, redlining, and drafting agreements. Its founders saw a gap in conventional e-signing tools. Those tools make it easy to sign an agreement, but they rarely give both sides an equally simple way to review, revise, and negotiate the document first.
“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, Co-Founder and CEO of Formable. That made DOCX editing a core part of the product, not a side feature.
Fidelity tested against real contracts
For legal teams, a contract that opens with a shifted column or a missing logo is a contract they stop trusting. Formable needed what users saw in Microsoft Word to stay intact when the same file opened for editing in its platform. As a startup, it did not have the resources to build its own word processor.
Rather than rely on feature lists, Formable benchmarked multiple DOCX editors, including commercial and open-source libraries, against a wide range of complex contracts with varied logos, layouts, and multi-column formatting. Apryse was the only option that consistently held the fidelity the team required.
“If you want high fidelity DOCX editing, you pretty much have to go with Apryse, because they’re the leaders in this space,” said Shi. “There’s a place for open-source tools, but because we wanted the full experience of a real word processor, Apryse was the best option for us.”
The reason is architectural. Most browser editors convert DOCX into HTML or JSON and back again, and headers, sections, columns, and tracked changes shift or drop out on the round-trip. The Apryse DOCX Editor works directly on the native DOCX file in the browser, with no conversion layer and no server required.
Tracked changes where legal review happens
Formable embeds the WebViewer DOCX engine into their React service. Tracked changes record every insertion and deletion, along with who made it and who accepted it. Reviewers work through the agreement without moving between a separate editor and the contract system.
“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,” continued Shi.
From trial key to prototype in two months
Formable started building during its evaluation with an Apryse trial key, so moving from test to development took no rework. “The free trial key allowed us to develop with the SDK without going through a whole sales process or having to talk to someone,” said Shi.
The bigger gain came after the prototype. “What Apryse saved us was time, at least a year or two, in terms of how much faster we were able to ship compared to building it ourselves,” Shi said.
Formable put that time into the contract workflows and user experience that set its product apart.
Support continued after launch, too. When a specific font caused a rendering issue, Apryse engineers reproduced and resolved it. With an unsupported open-source library, that work would have landed on Formable’s own team.
Built for the full contract lifecycle
Formable customers now use redlining as part of the contract process, not just a step before signature. The company’s roadmap extends across the full lifecycle, from AI-assisted contract editing through redlining, review, and signing.
“We want to build our entire ecosystem around legal agreements and contracts, so whenever somebody needs a tool for any part of that lifecycle, they can come to us,” Shi said. Formable is already evaluating Apryse redaction and PDF markup, which run on the same SDK it uses today.
“When product and engineering teams evaluate a document editing SDK, they need to know it can handle the complexity of real documents without becoming a development project of its own,” said Jon Duncan, VP of Product at Apryse. “Formable tested those capabilities against real contracts and embedded DOCX editing directly into its platform. That allowed its engineers to focus on building the broader contract experience rather than developing and maintaining those editing capabilities themselves.”
Formable’s results from using Apryse
- Working DOCX redlining prototype in two months
- An estimated one to two years faster to market than building in-house
- High-fidelity rendering across complex, multi-format legal documents
- Tracked changes embedded directly in the contract review workflow
- More engineering time dedicated to Formable’s core product
Availability
Developers can evaluate WebViewer and DOCX Editor with a free trial key at dev.apryse.com.
Read the full Formable Case Study.
About Formable
Formable is a contract management platform covering e-signing, redlining, review, and drafting. It gives both sides of an agreement a way to review, revise, and negotiate before signature. Learn more at formabledocs.com.
About Apryse
Apryse provides developers and organizations with the technology to build, scale, and automate document workflows across the entire document lifecycle. With support for viewing, editing, conversion, data extraction, OCR, redaction, digital signatures, collaboration, and more than 100 file formats, Apryse helps organizations embed powerful document capabilities directly into their applications.
Trusted by more than 20,000 companies, including 85% of the Fortune 100, Apryse powers mission-critical workflows where performance, security, and accuracy matter most.
For more information, visit Apryse.com.
Hanna Miller Apryse hanna.miller@apryse.com
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