Legislative tracking tools tend to look interchangeable from the outside yet feel very different in daily use. LegiScan and BillTrack50 fulfill overlapping but distinct needs. Both will tell you what bills are moving, but they are built for different people, and only one of them also covers regulations. This is an honest side-by-side to help you work out which fits your team.
Quick Overview
LegiScan
LegiScan is an impartial, nonpartisan legislative tracking, reporting and data service covering all fifty states and Congress. It operates on two fronts: a well-established API and bulk dataset business used widely across civic technology, and a tracking product — GAITS and GAITS Pro — used directly by government affairs professionals. The GAITS platform is lean, capable, and built by people who know the legislative process thoroughly.
BillTrack50
BillTrack50 is a legislative and regulatory tracking platform, founded in 2011, aimed especially at organizations that track on behalf of clients, members, boards or the public. The interface was designed knowing that the person doing tracking is not necessarily a full-time legislative specialist. BillTrack50 covers bills, regulations, and executive orders in one place. Information is presented in a simple spreadsheet-style interface including plain-English AI summaries, and straightforward publishing tools are provided to share information internally and on the web.
Coverage
LegiScan
Bills, resolutions and roll calls across all fifty states, DC, and Congress, normalized into a single consistent structure. This is hard work done well; anyone who has tried to reconcile fifty legislative websites knows how much unglamorous engineering it represents. Free bulk datasets are generously published under an open license.
Administrative rulemaking is not part of the service.
BillTrack50
Bills, regulations, and executive orders across all fifty states, DC, and Congress, in one platform with one search interface, one alert stream, and one set of reports. Paid tiers also include access to basic legislator and legislator staff details and contact information.
The regulatory tracking is highly useful as well. Legislative data is hard; regulatory data is a nightmare. Fifty-odd legislatures publish bills, but thousands of agencies publish rules each with its own website, publication schedule, document format and comment period, and nothing tying any of it together. We pull this information together, state by state, in some cases agency by agency, over several years. We believe the result is one of the most comprehensive regulatory tracking services available in the US.
Crucially, regulations tracking is not a separate product with its own learning curve. Regulations behave exactly like bills inside BillTrack50. For many of our customers the simplicity of our system is the main reason they have chosen BillTrack50, so we’ve done our best to turn regulation tracking into a manageable task. Legislation goes back to 2011; regulation coverage runs from 2024 onwards.
Functionality and workflow comparison
LegiScan
- Keyword search with email and RSS alerts
- Monitoring lists, bill notes, and priority ranking
- Custom executive summaries (Pro tier)
- Exports to Word, Excel, and PDF
- PolitiCorps — public or private groups for tracking and discussing bills together
- A mature, well-documented REST API plus free bulk datasets
- Per-user pricing above the first seat on the Pro tier
The interface rewards fluency. It is dense and efficient for someone who already knows what a substitute is, why second reading matters, and which calendar to watch.
BillTrack50
- Bill and regulation sheets that behave like a spreadsheet — filter, sort, group, and add your own custom columns
- Standardized bill text format across the country, with strikeouts and underlines, instead of having to understand the mechanics and bill drafting rules in fifty different states.
- AI-written plain-English summaries, so you know what a bill does before opening the text
- Version comparison with marked-up text: additions in green, deletions in red, with your search terms highlighted
- “Similar bills” — identify the same idea year over year or moving in other states
- AI “Bill Bot”, an AI interface for asking a question of a specific bill (“does this apply to organizations under fifty employees?”) with answers grounded in the bill text
- Embeddable bill list and map widgets to share data with others including the public
- Publishable legislator scorecards and stakeholder pages, including a mobile version
- Custom reports in PDF, HTML and Excel
- A full API to both bills and regulations included in every paid plan
- Unlimited users on every paid plan
Updates and actionability
Both services deliver reliable daily alerts. The difference is what happens after the alert arrives.
With LegiScan you get the change and the record — interpreting the bill or update is your job. However, practiced government affairs professionals often prefer this “just the facts” approach. With BillTrack50, an amendment alert leads straight into the standardized marked-up text with a plain-English summary alongside it, an AI chat bot to explain nuances and context, and room to record your notes to inform yourself or others. The goal is to make the information accessible and comprehensible to a wider audience.
Support and service
LegiScan
LegiScan offers email and phone support, with the level of support varying by tier. It is a small, efficient operation that keeps its overhead low. That discipline is part of how the pricing stays where it is. However, it doesn’t provide a named account manager, service levels or a dedicated success contact. The product is a capable tool that expects you to be self-sufficient.
BillTrack50
We are a smaller dedicated business, and we treat that as an advantage rather than an apology.
There is no tier to climb and no queue to sit in. When you contact us you reach one of the people who build the product — someone who can explain (or change) the thing you are asking about, usually the same day. We will sit with you while you set up your first bill sheet, work out why a search is not returning what you expected, or help you shape a scorecard before your board meeting.
We also go further than most when it warrants it. If you need something BillTrack50 does not yet do, we can build it. A good deal of the product exists because a customer asked. Bespoke development is a service we offer, not a door we close. Customers stay because they are happy, not because they lack options.
On the technical side, LegiScan's push API is excellent and deservedly well-known — but it is a separate product line, priced on top of the tracking tiers. The LegiScan push API is robust and complete, suitable for supporting an entire tracking service, such as BillTrack50.
The BillTrack50 API covers both bills and regulations, and is included in every paid plan at no additional cost. It is suitable for building your own widgets or AI applications, and we actively encourage customers to use it. Some customers pull their tracked bills into an internal dashboard, some feed a members' area on their own site, some have built products of their own on top of it. It is your data about your issues; we would love to see you do something impactful with it. Many services in this market treat API access as a separate purchase. We do not.
Pricing
LegiScan publishes its prices, which we respect and choose to do as well. Its entry tiers start lower than ours and it offers a free tier and reduced nonprofit rates. If your requirement is one state, a modest bill list and one person, LegiScan is hard to beat on cost alone, and we would recommend you give them a look.
BillTrack50 also offers a free Citizen tier, for the same reason that LegiScan does; we believe the legislative process ought to be legible to anyone without having to pay for software. Anyone can use the free Citizen account to search bills across all fifty states, DC and Congress, read AI-written plain-English summaries, look up legislators and committees, and share links to what they find. No charge, no time limit, no credit card. It does not include saved tracking, alerts or regulations — that is what the paid plans are for — but for research, for a one-off question, or for a student, journalist or board member trying to understand a single bill, the free tier is genuinely useful on its own.
BillTrack50 also publishes all paid pricing openly: single-state and all-states tiers for legislation, with separate and lower-cost tiers if you only need regulation tracking. Every paid plan includes unlimited users and full API access, with no per-seat charge and no data surcharge. If you are supporting lots of users, say a coalition of non-profits, free unlimited users can make BillTrack50 a cost-effective option.
Best platform for you
Reasons to choose LegiScan
Your team is fluent in the legislative process and wants a lean, capable tool at a low price; you need legislative data in bulk or via API and have technical staff to work with it; you track bills only; or you are an individual or very small group for whom the free and low-cost tiers are decisive.
Reasons to choose BillTrack50
- The person doing the tracking is not a full-time legislative specialist
- Several colleagues need access and you would rather not count seats
- You publish what you track to members, a board or the public — with scorecards, stakeholder pages and a mobile app
- You want to see at a glance exactly what an amendment changed
- You want API access included rather than bought separately
- Regulations or executive orders are part of your remit, not just bills
Start tracking what actually matters to you
Legislation and regulations, in one place, with pricing on the website and a friendly team that’s ready to help you. Start a 30-day free trial — no credit card required — or get in touch and we will show you around.