State Net and BillTrack50 fulfill overlapping but distinct needs. Both track legislation and regulations across the fifty states and Congress; the difference is that one is an enterprise intelligence service with human analysts behind it, and the other is a self-serve platform with its price on the website. This is an honest side-by-side to help you judge which you actually need.
Quick Overview
LexisNexis State Net
State Net describes itself as the premier online legislative and regulatory intelligence and tracking application for the fifty states and Congress. Founded in 1969 and acquired by LexisNexis in December 2010, it has fifty-plus years of continuous coverage that no newer entrant can match. Its defining feature is a human editorial layer: staff analysts who collect, verify, and enrich records rather than passing raw text through. It is sold by demo and quote, with dedicated onboarding, training and account management.
BillTrack50
BillTrack50 is a self-serve legislative and regulatory tracking platform, founded in 2011 by a small Colorado team. Its premise is that many organizations do not need an analyst service, they need a good tool they can operate themselves, at a published price they can approve without a procurement cycle.
Coverage
LexisNexis State Net
Very broad. Legislation and regulations across all fifty states and Congress, drawn from thousands of regulatory agencies as well as legislative sources, plus municipal coverage across more than 1,000 cities and counties. Records are editorially enhanced by analysts that write meaningful titles and summaries and classify measures by topic. Their Issue Screening service goes further, with analysts filtering a broad search down to an organization’s specific issue set. That is a service, not a feature, and no software product substitutes for it.
State Net also connects into the wider Lexis ecosystem, linking pending legislation to codes and practical guidance — a structural advantage that nobody outside LexisNexis can match.
BillTrack50
State and federal bills, regulations, and executive orders, in one platform with one search, one alert stream, and one set of reports. Paid tiers also include access to basic legislator and legislator staff details and contact information. Legislation goes back to 2011; regulation coverage runs from 2024 onwards.
Functionality and workflow comparison
LexisNexis State Net
- Legislative and regulatory tracking with analyst-verified, editorially summarized records
- Issue Screening: human analysts curating results to your issue set
- Topic classification across a very large taxonomy
- Custom and automated reports, built with help from solutions consultants
- XML data feeds into your own database or GRC system
- Predictive and analytical features over bill movement
- Integration with Lexis legal research, codes and practical guidance
- Dedicated onboarding, training and named customer success support
BillTrack50
- Bill and regulation sheets that behave like a spreadsheet so users feel immediately at home, able to filter, sort, group, add custom columns for internal position, owner or priority
- 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” helps you 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 that live on your own website and update themselves
- 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
The two services answer "what now?" quite differently, and both answers are legitimate.
State Net's answer is verification: a record has been read by a person, summarized and classified before it reaches you. Where an error carries regulatory or legal consequences, that human check has value.
BillTrack50's answer is speed and self-sufficiency. An amendment alert leads straight into the marked-up bill text, with a plain-English summary beside it and a column to record your position. From there the outward tools take over — a self-updating bill list on your own site, a published scorecard, a stakeholder page members read without a login. That outward orientation is the sharpest difference between us: State Net's outputs are aimed largely inward, at your compliance team or your own processes, while most of our customers track on behalf of somebody else and need to publish what they find to members, clients, or the public.
There is also a time-to-value difference. State Net is configured with help; BillTrack50 is built so one person can sign up, run a search, save a sheet and have a customized alert arriving the next morning, without training. Existing searches can be modified at will, and new searches built at any time.
Support and service
LexisNexis State Net
State Net includes dedicated onboarding, training and ongoing support, with named customer success contacts and solutions consultants who help build complex or automated reports. Support is available during published hours, with a training library alongside it.
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.
We would not pretend this is the same thing as an enterprise success function. It is smaller, less formal, and there is no implementation plan. Instead, BillTrack50 is direct. The distance between "this would be better if…" and someone acting on it is very short.
A full API is included in every paid plan at no additional cost, and we actively encourage customers to use it. Some 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. We love to see customers do something impactful with the data we provide. Many services in this market treat API access as a separate purchase. We do not. State Net delivers data through enterprise XML feeds, which sit within a broader commercial arrangement.
Pricing
State Net prices by quote. Rates are not published; you request a demo, discuss scope and receive a proposal. For an enterprise service with a human analyst component that is an entirely reasonable model. The cost genuinely depends on scope and service level.
BillTrack50 offers a forever free Citizen tier that anyone can sign up for and start using right away 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, a one-off question, or a student, journalist or board member trying to understand a single bill, it is genuinely useful on its own. We built it because the legislative process ought to be legible to people who are not paying for software.
Beyond that, BillTrack50 publishes every price on its website, where anyone can find and understand them without needing to talk to us. This includes 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 — no per-seat calculations, no deciding which colleague misses out this year, no separate data contract. There is a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
We will not claim we do everything State Net does for a fraction of the price, because it is not true. They do things we deliberately do not. What we would say is that a good many organizations pay for a service level they don’t actually need or use.
Best platform for you
Reasons to choose LexisNexis State Net
You need human analysts verifying and summarizing records; you have compliance obligations where an error is expensive; you require very deep municipal coverage; you want issue screening delivered as a service; or your organization already runs on Lexis and the integration matters. Those are good reasons, and State Net is a sound purchase for them.
Reasons to choose BillTrack50
- Your team can do its own tracking, given a good tool
- You want bills, regulations and executive orders in one place, handled the same way
- You would like to see the price before the demo
- Several colleagues need access without a per-seat charge
- You publish what you track to members, a board, or the public
- You want a free tier available to researchers, students and volunteers
- You want API access included, so you can build your own tools on top
- You would like to start this week rather than next quarter
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.