CourtMesh vs Indian Kanoon
The free, widely trusted full text judgment search everyone in Indian law has used, and the cheapest published court data API in the market.
Every claim about Indian Kanoon on this page was checked on 2026-09-19 against the source linked beside it. Where we could not verify something we say so rather than estimate. Their terms can change without notice, so check their own page before you buy.
The short answer
Who each one suits best
If you only read one section, read this one. These are two different tools and the choice is usually settled by what kind of question you are asking, not by which product is better.
Indian Kanoon is better for
Anyone who needs to read the text of a judgment right now, for free, without an account, and any developer for whom the per call price is the whole decision. It is the default starting point in Indian legal research for good reason.
CourtMesh is better for
Teams that need the docket layer, that is live case status, order sheet timelines and District Court filings beyond Delhi and Bangalore, or a structured API with more than document retrieval in it.
The honest version
What Indian Kanoon does well, and where we differ
Let us start with the part most comparison pages skip. Indian Kanoon is free, it has been the default entry point to Indian case law for well over a decade, and its organic footprint is enormous. Search almost any Indian case by name and Indian Kanoon is what you find. It is a genuine public good, it costs nothing to read, and its published API rate card is the cheapest in the Indian market by a wide margin. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and if price per call is your only constraint you should stop reading here and use them.
The difference is what each product is built to be. Indian Kanoon is a judgment and order search engine: it indexes decided text so you can read it and cite it. CourtMesh is built on the docket, that is the case as it moves, including status, listing history, order sheets and District Court filings, with the judgment text alongside rather than instead.
That difference shows up most concretely in the browse directory. Indian Kanoon lists two district courts, Delhi and Bangalore, alongside the Supreme Court, the High Courts and 21 tribunal collections. That is a deliberate scope for a judgment index, and it is also why a District Court question outside those two cities is not a question it is built to answer.
So the honest framing is not better or worse. It is whether your question is "what did the court hold", which Indian Kanoon answers for free, or "what is happening in this matter, and what has this party been sued for", which is a docket question.
Side by side
CourtMesh and Indian Kanoon, dimension by dimension
Only dimensions where both products can genuinely be compared, and only claims we could read from a published page. A tick marks the side with the advantage on that row, including the rows where it is not us.
| What you are comparing | Indian Kanoon | CourtMesh | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price to a reader | Free to read, no account needed. Optional membership at ₹500 per month or ₹5,000 per year, after a one month free trial | Free judgment library and free statute library with no account needed to read; an account for search and AI features | View source |
| Brand recognition and organic reach | The best known Indian case law site, and usually the first organic result for a case searched by name | A newer entrant with a far smaller organic footprint | View source |
| API price per call | ₹0.50 per search, ₹0.50 per original document, ₹0.20 per document, ₹0.05 per document fragment, ₹0.02 per document metainfo | A published per call credit price for every confirmed endpoint, listed on the pricing page | View source |
| API free allowance | ₹500 of free credit to develop and test. Non commercial use can get ₹10,000 free every month, subject to use case verification by the site administrator | 2,500 API credits on signup and 500 free every month, plus a free public judgment library and a free statute library | View source |
| API attribution requirement | A "powered by IKanoon" logo must be shown wherever results, documents or classifiers are surfaced, expressly including retrieval augmented generation and model fine tuning | Attribution as "Source: CourtMesh" on public display surfaces, waivable under a separate agreement | View source |
| District Court coverage | Two district courts appear in the browse directory, Delhi District Court and Bangalore District Court | District Courts nationally, including case status and filing metadata | View source |
| Dockets, case status and cause lists | Not offered. The browse directory carries decided judgments and published order series, not live case status, cause lists or filing metadata | Case status, order sheet timelines, filing metadata and party level litigation history, including District Courts, searchable across the corpus and available over the API | View source |
| Search type | Full text keyword search with citation linking between documents | Keyword search across the full corpus, plus AI semantic search across roughly 2 million cases | View source |
| Endpoints in the API | Search, original document, document, document fragment, document metainfo and classifier calls are priced on the rate card | Public REST API, 18 confirmed endpoints with a published per call credit price, plus an MCP server | View source |
| Published coverage and freshness stats | The browse directory lists the courts covered. We could not find record counts or ingest freshness published | Per court, per year record counts and last ingest freshness published free, no API key needed | View source |
| Party litigation screening | We could not find a party screening or litigation check product offered | Party screening endpoint returning confidence banded matches with evidence and a DPDP purpose field on every call | Not published |
| Editorial content | No publisher headnotes. Judgment text with citation links between documents | None. No headnotes, no editorial summaries, no publisher citator. AI generated analysis is labelled as such and sits beside the record, never inside it | View source |
Checked 2026-09-19. Rows reading “we could not find” record what was published on the pages we retrieved, not a claim that the capability does not exist; ask Indian Kanoon directly if it matters to your decision. Figures about CourtMesh come from the same constants that drive our own pricing and coverage pages, so they cannot drift apart from what we charge and publish elsewhere.
Be honest about it
When to choose Indian Kanoon instead
We would rather you picked the right tool and came back later than bought the wrong one from us now.
Choose Indian Kanoon when
- You want to read the text of a judgment right now and pay nothing. This is the most common reason to use Indian Kanoon and it is a completely good reason.
- You are a student, an academic, or working non commercially, and the ₹10,000 per month free API grant applies to you.
- Your build is a thin lookup over judgments and per call price decides it. Their rate card is the market floor and we will not tell you otherwise.
- You need a source your reader already recognises. Familiarity has real value in a citation.
Choose CourtMesh when
- Your question is about the docket rather than the judgment: current status, when it was last listed, what orders have been passed, what the filing history shows.
- You need District Courts beyond Delhi and Bangalore, which is most District Court work.
- You are screening a party rather than researching a point of law, so you need name resolution across the corpus with a confidence band rather than a list of documents.
- You want coverage and freshness numbers you can check before you commit, rather than take on trust.
What we do not do
CourtMesh's own gaps, stated on our own page
These are true whichever product you are comparing us against, and you will find them out eventually. Better here.
- No SOC 2 Type II and no ISO 27001. Neither is scoped to a target date today.
- No published uptime or freshness SLA. The document at /sla is a proposed draft, not a signed commitment.
- No editorial headnotes, no publisher citator and no commentary. We carry the record, not a reading of it.
- AI semantic search covers a subset of the corpus, not all 315.6 million records. Keyword search covers the whole of it.
- India only. If your research crosses jurisdictions, we are the wrong tool.
Our security posture, retention windows and subprocessor list are set out in full on API security, and what a licence actually grants is on data licensing.
A note on the underlying records
Who owns what in an Indian judgment
This matters to any comparison of Indian legal research products, because it decides what each side can legitimately hold. In Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, (2008) 1 SCC 1, the Supreme Court held that the raw judgment is in the public domain, while a publisher's copy edited version, headnotes, footnotes and paragraph numbering are that publisher's own protected work where they show skill and judgment. Section 52(1)(q) of the Copyright Act, 1957 places the reproduction of judicial pronouncements outside infringement.
The practical consequence runs both ways. CourtMesh ingests primary records from official court portals and does not ingest, reproduce or resell another publisher's headnotes, editorial summaries or paragraph numbering, which keeps our licensing position clean. It also means we have no editorial layer of our own to offer you, and nothing on this page quotes Indian Kanoon's.
Counsel review pending on this section.
FAQ
CourtMesh and Indian Kanoon, asked and answered
Other comparisons
Still weighing the options
Each of these is written the same way: sourced, dated, and explicit about when the other tool is the better answer.
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CourtMesh vs LegitQuest
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CourtMesh vs CaseMine
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CourtMesh vs eCourtsIndia
The closest thing to a like for like competitor we have: an Indian court data platform that, like us, publishes a per endpoint API rate card, runs an MCP server and sells a party screening product.
Or go straight to the product: all comparisons, the Indian court cases API, the litigation check API, court case search, coverage and freshness, the MCP server or pricing.
Test it against your own case list
The only comparison that settles anything is a recall test on cases you already know. Sign up, get free API credits immediately, and run it yourself. No sales call, and no obligation to tell us the result.