Factsmith

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of awesome evidence

Feature Comparison

Disclaimer: The following information may be out of date. If you notice any errors, please contact us.

Notes: Blue Book Report 3.0 and 4.0 are no longer available for use, but are retained here for historical interest. Not all categories are equally applicable to all software. Blue Book Report 4.0 did not feature a brief editor (it just formated and stored a database of cards, which could be organized into briefs using a word processor). Verbatim is a Word template for paperless debate, so this tally only considers its normal research and formatting features.

	Factsmith	Evidence Scribe	EvScribe Web	BBR 3.0	BBR 4.0	Verbatim	(word processor)
Cost
Free?	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Operating System
Windows	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Macintosh	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	MIXED	YES
Linux	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES	MIXED	YES
Database Structure
Cards separate	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Sources separate1	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Authors separate	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Card database2	SORT OF	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Cross-brief sources	NO	NO	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO
Brief File Formats
BRF (Factsmith)	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
xBrief (EvScribe)	MOSTLY	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
OpenBrief (OBF)	YES	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Export File Formats
Word (doc)	YES	YES	YES	YES	SORT OF	YES	YES
Word (docx)	NO	YES	YES	NO	SORT OF	YES	YES
OpenDocument (odt)	YES	YES	YES	NO	SORT OF	YES	YES
PDF	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	YES	YES
HTML	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Smartphone Webpage	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Rich Text (RTF)	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
BBCode	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Formatting Features
Automatic Formatting	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Format Customizable3	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Citations Customizable4	YES	PARTIAL	NO	NO	NO	MANUAL	MANUAL
Emphasis Customizable	YES	PARTIAL	NO	NO	NO	NO	MANUAL
Paragraph Styles	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Character Styles	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Table of Contents	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Headers and Footers	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES
No Cross-Page Cards	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	N/A	MANUAL
Easy Style Switching5	YES	MOSTLY	NO	NO	NO	NO	DEPENDS
Date Standardization	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
CITE-Compliance	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES
Data Entry
No Window Switching6	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO
Drag-and-Drop Entry	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	PARTIAL	PARTIAL
Screen-To-Text	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO
Line Break Removal	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	NO
Auto Access Dates	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Title Autocomplete	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Case Change	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	PARTIAL	PARTIAL
Spellcheck	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Evidence Formatting
Underline	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Strikethrough	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Bold	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Italic	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Advanced	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Images	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Citation Emphasis7	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	YES
Interface
Looks Like Final	NO	NO	NO	MOSTLY	SORT OF	YES	YES
Compact Brief View	YES	YES	YES	MOSTLY	NO	PARTIAL	NO
Drag-n-Drop Sorting	YES	NO	YES	YES	NO	PARTIAL	PARTIAL
Undo/Redo	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Online Features
Web-Based	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES
Works Offline	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Online Collaboration	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Online Storage/Backup	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Offline Storage/Backup	YES	YES	NO	PARTIAL	SORT OF	YES	YES
Extra Features
Paperless Debate	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	MANUAL
Automatic Sorting	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Automatic Updates	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES
Version Tracking8	MOSTLY	NO	YES	NO	NO	MANUAL	MANUAL
Built-In Brief Tree	YES	YES	PARTIAL	NO	NO	YES	NO
Bulk Brief Export	YES	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Internal Email Tool	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES
Internal Print Tool	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES
Quality Rankings	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	MANUAL	MANUAL
Source Standards9	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Statistics Display	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	NO
Subfolders10	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES
Text Speech Content	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO
Updated Briefs List	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO

[1] BBR has evidence filed under sources, instead of separately; thus they are functionally, but not literally, separate.

[2] BBR and EvScribe Web both use a card database integrally (cards are stored in a central database and can be reused in several briefs.) Factsmith features a card-collection-recall tool. The desktop version of Evidence Scribe allows you to easily find the card, but requires you to copy it manually.

[3] EvScribe Web allows limited tweaking of formatting options, but for the most part the formatting is fixed. BBR's formatting is not customizable at all beyond very basic content options.

[4] EvScribe Web does allow very limited tweaking of citation order, but not enough to list as "customizable" here.

[5] Conventions such as CITE can make style-switching in a word processor much easier.

[6] This does not include manual window-arrangement tricks to reduce switching.

[7] Both versions of Evidence Scribe support hard-setting citation emphasis (for example, always underline organization and date) but not case-specific customization of emphasis.

[8] Factsmith stores modification dates. EvScribe Web tracks modified cards to give you an idea of how much has changed.

[9] The existence of this feature in EvScribe Web is advertised on the website, but some users have reported that it is unavailable in everyday use. A club administrator account may be required to modify the settings.

[10] As of May 2010, this feature is broken in EvScribe Web. This may be fixed in the future.

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