What the category does, what separates the tools, and where a California-only one sits among the rest. Written by people who build one, which you should weigh accordingly.
Strip the marketing off and the category has four jobs. Ingest: pull the official record from the legislature, bill text, every amended version, committee analyses, hearing calendars and floor votes, and keep pulling as it changes. Track: let you pick the measures that matter to your organization, attach a position and a priority, and hand them to the people responsible. Alert: tell you when one of them moves, by whatever channel you will actually notice. Report: turn the result into something a board, a client or a member can read.
Every tool on the market does a version of all four. The differences are in how fast the record arrives, how much of it the tool actually reads, and what happens when you write in.
The questions a careful buyer asks, in roughly the order they end up mattering.
Three kinds of tool serve California today, and they make different trades.
Built for national associations and multi-state corporate teams that need one login for every capitol. They are broad by design, which means the California feed is one of fifty and gets the depth the average state warrants. Floor votes typically arrive on a batch cycle, amendment handling is generic, and CalAccess is not part of the picture. If most of your work is outside California, this is probably the right trade.
Bill status, text and a subscription to changes, at no cost, aimed at the public and journalists as much as advocates. Good for watching a handful of bills. They stop at status: no positions, no whip counts, no team, no letters, and no obligation to anyone when the feed is late.
A small group. The one that has been here longest is CapitolTrack, which many Sacramento shops have used for twenty years. Depth in one state is the point of all of them. What separates them is whether the interface, and the reading behind it, were built for how the work happens now, and whether anything in the tool reads the record or only relays it.
RTG vs CapitolTrack lays that out cell by cell, including the two places CapitolTrack wins.
Real Time Gov is the third kind, and it makes the one-state trade on purpose. It covers California only. Floor votes come off the chamber as the roll closes and reach your phone in minutes. Every amended version of every bill is read and classified, with the reasoning shown, across the whole session and not only your list. Position letters are drafted inside the workspace and approved line by line by a person. The CalAccess lobbying record is refreshed daily and cross-referenced. Pricing is per seat with unlimited bills, from $60 to $100 a seat depending on volume, with a fourteen-day trial and no credit card.
The people who answer when you write in are the people who build it. That is a feature for a shop that wants a fix, and a limitation for one that wants an account team. We would rather say so here than in the second month.
Software that pulls the official record of a legislature, lets an organization follow the bills that affect it, alerts the right people when those bills move, and produces the reports that go to clients, members or a board. The category runs from free public trackers to fifty-state platforms. The differences are speed, how much of the record the tool actually reads, and who answers when you write in.
Tracking tells you where a bill is. Intelligence tells you what just happened to it, who moved, and whether it is still the bill you were tracking. In practice that means live floor votes rather than a morning digest, amendments compared version by version, and positions held over time so you can see who switched. The longer answer is its own page.
No. A fifty-state platform is built for the average legislature, and California is not one: 4,000-plus bills a session, gut-and-amends late in session, position letters filed at committee, and a public lobbying record in CalAccess that only helps if something cross-references it. If most of your work is in Sacramento, a California-only tool goes deeper for less.
Minutes. The vote is captured as the roll closes on the Assembly or Senate floor and delivered by SMS, push or email within minutes, with each member's vote and any changes made after the fact. The common alternative is a nightly batch, where the same vote arrives the next morning. How the alerts work.
Three ways: per seat, per bill, or per state. Per-bill pricing caps you in the busiest weeks of session. Per-state bundles charge for states you will never open. Real Time Gov is per seat with unlimited bills, from $60 to $100 a seat depending on volume, with a fourteen-day trial and no credit card.
You should be able to, and you should ask before you sign. Real Time Gov exports to HTML, PDF and Word, and what you built there, the tracked list, positions and notes, exports with it. Nothing about leaving should require a phone call.
No credit card. Real California bills. Real votes. Full RTG, unlocked, for two weeks.