ESAJ vs PJE: differences, state coverage and how to query both

TL;DR: ESAJ and PJe are Brazil’s two largest lawsuit consultation systems, together covering most state and federal courts. ESAJ is private (Softplan), used in 7 large states including São Paulo. PJe is run by the CNJ, the official standard, used in 13 state courts plus the Federal and Labor Justice. Neither has an official public API — the only way to query both (and the other 5 parallel systems) in a single call is via an aggregator API. This guide has state-by-state coverage, a 12-criteria comparison table, a visual map, and the day-to-day practical problems.

Brazil has one of the most complex judicial structures in the world. More than 90 courts span the State, Federal, Labor, Electoral, and Military Justice branches. For anyone who needs to search lawsuits — lawyers serving clients across multiple states, compliance teams, fintechs with credit engines, supplier audit teams — this fragmentation is the single biggest day-to-day obstacle.

Each court runs its own system, its own interface, its own response format. There is no “Google for Brazilian lawsuits.” The two largest systems — ESAJ and PJe — together cover most state and federal courts, but they operate in completely different ways.

This guide explains how each works, which one to use in each situation, and how to work around fragmentation in practice.

What is ESAJ

The e-SAJ (Sistema de Automação da Justiça, “Justice Automation System”) is a platform developed by Softplan, a private Brazilian software company from Santa Catarina, hired by state courts to digitize lawsuit consultation and electronic filing. It was one of the first systems to offer public online lawsuit lookup in Brazil and has since become the de facto standard in several states.

Who maintains it and since when

Softplan has maintained ESAJ since the early 2000s. Each court contracts the company and hosts its own instance — which means the interface can vary slightly between TJSP, TJBA, TJCE, etc, even though they’re all “ESAJ”. The engine is the same, but theme, flow, and sometimes specific features differ.

Courts that use ESAJ

Court	State	Trial	Appeals
TJSP	São Paulo	✅	✅
TJBA	Bahia	✅	✅
TJCE	Ceará	✅	✅
TJAC	Acre	✅	✅
TJAL	Alagoas	✅	✅
TJAM	Amazonas	✅	✅
TJMS	Mato Grosso do Sul	✅	✅

TJSP is by far the largest court in Brazil by volume — São Paulo alone holds about 25% of all Brazilian lawsuits. Anyone working with Brazilian court data who ignores ESAJ is leaving 1 in every 4 lawsuits out of scope.

How to access — step by step

1. Open the e-SAJ portal of the specific court (each state has its own — esaj.tjsp.jus.br, esaj.tjba.jus.br, etc)
2. Click “Consulta Processual” (Lawsuit Lookup) → “1º Grau” (Trial) or “2º Grau” (Appeals)
3. Choose the criterion: case number, party name, or CPF/CNPJ
4. Solve the captcha (every ESAJ has one)
5. See the list of cases returned, click each to view movements

No registration needed for public lookup. To file motions or see sealed data, you need an ICP-Brasil digital certificate.

Known ESAJ limitations

• Captcha on every search — not just once, but on every query, which makes manual automation impossible
• IP blocking on bulk queries — making 10+ searches in sequence from the same IP frequently triggers temporary blocking
• Inconsistent interface across courts — even being all “ESAJ”, TJSP and TJBA aren’t identical, and scraper code for one doesn’t work on the other without adjustments
• Legacy Java/browser dependency — some old features still depend on the Java browser plugin (deprecated in 2017) or legacy Internet Explorer/Edge
• No public API — Softplan does not expose an API for third parties, only for negotiated case-by-case integrations with corporate clients

What is PJe

The PJe (Processo Judicial Eletrônico, “Electronic Judicial Process”) is the official CNJ (National Justice Council) system for digital lawsuit processing and consultation. It was created to unify Brazilian judicial systems on a single platform — a direct response to the fragmentation that ESAJ and other private systems created.

Who maintains it and the role of CNJ Resolution 185/2013

CNJ Resolution 185/2013 instituted PJe as the official system for processing information and judicial acts, to be mandatorily used by all courts, except those with pre-existing systems already in production. That exception clause is exactly what allowed ESAJ to keep running — TJSP never migrated and probably won’t anytime soon.

The CNJ is responsible for development and maintenance, and each court hosts its instance. The difference from ESAJ: PJe is free for the courts (no licensing), and the CNJ defines the roadmap.

Courts that use PJe

Court	State/Region	Instances
TJMG	Minas Gerais	Trial + Appeals
TJPE	Pernambuco	Trial + Appeals
TJDFT	Federal District and Territories	Trial + Appeals
TJMA	Maranhão	Trial + Appeals
TJAP	Amapá	Trial + Appeals
TJRN	Rio Grande do Norte	Trial + Appeals
TJRO	Rondônia	Trial + Appeals
TJPB	Paraíba	Trial + Appeals
TJPI	Piauí	Trial + Appeals
TRF1	Federal Region 1 (14 states)	Trial + Appeals
TRF3	Federal Region 3 (SP + MS)	Trial + Appeals
TRTs	Labor Justice (24 regional courts)	Trial + Appeals

The TRFs are particularly important because they cover the Federal Justice, which handles cases against the Union and federal agencies — relevant for fintechs (BACEN, Receita), healthcare, social security, and disputes with public banks.

How to access — step by step

1. Open the PJe portal of the specific court (pje.tjmg.jus.br, pje1g.trf1.jus.br, etc)
2. Go to “Consulta Pública” (Public Lookup)
3. Enter the case number OR the party’s CPF/CNPJ
4. Solve the captcha
5. To see case details, some courts require digital certificate login — public lookup shows only basic data

To file motions, an ICP-Brasil digital certificate or 2FA login is mandatory.

Known PJe limitations

• Captcha equally pervasive — even being CNJ, it inherited all the scraping prevention problems
• Variation across instances — the PJe of TJMG is different from the PJe of TRF1, even being the “same platform”. Each court customizes
• Java/legacy applet dependency in some features — electronic filing in some TRFs still uses Java applets (which modern browsers don’t support)
• Variable performance — peak days (e.g., the eve of a procedural deadline) the system frequently crashes
• No official public API — just like ESAJ, no public endpoint for developers

ESAJ vs PJe — side-by-side comparison

Criterion	ESAJ	PJe
Maintainer	Softplan (private)	CNJ (public)
Cost to courts	Licensed	Free
Courts covered by Vigilant	7 state	9 state + 2 federal
Case volume	High (TJSP alone = 25% of BR)	Medium-high (sum of all)
Public access without registration	✅ Yes	✅ Yes (limited)
CPF-based search	✅	✅
Full case history	✅	✅
Filing support	✅ (with digital cert)	✅ (with digital cert)
Public official API	❌	❌
Captcha on consultations	✅ Always	✅ Always
Mobile compatibility	⚠️ Limited	⚠️ Limited
Interface standardization	⚠️ Variable per court	⚠️ Variable per court
Future trend	Maintain current base	Expansion (CNJ pressures migration)

Practical summary: to choose between the two, the right question isn’t “which is better” — it’s “which court do I need to use”. If it’s TJSP, it’s ESAJ mandatorily. If it’s TRF1, it’s PJe mandatorily. For anyone working with multiple courts, the answer is always both — and the challenge becomes how to query both without spending nights copying data between spreadsheets.

Coverage map — which system is in which state

Fragmentation is more visual when you look at it state by state. This is the current coverage of the 12 courts Vigilant integrates today:

State	State Court	System
🟦 SP	TJSP	ESAJ
🟦 BA	TJBA	ESAJ
🟦 CE	TJCE	ESAJ
🟦 AC	TJAC	ESAJ
🟦 AL	TJAL	ESAJ
🟦 AM	TJAM	ESAJ
🟦 MS	TJMS	ESAJ
🟩 MG	TJMG	PJe
🟩 PE	TJPE	PJe
🟩 DF	TJDFT	PJe
🟩 MA	TJMA	PJe
🟩 AP	TJAP	PJe

Note two patterns:

1. ESAJ predominates in the North and Northeast, with São Paulo as a massive exception in the Southeast
2. PJe dominates the courts migrated after 2013, mainly Southeast-South and federal instances

The other 14 states still have their own systems or are in migration, and not all have external coverage via aggregator API today.

Other systems you’ll encounter

Even covering most large courts, ESAJ and PJe aren’t the only systems in production. These are the others you’ll encounter when expanding jurisdictional coverage:

System	Court	Maintainer	Note
Projudi	TJGO, TJPR	CNJ (pre-PJe legacy)	Old system, being phased out
EPROC	TJSC, TRF2, TRF4, JFRJ	TRF4	Well-designed, popular among lawyers, but limited to a few courts
Tucujuris	TJAP (some services)	Proprietary	Developed by TJAP, parallel to PJe
ClickJud	TJMT	Proprietary	Mato Grosso legacy system
ConsultaUnificada	TJPA	Proprietary	Pará’s proprietary platform
Proprietary systems	TJRJ, TJSE, TJPE (some services)	Court’s own	Each with its own API/interface

Anyone needing nationwide coverage will inevitably bump into 5 to 8 different systems — even more when you consider trial and appeals separately, plus Labor Justice.

Day-to-day practical problems

Theory is one thing. Anyone operating with these systems day-to-day faces a series of frictions that rarely show up in the official documentation.

Court system outages don’t automatically suspend deadlines

This is problem number one. If ESAJ or PJe is down on the eve of a defense filing deadline, that does not automatically grant the lawyer an extension. Brazilian case law has settled that:

• The unavailability needs to be publicly acknowledged by the court (official notice)
• The lawyer must have registered the access attempt (screenshot, log, timestamped email)
• Even then, the suspension only covers the duration of the incident — you can’t “save” it for the next deadline

Result: serious law firms work with at least 24h of slack on any critical deadline. And many automate the collection of case movements via API precisely to have an auditable log of attempts, ready to present to a judge if the court goes down.

Java, captcha, IP blocking, and browser compatibility

ESAJ and PJe were designed when the Java browser plugin was standard. Although most modern features have migrated to HTML5/JavaScript, some legacy features still require:

• Internet Explorer 11 or legacy Edge for electronic filing in specific courts
• Java Web Start or applets to read digital signatures on old cases
• Manually solved captcha on every query (session cookies don’t bypass it)
• IP blocking when making more than 10-20 sequential queries from the same address — common in teams trying to automate with simple scripts

For a lawyer opening 5-10 cases per day, it’s tolerable friction. For a compliance team auditing 500 suppliers per week, it’s unfeasible.

Bulk data capture = a Sisyphean task

To run procedural due diligence on a 50-controller M&A target across 8 different courts, the manual work runs to 2-3 weeks of full-time work for a paralegal. For each CPF: open 8 portals, solve 8 captchas, copy data, consolidate. Multiplied by 50 people. That’s why this kind of operation is generally done via aggregator API — there is no economic alternative.

Fragmentation continues

CNJ Resolution 185/2013 is over 12 years old. The promised unification didn’t happen. Brazil still has more than 40 judicial systems in production, according to a recent CJF survey. The trend is slow migration to PJe, but TJSP — the most relevant court in the country — shows no sign of migrating in the next 5 years.

For anyone needing data today, the only sustainable strategy is to abstract the fragmentation behind a single layer.

How to query both (and the others) with a single call

The most efficient way to deal with fragmentation is to use an API layer that abstracts the systems. That’s exactly what Vigilant does: you send a CPF and a list of courts, and you get the data from all of them in a unified JSON format — regardless of whether each court uses ESAJ, PJe, EPROC, or another system.

What Vigilant returns

For each case found:

• CNJ number in standardized format (NNNNNNN-DD.YYYY.J.TR.OOOO)
• Case class (e.g., Civil Procedure, Execution of Title, Labor Claim)
• Status (Active, Archived, Suspended, etc)
• Parties (plaintiff, defendant, lawyers, with full names)
• Movements (chronological history with date, description, and code)
• Subjects (CNJ classification)
• Jurisdiction (chamber, district)
• Case value (when available)
• Instance (trial or appeals)
• Original case URL in the source portal (for you to open manually when needed)

All already parsed, normalized, and in JSON. No captcha, no scraping, no IP blocking.

Current coverage

12 judicial sources covering 10 Brazilian states, including all 7 ESAJs (TJSP, TJBA, TJCE, TJAC, TJAL, TJAM, TJMS) and the main PJes (TJMG, TJPE, TJDFT, TJMA, TJAP). Trial and appeals on all of them. See the full list of covered courts with individual descriptions of each.

How much it costs

R$ 0.10 per query, per court. No subscription, no minimum, no contract. Automatic 2-day cache — repeated queries are free. Full pricing page.

Example API call

curl -X POST https://vigilant.trackjud.com.br/api/v1/consults \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "document": "529.982.247-25",
    "courts": ["TJSP", "TJMG", "TRF1"]
  }'

Response in ~60 seconds with consolidated cases from the 3 courts (1 ESAJ + 2 PJe), in structured JSON ready to integrate into your system.

The full OpenAPI 3.1 documentation is publicly available.

Glossary

Term	Definition
CPF	Cadastro de Pessoa Física — Brazilian individual taxpayer ID (11 digits)
CNPJ	Cadastro Nacional da Pessoa Jurídica — Brazilian company ID (14 digits)
CNJ	National Justice Council — body that administers the Judiciary
TJ	Tribunal de Justiça — state court (e.g., TJSP, TJBA)
TRF	Tribunal Regional Federal — Federal Justice court
TRT	Tribunal Regional do Trabalho — Labor Justice court
Trial instance	First-degree court — where the case begins
Appeals instance	Second-degree court — appellate level
CNJ number	Unique identifier in the format NNNNNNN-DD.YYYY.J.TR.OOOO
Judicial secrecy	Cases with restricted access (family, child welfare, etc)
ICP-Brasil	Brazilian public key infrastructure for digital certificates

Conclusion

ESAJ and PJe are the two pillars of Brazilian lawsuit consultation. Each has its particularities, history, and limitations. For lawyers, legal managers, or compliance teams that need to deal with multiple states, fragmentation is the problem, not the systems themselves.

The good news is that today, you don’t have to choose between them. Modern tools abstract the complexity and return unified data, leaving the professional’s time for legal analysis — not for solving captchas and copying data between spreadsheets.

If you’re in this situation, it’s worth seeing how Vigilant works with 5 free credits on signup, or talking to our team to understand whether it makes sense for your case.

And if you want to go deeper into the topic of automation, also worth reading How to automate lawsuit search at a law firm — a complementary guide focused on operational workflow.

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