Cliniko Pricing: What It Costs and Best Alternatives

What does Cliniko actually cost?

Cliniko charges per practitioner, per month — so your software bill grows every time you add a clinician to the roster. That's the number most physio and chiro owners miss when they price it up. Cliniko is practice management software built for allied health: bookings, patient notes, invoicing and Medicare claiming in one place. It's genuinely good at the clinical side.

But the per-head model bites. A solo practitioner pays one rate; a five-chair clinic pays roughly five times that, on the Cliniko pricing page tiered structure. Add a receptionist, a locum, a new grad — the meter ticks up.

Here's the catch: booking and notes are only half of what fills a clinic diary.

Key takeaways

• Per-practitioner pricing means your Cliniko cost rises with every clinician you hire, not with how much you earn.
• Clinical strength, marketing gap — Cliniko nails notes and claiming, but review generation, lead capture and campaigns sit in separate paid apps.
• All-in-one alternative runs booking, reminders, reviews and payments from one login, so you're not stitching four tools together.

Where Cliniko stops and your marketing starts

Cliniko manages the patients you already have — it doesn't chase the ones you don't. There's no built-in review-request engine, no missed-call text-back, no landing pages for a Google Ads campaign. Those jobs land on other tools you fund separately.

Picture a Tuesday at a suburban physio clinic. A prospective patient rings during a treatment session, gets voicemail, and books with the clinic two streets over before you've washed your hands. Cliniko never sees that lost patient — the call never became a booking. A missed-call text-back tool fires a reply in seconds so the enquiry doesn't walk.

Reviews are the other gap. New patients read them before they book, yet Cliniko won't ask for one on your behalf. You end up bolting on a reviews app, an email tool, maybe a separate booking page for your website. Each one's another login and another invoice.

The real cost isn't the licence — it's the stack around it

The sticker price on Cliniko is only the start. Add the review tool, the email platform, the SMS credits, the payment gateway and the online booking widget, and your monthly spend quietly doubles. This is the trap we cover in the real cost of a SaaS stack.

We've seen the maths on this. Our calculator puts a typical replaced tool stack at about $18,000 a year once you tally every subscription a growing clinic runs. Cliniko covers a slice of that — the clinical slice — and leaves the growth slice to everyone else's software.

"But switching sounds like a nightmare mid-year." It isn't with a free migration: your patient list and booking history move across before you go live, so you're not re-keying a spreadsheet at midnight.

What to look for in a Cliniko alternative

Pick the tool that closes the gaps Cliniko leaves open, not just another diary. Four things matter for a clinic that wants to grow, not only tick over:

1. Online booking that cuts no-shows with automated SMS and email reminders, plus deposits where you want them.
2. Review generation that texts happy patients a one-tap Google review link after their appointment.
3. Lead capture — website forms, missed-call text-back and a shared inbox so no enquiry sits unanswered.
4. Payments built in, so patients pay by text or at the desk without a bolt-on gateway.

Reminders alone earn their keep. We break down how reminders and deposits cut no-shows by a third — every recovered slot is revenue Cliniko's diary can't recover on its own.

Cliniko vs an all-in-one: which suits your clinic?

Stay on Cliniko if clinical notes and Medicare claiming are all you need and your patient book is already full. It's built for that. But if you're paying for a reviews app, an email tool and a booking widget on top, you're running four bills to do what one platform does. Here's what we'd do: consolidate.

The deeper comparison — features, migration, what's included — sits in our guide to the best all-in-one platform for clinics. It's the honest side-by-side for a price-checker weighing the switch.

How IgniteOS does this for you

IgniteOS runs your clinic's front desk from one login — no per-seat fees, so hiring a new clinician doesn't inflate your software bill. Online booking with automated reminders, review requests that fire after each visit, get-paid tools for text-to-pay, and a shared inbox that catches every missed call and web enquiry.

It's 20+ tools and 60+ features in one place — the stack a clinic usually cobbles together from four vendors. See the full platform, or weigh it against your current setup in our best all-in-one for clinics comparison.

Start with a 14-day free trial: card required, $0 charged until day 14, cancel anytime, with free migration of your patient list included. Prefer a walkthrough first? Book a demo. Either way, the fastest win is switching on booking reminders in week one and watching your no-show rate drop. See pricing for plans.