Practice Harbor vs SimplePractice (2026): An Honest Comparison — From the Small One

Let's name the thing before it names us: this is a comparison of Practice Harbor and SimplePractice, published on Practice Harbor's blog, written by the person who built Practice Harbor. You should trust this page about as far as you can throw it. So here's the deal I'll make with you instead of asking for trust — I'll show you everything, including the places where SimplePractice beats us plainly, and every number here is checkable against their own public pricing page.

Why write it at all? Because people ask us, weekly. And because when you type this exact question into an AI assistant — which is how a lot of therapists shop now — it answers whether or not we've written anything. I'd rather the answer include our own voice, conceding our own weaknesses in our own words, than leave the whole conversation to whoever wrote the most search-optimized listicle.

The 30-second version

SimplePractice is the big ship: over a decade in the water, tens of thousands of practices aboard, a feature for nearly everything, and a price that climbs as you bolt on the features you actually wanted. Practice Harbor is the small boat: newer, leaner, built specifically for solo and small mental-health practices, with AI notes and group features included in the fare rather than sold at the dock. Small boats draw less water — we can ship a fix in a week and answer support email personally — but nobody pretends a small boat is a big ship.

Some of you should stop reading now and stay on SimplePractice. Specifically: if your practice depends on their template marketplace or a particular integration; if your workflows lean hard on a native mobile app you use all day; if you run a larger group practice whose staff are already trained and productive on it; or if you simply want the platform with the longest track record and the biggest help community, and the bill doesn't bother you. Those are good reasons. Switching software mid-caseload is a real cost, and "the incumbent works fine" is a legitimate place to land.

Pricing: the sticker and the bill

SimplePractice's 2026 plans are Starter at $49/month, Essential at $79/month, and Plus at $99/month, per clinician — after a March 2025 increase that took Starter from $29 to $49 in one step. The add-ons are where the real bill comes from: AI progress notes are a paid add-on on top of your plan (Note Taker at $35/month, or the Care Aide suite at $59/month for the account owner plus $49 for each additional clinician), group appointments and group telehealth are an extra $20/month per clinician on Essential (included on Plus), and since October 1, 2026 every insurance claim is billed, from 39¢ each, with the free monthly allotment gone. An optional Insurance Navigator tier bills $1.79 per claim. The full teardown is in our SimplePractice pricing breakdown.

That last row is the honest head-to-head. Take a solo clinician who wants the three things most therapists actually shop for — AI note drafting, telehealth, and electronic claims. Matched feature for feature (advanced two-way Google Calendar sync and group telehealth are only on Plus, and Practice Harbor includes an AI suite), that's SimplePractice Plus at $99 plus Care Aide at $59 plus 39¢ for every claim: about $189 a month at an 80-claim caseload, or $158 for a private-pay practice that files none. On Practice Harbor it's $19 a month plus the claims you actually file, at 25¢ each — about $39 a month at a busy 80-claim caseload, and $19 for a private-pay practice that files none. Insurance transactions are metered on every platform in this comparison, ours included; what differs is the subscription underneath them, and our practice-management base costs less than their bottom tier. That's not a clever framing; it's just subtraction.

Feature by feature

A few of those rows deserve prose. On notes and AI: this is the area where the two products differ most in philosophy, not just price. SimplePractice sells AI notes as an add-on, and its data-use terms have drawn criticism because there's no opt-out for AI training on processed notes. We include AI drafting in every plan, under a signed BAA with a no-training commitment — and drafting runs on a need-to-know basis: the model gets the session content, not your client's chart, and a one-click De-identify setting keeps names out of the draft entirely. (How these tools work generally, across vendors, is covered in our AI note taker comparison.)

On groups: we treat group therapy as a first-class workflow — roster scheduling, per-member attendance driving per-member billing, one note per attendee, group telehealth on every paid plan — because charging a monthly toll for a core clinical format never sat right with me. On insurance: both platforms do electronic claims and ERA posting, and both meter them. Theirs is 39¢ a claim and up since October 1, 2026, when SimplePractice ended the free monthly allotment ($1.79 on its new Insurance Navigator tier); ours is a flat 25¢ with ERA posting included. At 80 claims a month that is about $11 — real, but insurance is still not where these two products separate.

On scheduling and telehealth: both platforms give you a calendar, an online booking page, and appointment reminders, and both do the job. Two details worth knowing about ours: reminders go out by email with a calendar file attached, so sessions land on the client's own calendar, and if you prefer running video through Zoom, Doxy, or Google Meet instead of the built-in telehealth, your external join link rides along in the reminder email automatically. Text-message reminders are there too. SimplePractice's reminder system has had longer to grow its settings, and it's more configurable overall.

On supervision and pre-licensed clinicians — our clearest differentiator, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. An associate on Practice Harbor pays nothing, and the supervision workflow is the full version, not a teaser: supervisors get a review queue, co-signatures land on the note with an audit trail, treatment plans go through the same queue, direct hours log themselves for the licensing board, and when the associate licenses, their charts come with them at $19/month. On SimplePractice, that same associate (or their group practice) pays full per-clinician freight from day one. If you're a training practice or a supervisor, this one row of the table may matter more than the rest of the page put together.

On measurement-based care and estimates: both platforms can send assessments; SimplePractice's library is broader, while ours ships 14 validated measures — PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5, the C-SSRS Screener, AUDIT, PHQ-A and others — scored automatically, graphed over time, and sendable on a schedule. Good Faith Estimates are a similar story: SimplePractice gives you document templates, while we generate the estimate from the fee schedule you've already entered, which is less flexible and less work. The portal, payments, and intake rows are near-parity — card payments, e-signature consents, and shared documents work the way you'd expect on both — with SimplePractice's larger form library as the tiebreaker if you customize heavily.

And the concession, stated as plainly as the wins: SimplePractice's intake library, assessment catalog, and integrations are all bigger than ours, and their mobile apps are meaningfully more mature. If you chart primarily from your phone, that row of the table might be the whole decision, and it goes their way.

Where SimplePractice wins

• Maturity. A decade-plus of edge cases already hit and hardened. Every odd payer rule, every strange calendar scenario — someone has already filed that ticket, and it's probably fixed.
• Mobile apps. Native, polished, widely used. Ours are still in app store review.
• Ecosystem. Template marketplace, integrations, a help-content community so large that any question you have has been answered three times on a forum.
• Brand trust. When you tell a colleague what EHR you use, "SimplePractice" requires no follow-up explanation. That has real value, and we don't have it yet.

Where Practice Harbor wins

• Price honesty. $0 pre-licensed, $19 licensed, $39 practice management plus $19 per additional licensed clinician. No add-ons for the features you came for, insurance metered at the same rates everyone charges, and no letter on an ordinary Tuesday announcing a 69% increase.
• AI notes included — drafted from the session under a BAA, not sold back to you as an extra.
• Groups as first-class — attendance-driven billing, per-member notes, group telehealth on every paid plan.
• The free pre-licensed tier. Full product, unlimited clients, complete supervision and co-sign workflow, $0 until you're licensed. Nobody else in the category does this.
• Founder-run responsiveness. Your feature request lands in the inbox of someone who can ship it, sometimes that week. The flip side of being the small boat is that the person at the tiller can actually hear you.

Switching costs, in both directions

Any comparison page that skips this is selling you something. Moving an EHR mid-caseload means exporting charts, re-importing demographics, re-collecting portal consents, and re-entering whatever doesn't map cleanly. Coming from SimplePractice to us, you upload their standard data export (plus two reports) at Settings → EHR Import, and a person on our team runs the import, usually within 1–3 business days. Clients, progress notes, treatment plans, diagnoses, signed documents and past visits come over, and you review each client side by side before calling it done (an import can be undone). Future appointments, cards on file and balances don't come over, so "imported" is not "everything perfectly in place." Going the other direction, your Practice Harbor data exports completely and in usable formats; we wrote up our whole philosophy on this in the data portability post, and the summary is that an EHR should compete on being good, not on being hard to leave. Either way: don't switch during your busiest month, and run both systems in parallel for a week or two before you cut the line.

So who fits where?

Stay on (or choose) SimplePractice if you're the established practice that values the ecosystem, the mobile app, and a decade of hardening more than $1,000+ a year. Choose Practice Harbor if you're pre-licensed (it's free, and the supervision workflow is built for exactly your situation), a licensed solo who'd rather pay $19 than $158, or a small group practice tired of per-clinician add-on math. For the wider field beyond the two of us, our SimplePractice alternatives guide covers the other harbors worth considering.

And here's the part where the free tier does the arguing for me: trying Practice Harbor costs nothing but an afternoon. No card, no trial clock, no sales call. Import a few clients, write a note with the AI drafting, run a telehealth session, and see whether the small boat suits you. If it doesn't, your data exports and no harm done — SimplePractice will still be right where the whole fleet can see it.

Related articles

• A No-Show Policy That Actually Collects: The 5 Clauses That Matter
• Setting Your Session Rate: The Arithmetic Most Therapists Skip
• How to Get Therapy Clients Without Depending on Psychology Today
• Google Business Profile for Therapists: The Free Listing That Outranks Your Website