Where SimplePractice wins
SimplePractice is good at what it was originally built for.
SimplePractice was built first for solo mental health counselors, and that audience is still where it shines. The clinical note flow is smooth, the patient experience is polished, and a large user community means most questions have a clear answer. A fair list of where SimplePractice is the right answer:
- Mental health first design. Group therapy, couple and family workflows, and short-form session notes are thoughtful. If your practice is mental health only, the product fits the work.
- Brand maturity. Years of refinement, deep training resources, and an active third-party ecosystem. Onboarding documentation is good. Support is available across phone, email, and chat.
- Integrated telehealth and patient-facing UX. Modern client portal, smooth online intake, reliable telehealth video built in, SMS and email reminders. Patients tend to find SimplePractice pleasant. MyTherapyWizard does not currently ship integrated telehealth or SMS reminders, so a practice that needs those built into the EMR will see this as a real plus on the SimplePractice side.
- Marketing and growth tools. Through Monarch and similar paid add-ons, SimplePractice offers directory listings and lead generation that help solo therapists fill caseloads. That has real value for early stage private practices.
- Solo practice ergonomics. One clinician with a manageable caseload runs well on SimplePractice. Most solo users like it.
If your practice is one or two mental health clinicians, your documentation is short, and the add-on math works at your volume, SimplePractice is a reasonable pick.
Where MyTherapyWizard wins
MyTherapyWizard is true clinical-scientific therapy software.
Most therapy EMRs are documentation tools. The clinician charts, the system stores, and at the end of the quarter the practice has a pile of unstructured narrative. MyTherapyWizard works the other way around. The clinical work generates structured data, and the system uses that data to do the documentation work clinicians used to do at night.
- Goal level performance capture. Every session captures correct out of attempted, cues, level of assistance, and mastery for each goal you wrote. About fifteen seconds per goal. The result is a Goal Performance Index and Session Performance Index for every active goal in your caseload. SimplePractice has a measurement-based-care add-on with generic outcome surveys. It does not collect goal-level performance data.
- RTI data as a natural output. Because measurement is structured at the goal level, response-to-intervention data falls out of normal sessions. School districts ask for this. Value-based care payers ask for this. SimplePractice has no comparable output.
- Auto-generated clinical documentation. Plans of care, evaluation reports, progress reports, quarterly summaries. The numbers under the goals do the writing, and the clinician edits. New graduates produce documentation that reads like a senior therapist wrote it. SimplePractice leaves the writing to the clinician.
- Discipline-aware, not mental-health-shaped. The eval templates, the goal bank, and the standardized assessment library are built for occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech-language pathology, and mental health specifically. An OT evaluation looks like an OT evaluation. A speech evaluation looks like a speech evaluation. SimplePractice's clinical templates are shaped for mental health counseling, and OT, PT, and SLP clinicians end up repurposing a counseling note rather than using a tool designed for their discipline.
- Audience-aware documentation. A plan of care written for an insurance reviewer reads differently from one written for an IEP team. MyTherapyWizard tunes the language by audience, medical or educational. SimplePractice treats both the same.
- School-based therapy and IEP-ready output. Educational audience documentation, multi-site district management, contract invoicing. RTI data is a natural byproduct of the measurement system. SimplePractice is not built for school work.
- Clinical workflow lifecycle. The Teams tier includes a 10-stage configurable clinical lifecycle, billing readiness scoring across the org, per-stage workday deadlines, and service-stop, hold, and insurance change propagation through the chart. SimplePractice has scheduling and a chart.
- FERPA-aligned data privacy and 1EdTech certification. MyTherapyWizard holds 1EdTech TrustEd Apps Data Privacy Certification (Registration IMSP1ls2026W1, certified April 2026), the third-party privacy review that school district IT and procurement teams typically require before signing a contract. SimplePractice does not currently hold this certification, which matters for therapy practices working under school contracts or with educational agencies.
- Deliberate focus, not EMR bloat. MyTherapyWizard ships the practice management tools a therapy clinic needs and the clinical intelligence that makes documentation defensible. We do not ship integrated telehealth, a patient portal, ePrescribe, card-on-file payments, or SMS reminders. Those features quietly drive subscription costs up across the category, and a therapy practice can run cleanly with the video and payment tools it already uses. The cost-stacking section below works through the math on the SimplePractice side.
- You learn your field, not just document it. After a quarter of normal use you can see which goals progress fastest at which baseline scores, which interventions correlate with mastery, and where denials cluster by payer and CPT. Most clinicians have wished for this view their whole careers. Most EMRs were not built to produce it.
- Built by a working clinician, used across the lifespan. MyTherapyWizard is designed and built by Stephanie Wick, OT/L, MSOT, an occupational therapist with 25 years of clinical experience and a practicing clinic owner. The architecture supports therapy across the lifespan: pediatric, adult outpatient, geriatric, school-based, and mental health. Every feature has to pass the test of whether a real therapist would actually use it on a Monday morning.
Where they're equivalent
The practice management basics show up in both products.
If you only need a calendar, a chart, and a way to send claims, either platform handles it. The catch with SimplePractice is that several of these basics are paid add-ons rather than parts of the base plan.
- HIPAA compliance. Both platforms are HIPAA compliant and offer signed BAAs.
- Multi-clinician scheduling. Recurring appointments, waitlists, and multi-provider calendars on both. SimplePractice's scheduling UX has been polished for solo work for years; MyTherapyWizard's is functional and clinically aware.
- Online intake forms and digital consents. Both handle digital intake and e-signature for consent forms.
- Appointment reminders. SimplePractice ships SMS and email reminders. MyTherapyWizard ships email reminders. Practices that need SMS specifically should factor that in.
- Insurance claim submission and ERA posting. MyTherapyWizard does this through ClaimMD, included with the platform. SimplePractice sells insurance billing as a $20 a month per clinician add-on on the Essential plan, on top of the base subscription.
- Patient portal and online payment. SimplePractice ships a patient portal and integrated card-on-file processing at 2.7% plus 30 cents per transaction. MyTherapyWizard does not ship either, by design. Practices that need a patient-facing portal and integrated payments will see this as a real plus on the SimplePractice side.
Past these basics the products diverge. The decision comes down to what your practice needs on top of the calendar and the chart.