SimplePractice Alternatives for Agencies: An Honest Comparison Guide

Every agency director managing a network of providers eventually has the same meeting with themselves. They open SimplePractice for the tenth time that week, try to figure out how to show their 22 providers in one branded directory that clients can actually search, and realize the tool is not going to do it. Not because SimplePractice is bad. Because SimplePractice was never designed for what an agency is trying to do.

This guide is for the founder or director of a coaching collective, therapy network, wellness association, or multi-provider agency currently running on SimplePractice, or evaluating whether to adopt it. We are not going to tell you SimplePractice is broken. It is one of the best solo-practitioner EHRs on the market. We are going to walk through where it fits, where it quietly hits a wall for agencies, and what the honest alternatives look like when you need something different.

When SimplePractice Is the Right Fit

Credit where it belongs. SimplePractice is a mature product. It has spent more than a decade building workflows for licensed clinicians, and it shows. Scheduling, telehealth, superbills, insurance claim submission, client portal, measurement-based care, and clinical documentation all live inside one account. For a solo therapist or a small group practice that shares billing, it removes a stack of smaller tools.

If you are a clinician who takes insurance, runs your own caseload, and wants one system for notes, claims, and calendar, SimplePractice is often the right answer. The support team is responsive. The mobile app works. The training library is deep. The Monarch directory gives your profile a home inside a brand clients already recognize.

None of that is the question an agency is trying to solve. The question an agency is trying to solve is different.

Where SimplePractice Breaks Down for Agencies

The friction is architectural, not cosmetic. SimplePractice was built for one clinician at a time. When an agency tries to operate a network through it, six things surface almost immediately.

1. There is no white-label layer

When a client books through SimplePractice, the confirmation email, the client portal, and the Monarch directory all carry SimplePractice's identity. Your community forms a relationship with SimplePractice, not with your agency. That is the trust transfer problem, and for an agency whose whole value is being the trusted middle, it is a serious leak.

2. The billing model assumes one practice

SimplePractice charges per clinician. There is no network-level pricing, no account structure for an agency sitting above the providers, no way to consolidate billing across a roster. Agencies end up either paying a seat for every provider, or asking each provider to hold their own subscription, which leaves the agency with no centralized data at all.

3. There is no directory layer for clients to search

SimplePractice providers can opt into Monarch, the SimplePractice-branded directory. Clients who find a provider there are finding them through Monarch, not through your agency. There is no way to run a branded, searchable, filterable directory of your network on your own domain, with your categories, your vetting standards, and your curation.

4. There is no commission or revenue-share logic

Agencies that route clients to providers have one question the software needs to answer: when a booking happens because of the agency, how does the agency earn from it? SimplePractice has no concept of this. Bookings and payments are between the provider and the client. The agency has to track referrals manually, invoice providers separately, and reconcile commissions in a spreadsheet.

5. There is no agency dashboard

An agency director needs to see which providers are busy, which categories are in demand, which profiles are incomplete, where referrals are dropping off, and how the network is performing as a network. SimplePractice shows you your practice. It does not show you your network. That is not a reporting gap, it is a design decision, and the design was made for someone else.

6. Referral routing is manual

When a client reaches out to an agency, someone on staff usually reads the intake, picks a provider, and makes a warm introduction. There is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that the software offers no help. No rules for category matching. No overflow logic when a provider is fully booked. No way to surface the right provider to the client directly. The work scales linearly with the network, and then the network stops scaling.

None of this is a complaint about SimplePractice. It is a description of what happens when a tool built for one job is asked to do a different job.

Hunhu: Built for Agencies, Not Solo Practices

Hunhu takes the agency layer seriously. The agency is the customer. The providers in the network are the supply. The clients looking for help are the demand. All three sides need infrastructure, and the agency needs to sit in the middle of it with real control over what happens.

A Hunhu directory lives on your domain, under your brand. The providers you curate appear in categories you define. Clients search, filter, and book inside an experience that feels like part of your organization, because it is. When a booking happens, the commission logic you configured runs automatically. Providers keep whatever EHR they already use. You get the agency dashboard, the network analytics, and the revenue flow. They keep their practice.

Hunhu is not a SimplePractice replacement for a solo clinician. It is not an EHR. It does not write progress notes, submit insurance claims, or run telehealth sessions. If that is your core need, stay where you are. Hunhu is the platform that covers the agency-shaped hole SimplePractice was never built to fill.

The philosophy underneath the product is old and short. I am because you are. A network is a network because the people in it show up for each other. Software should make that easier, not redirect the trust a community built toward a vendor's brand.

Other Alternatives Worth Knowing

SimplePractice is not the only option in this space, and Hunhu is not the only alternative worth considering. Honest comparison means naming the other tools and where they fit.

TherapyNotes

TherapyNotes is the closest peer competitor to SimplePractice on the clinical side. It is used by many group practices that handle their own billing and documentation. If you run a group practice where every clinician is a W-2 or contracted staff member inside one legal entity, and you want strong clinical and billing workflows, TherapyNotes is mature. It is not a directory platform. It does not solve the network-of-independent-providers problem.

Practice Better

Practice Better is a strong fit for health and wellness practitioners outside the insurance-reimbursed therapy world. Nutritionists, health coaches, functional medicine practices. It has better protocol and program tools than SimplePractice and a cleaner client-facing experience. For a coaching collective operating cash-pay, Practice Better is worth a look. The same agency-layer limitations apply. It is built for one practice, not a network of practices.

Jane

Jane is popular with multidisciplinary clinics, especially in Canada and the UK. Chiropractors, physios, massage therapists, and mental health providers under one roof. If you are operating a physical-location clinic with shared staff and shared rooms, Jane handles the operational reality well. It is a clinic platform, not an agency platform. Multi-entity networks of independent providers do not map cleanly to its model.

Build-your-own on generic tools

Some agencies try to stitch together Webflow or WordPress for the directory, Calendly or Acuity for booking, Stripe for payments, and a CRM or spreadsheet for provider records. It can work for a while. It also means the agency is now running a small software product without the budget of a software company. Maintenance becomes the job. The tradeoffs are real on both sides.

A Five-Question Decision Framework

If you are trying to decide whether SimplePractice is still the right center of your stack, or whether you need to add something built for the agency layer, these five questions cut through most of the noise.

1. Who is the customer of the software? If the customer is the individual provider, SimplePractice is designed for them. If the customer is the agency curating a network, you need a platform where the agency is the first-class account.
2. Whose brand does the client see? When a client books, confirms, and shows up, whose name is on the email, the portal, the directory profile? If the answer is not your agency, your agency is building someone else's equity with every booking.
3. Does the platform have a concept of commission? If the software does not understand that the agency earned a cut, the agency will spend hours every month reconciling by hand. Eventually they stop, and the revenue quietly leaks.
4. Can clients find providers inside a directory I control? A searchable, filterable directory on your domain, with your categories and your curation, is a different product than a contact page linking to 22 different booking pages on 22 different platforms.
5. What does the network look like in 12 months? If the network will still be five providers, patchwork tools can survive. If the plan is 30, 50, or 100 providers, you will hit the agency-layer wall. Better to hit it on purpose than by surprise.

The Real Decision

Most agencies that land on this page are not actually trying to replace SimplePractice. They are trying to add the layer SimplePractice never built. The providers in the network keep their EHR. The agency finally gets a directory, a dashboard, a commission model, and a brand that belongs to the organization instead of the vendor.

If the layer you actually need is the agency layer, Hunhu was built for it. If you want to see what your branded directory would look like, with your categories, your commission structure, and your providers, a 15-minute walkthrough is the fastest way to know whether it fits. No slide deck. Just your network, on your domain, with your economics.

Related reading

• White-Label Provider Marketplaces: What Agencies Actually Need
• Building for Three Sides: Why Single-Sided Platforms Always Leave Someone Losing
• The Complete Guide to Building a Provider Directory That Actually Works