Oasys vs SimplePractice: Which Is Better for a Group Practice?

Short answer: For a group practice with five or more clinicians, especially one running supervisees or a training program, Oasys is the better fit, because supervision, permissions, and payroll are native rather than bolted on. For a solo therapist or a small practice that values a mature mobile app and a large ecosystem, SimplePractice is still an excellent product and we'd tell you so.

This comparison draws on our ongoing conversations with practice owners, many of them current or former SimplePractice customers.

At a glance

On pricing. SimplePractice publishes Starter at $49, Essential at $79 and Plus at $99 a month. Group practices need Plus, and additional clinicians are tiered: $74 each for 2 to 5 clinicians, $72 for 6 to 15, and $69 for 16 or more. Care Aide, Note Taker and ePrescribe are separate add-ons. Verified against both vendors' pricing pages on 30 July 2026.

Where SimplePractice is genuinely strong

We're not going to pretend this is a one-sided comparison, and the practices we talk to don't either.

SimplePractice has a mature, polished product with an enormous user base, a strong mobile experience, broad support for practitioner types beyond mental health, and an ecosystem, templates, community, documentation: that a newer platform simply doesn't have yet. For a solo therapist, it is a very good answer, and a large number of the practices we speak with were happy on it for years.

The pattern isn't that SimplePractice is bad. It's that the thing it optimizes for stops being the thing you need somewhere around your fifth or tenth clinician.

Supervision: the clearest difference

SimplePractice requires supervisor sign-off on all supervisees, regardless of credential status. That's a reasonable default for interns. It's the wrong default for a provisionally licensed clinician who is independently credentialed with your payers and does not legally require a co-signature.

One practice put the request plainly: "if it's a supervisee, you have to sign off on everything. Is there a way to differentiate that?"

Oasys approaches this differently. Supervision is configured per role and per supervisor-supervisee relationship, so clinicians who don't require a co-signature can be exempted without switching supervision off for everyone else.

For a practice with 15 supervisees, this is the difference between a supervisor spending their week reviewing clinical work and spending it clicking.

Payroll: the cost nobody puts on a comparison table

The largest number in this comparison is about neither platform's list price.

"About 20 hours a week of our billing manager goes into converting the information in [our EHR] into a payroll ledger."

Twenty hours a week (half a full-time role, permanently) because the EHR has no model for how the practice pays people. And the comp structures involved aren't unusual: a one revenue split for contractor day-rate sessions and a different one for off-hours, and for salaried clinicians a split carrying an hourly minimum plus a monthly commission.

Oasys models the revenue split natively, supports per-therapist overrides, and produces the payroll ledger as an output rather than as a monthly manual project. Payout can be gated on the underlying notes being signed and approved.

Pricing at group-practice scale

SimplePractice's model is a base plan plus a per-clinician charge, with payment processing on top, one practice flagged their card rate at roughly 3.25%, noting "that really adds up so much." And per-seat pricing doesn't distinguish credential status: "it's the same cost for a clinician versus an intern."

Oasys is $80 per clinician per month on an annual contract, with no add-ons. Billing, supervision, scheduling, documentation, and payroll reporting are included rather than tiered.

For a practice running a training program, the intern math is where this lands hardest. One practice we spoke with carries more trainees than licensed clinicians. Under flat per-seat pricing, more than half their seats are people who cannot yet bill independently.

Billing and claims

Practices report verification of benefits as "barely functional" on SimplePractice, with staff checking payer portals manually. Superbills get exported into a second tool for submission, one practice described the workflow as "pretty cumbersome." Another hit a rendering-provider bug that caused every Medicaid claim to be rejected by their payer: "every Medicaid claim now requires manual editing. Not sustainable."

That last one is worth sitting with, because it's the scenario that turns a planned migration into an emergency one.

Switching: the honest part

This is where most comparison pages hand-wave, so let's be specific.

Practices in this category are typically 8 to 11 years into their current system. The fear isn't that the new platform is worse, it's that the move itself will break the practice. That fear is well earned. A practice that attempted a migration to another platform described it as "awful. Bad. So bad." Another paid extra for white-glove onboarding and still found records "migrated over and done incorrectly," with "contradictory and incomplete answers" for months afterward.

The sentence we hear over and over, in different words: "we can't do it twice."

Migration is the question we are asked about most. Rather than make promises in a blog post, ask us directly what moving your particular system would involve, what comes across, and what happens to appointments already booked.

Who should choose which

Choose SimplePractice if you're solo or a small practice, you want a mature mobile app, you work across practitioner types beyond mental health, or you value a large established ecosystem and community.

Choose Oasys if you have five or more clinicians, you supervise interns or provisionally licensed clinicians, you're rebuilding payroll in a spreadsheet every month, you need role-based permissions, or you want per-clinician pricing without add-on tiers.