Cliniko vs Salesforce

Cliniko is practice management and EHR software for allied health practitioners such as physiotherapists, chiropractors, and podiatrists, covering scheduling, treatment records, invoicing, payments, and telehealth in one system. Every pricing tier includes the same full feature set; only the price changes as the number of practitioners on the account grows. All plans include unlimited admin and reception users, unlimited locations, unlimited file storage, and unlimited patient records, along with automatic backups and 24/7 monitoring. Cliniko connects to third-party apps including MailChimp and Xero, charges 10 cents per SMS reminder via pre-paid credits, and states that it donates 2% of subscription revenue to charity.

Salesforce is the market-leading customer relationship management platform, used by enterprises to manage sales pipelines, customer service, marketing, and increasingly, custom business applications built on its underlying platform. Its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products are the core of most implementations. Salesforce's highly configurable architecture, built on its own Apex programming language and declarative tools like Flow, lets organizations extensively customize workflows, objects, and automation to match complex business processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the software. Einstein, Salesforce's AI layer, adds predictive lead scoring, generative email drafting, and conversational AI assistance across the platform, while AppExchange offers thousands of pre-built integrations and add-on applications for extending functionality further.

• Every plan includes the full feature set; only practitioner count changes the price, with no feature-gating by tier.
• Offers a genuinely free 30-day trial that does not require a credit card upfront.
• Unlimited patients, locations, and file storage are included on all plans.
• Emphasizes data security, 24/7 monitoring, and automatic backups on its marketing site.

• Extremely configurable for complex enterprise needs
• Massive AppExchange ecosystem
• Strong reporting and forecasting tools
• Industry-standard, well-supported platform

• Pricing rises steeply with practitioner count, from $45/month for one practitioner up to $395/month for 26-200.
• Telehealth requires entering payment details to unlock, even during the free trial.
• SMS reminders are a metered extra cost (10 cents/message) rather than included in the base price.

• Steep learning curve and implementation cost
• No free tier, relatively expensive per user
• Often requires dedicated admins or consultants to configure well