The wrong question is "which EHR has the most features."
I talk to solo and small clinic owners constantly and the pattern is the same every time. They Google "best EHR for solo practice." They get a comparison table with 47 feature rows. They pick the one with the most checkmarks. Six months later they're using scheduling, charting, and billing — the same three things every practitioner uses — and paying for an enterprise feature shelf they've never opened. A chiropractor in Guelph told me she was paying $143 a month across two platforms before she'd booked her twentieth patient. She wasn't using half the features she was paying for.
The right question is simpler: does this software do the five things I need, and does it do them without making my day harder?
A two-practitioner acupuncture clinic in Calgary is not the same operation as a hospital outpatient department. Their workflows are different. Their compliance requirements are different. Their budget is different. A solo massage therapist running four evening appointments out of a rented room in Brampton has zero use for multi-location staff scheduling, credential verification modules, or departmental reporting dashboards. Zero. But those features exist in the platform she's paying for, and they're the reason her charting screen is three menus deep.
What $79/month buys you, and what it doesn't include
I need to be specific about pricing because vague comparisons are useless.
Jane App's Practice plan starts at $79/month for one practitioner with unlimited appointments. Reasonable on the surface. But their AI Scribe is a separate add-on — 5 free notes on the Balance plan, unlimited notes at additional cost. Insurance billing tacks on another $20/month. So a solo naturopath who wants AI-assisted charting and insurance invoicing is at $114/month minimum before payment processing fees.
Cliniko charges $45/month for a single practitioner and includes every feature — genuinely fair for what it offers. Except Cliniko doesn't include AI charting at all. No AI scribe. A clinician who needs AI documentation is stuck sourcing a standalone scribe ($50 to $99/month depending on the tool) and possibly a separate telehealth app ($15 to $30/month). That pushes the real cost to $110 to $175 a month across multiple platforms, multiple logins, and multiple support teams — a disjointed stack where nothing shares context.
Oli Health is $19.95 per clinician per month. One plan. AI scribe, AI charting, AI patient overview, scheduling, billing, telehealth, patient portal, online booking, client communication, task management — all included. No tiers. No add-on fees.
I'm not going to pretend the comparison is perfectly even. Jane App has been around longer, has a large community, and has mature integrations with Canadian insurance billing networks. Cliniko has rock-solid reliability built over more than a decade. These aren't bad products. They're products built in a different era with different assumptions about what practice software should cost and include.
Oli Health's single all-inclusive plan costs less per month than what most solo practitioners pay for the base plan alone on legacy platforms — before adding AI, telehealth, or insurance billing.
The gap widens with every add-on. A solo practitioner using a legacy EHR plus separate tools for AI documentation, telehealth, and patient intake can spend $150 to $250/month depending on configuration. Over a year, that's $1,560 to $2,760 in savings on Oli Health. For a practice netting $60,000 to $80,000 annually, that's not a rounding error.
We broke down the detailed pricing across 11 platforms if you want the line-by-line comparison.
How much does practice management software cost for a solo practitioner?
Most solo practitioners spend between $79 and $175 per month on practice management when you include the base EHR plan, AI charting add-ons, and third-party tools for telehealth or patient intake. Jane App's Practice plan starts at $79/month with AI scribe and insurance billing as paid extras. Cliniko is $45/month but doesn't include AI. Oli Health charges $19.95/month per clinician with everything included — no tiers, no add-ons.
The bloatware problem inside your clinic
The pricing problem is the symptom. The architecture is the disease.
Legacy EHR platforms were built to serve the broadest possible market. A platform like Jane App needs to work for a solo acupuncturist, a twenty-provider physiotherapy chain, a multi-location counseling group, and a dentist with three hygienists. To serve all of those use cases, the software accumulates features the way a junk drawer accumulates batteries — everything goes in, nothing comes out, and eventually you can't find the tape.
Nkechi runs a solo psychotherapy practice out of a shared office in Etobicoke. Three days a week, six clients a day. Her previous EHR had a report builder with nineteen report types. She used one: the monthly revenue summary. The platform also had a product inventory module (she has no products), a class booking system (she doesn't teach classes), a multi-location scheduler (she has one room), and a staff permission hierarchy for managing employees she doesn't have. She spent twenty minutes during her first week trying to find where to write a session note because it was buried three menus deep behind a workflow designed for clinics with intake coordinators.
I started collecting these stories because I thought they'd be edge cases. They're the norm. Most solo and small practice owners describe the same experience: the software has 200 features, they use 12, and the 12 they use are harder to access because of the 188 they don't.
Software shaped for small clinics
An EHR designed for solo and small practices should have a short list of things it does, and do all of them within two clicks. When a physiotherapist finishes a patient session, the note should be one tap away — not buried under a navigation tree designed for multi-departmental hospital systems.
What should solo practitioners look for in EHR software?
Solo practitioners need an EHR that handles scheduling, charting, billing, online booking, and patient communication without requiring separate tools or add-on subscriptions. The software should be fast to learn, priced per clinician (not per feature tier), and designed for small practice workflows rather than scaled down from enterprise platforms. AI-generated clinical notes, built-in telehealth, and a patient portal should be included in the base price, not sold as extras.
Three things solo practitioners miss during the EHR search
The AI is already in the price, or it isn't. I've evaluated a dozen EHR platforms in the last year. The ones built after 2023 tend to include AI documentation as a core feature. The ones built before 2020 sell it as an add-on, priced between $15 and $199/month depending on usage. This is the single most important pricing detail for a new solo practitioner in 2026 — AI-generated clinical notes represent the largest concrete time savings available in practice management software. Whether AI is included or sold separately changes your effective monthly cost by $15 to $199.
Per-clinician pricing beats per-plan pricing for small practices. Tier-based pricing (Starter, Professional, Enterprise) forces you to choose between missing features and overpaying. A per-clinician flat rate means you pay for the number of practitioners who use the system and every feature is available from day one. If you're a two-person practice, you pay twice the base rate. If your associate leaves and you're back to solo, your bill drops by half. No plan downgrade, no feature loss, no customer support call.
Workflow friction costs more than your subscription. A solo occupational therapist in Oakville told me she was spending roughly 45 minutes per day on tasks her EHR could have automated but didn't: manually copying appointment confirmations from email to calendar, re-entering patient demographics from intake PDFs into chart fields, toggling between separate scheduling and charting tabs because they couldn't share a screen. At her billing rate, 45 minutes of lost productivity is $65 to $90 per day. Even the most expensive EHR subscription is cheaper than that.
Lock-in isn't where you think it is
The real lock-in isn't data migration. Most platforms export patient records as CSV files. You'll lose some formatting, spend a weekend reorganizing, but the data moves.
The lock-in is muscle memory. After eighteen months on a bloated platform, practitioners develop workarounds. They know which three clicks bypass the unnecessary intake wizard. They know to ignore the seven dashboard widgets that don't apply to their practice. They've learned to live with the software, the way you learn to live with a kitchen drawer that sticks.
That doesn't mean the drawer is fine. It means you've stopped noticing the friction — and the friction has a cost you're absorbing without tracking it.
Open a free trial of anything before you read another comparison article. Five minutes inside an interface tells you more than any feature matrix. If you can create a patient, book an appointment, and start a chart within those five minutes without watching a tutorial video, the software was built for your size of practice. If you can't, it wasn't.
If you're paying for features you don't use and missing the one — AI documentation — that would change your day, Oli Health's $19.95/month plan might be worth thirty minutes of your time. Start a free trial, book a test appointment, record a session. You'll know fast.
