TherapyNotes vs. SimplePractice vs. Jane in 2026: Which Handles Intake Best?

TL;DR#

The TherapyNotes vs SimplePractice vs Jane decision should be made on billing, documentation, and scheduling — not on intake, because all three handle intake essentially the same way. TherapyNotes is the strongest of the three for behavioral-health documentation and insurance-heavy practices, with note templates built around payer expectations and a client portal included in the subscription rather than sold as an add-on. SimplePractice is the broadest and the most polished on the client-facing side, covering scheduling, telehealth, claims, documentation, and a public directory listing inside one tiered subscription. Jane is the strongest scheduling engine of the three and the natural fit for multidisciplinary clinics where a therapist, a physiotherapist, and a massage therapist share one calendar and one chart system. All three deliver intake as a static packet — consent documents plus a questionnaire — pushed through a client portal and filed to the chart, because all three are systems of record first, and a record system's contract is a fixed schema. None of them asks a follow-up question when a new client writes "anxiety, on and off, for a while." That matters: a 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis in Psychiatric Services put pooled first-appointment nonattendance at nonspecialist outpatient mental health clinics at roughly 34%, and a packet that collects fields without building any relationship does nothing about that number. The practical conclusion is to pick your EHR on billing, documentation, and scheduling fit, then solve intake depth separately with a conversational pre-intake layer — Perspective AI is built for exactly that lane — that runs before the clinical record exists and hands structured output into whichever system you chose.

TherapyNotes vs SimplePractice vs Jane: How the Three Compare at a Glance#

The three differ sharply on documentation, billing, and scheduling, and barely at all on intake. Here is the honest map, narrowed to the axis this article is about.

Two things to notice. First, the "strongest at" column is genuinely different for each system — this is not a case where one product dominates and the others are cheap copies. Second, the "intake depth" column is the same for all three. That is the finding this post is built on, and we unpack it below. If you want the intake question answered on its own terms rather than as a footnote to an EHR decision, our roundup of the best client intake software for therapists in 2026 evaluates tools on screening depth first.

TherapyNotes: Documentation Depth and Insurance Fluency#

TherapyNotes is the best of the three at behavioral-health documentation and insurance billing, and that is what you are buying it for. It was built for behavioral health specifically rather than adapted to it, and the difference shows in the note types: Intake Note, Progress Note, Psychiatry Note, Treatment Plan, Termination Note, each structured around what a payer or auditor expects to see. In 2026 the platform added customizable Intake Note templates, letting practice administrators rename assessment sections, reorder fields, drop fields that do not apply, and add custom assessment fields — a meaningful concession to practices whose clinical model does not match the default.

On billing, TherapyNotes handles claim submission, ERA and EOB posting, credit card processing, and client statements inside the same system that produced the note. For a practice where insurance is the majority of revenue, that single loop — session happens, note is written, claim goes out, remittance posts back — is the whole value proposition. Scheduling is competent rather than remarkable: a calendar, appointment reminders by text, email, and voice, and telehealth included.

How TherapyNotes handles intake#

TherapyNotes handles intake through TherapyPortal, its client portal, which is included with the subscription rather than priced as an add-on. Practices assign documents to a client — the Client Information Form for demographics and insurance details, the Client History Form for presenting problems, psychiatric and medical history, family and social history, and substance use — and the client completes and signs them before the first session. Responses process into the chart rather than sitting in an inbox as PDFs, which is a real workflow advantage over practices duct-taping a generic form builder onto an EHR.

TherapyNotes also ships a drag-and-drop custom form builder for practice-specific documents: text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, and signature capture, shared through the portal, with an option to make certain forms always available to clients rather than assigned one at a time. It is a competent document builder. It is not a conversation. The Client History Form asks about substance use; it does not notice that a client answered "occasionally" and ask what occasionally means. That is not a bug — it is what a form is.

SimplePractice: Breadth and Client-Facing Polish#

SimplePractice is the broadest of the three and the most refined from the client's point of view. Scheduling, documentation, telehealth, claim filing, secure messaging, client billing, a clinician mobile app, a client mobile experience, measurement-based care through standardized assessments, a practice website builder, and a listing in the company's public therapist directory all live under one subscription, tiered so that smaller practices are not paying for group-practice machinery.

The polish is not a cosmetic point. Clients who are anxious about starting therapy notice when the portal is confusing, and SimplePractice's onboarding flow is the smoothest of the three. That is worth real money in a category where the drop-off between "found a therapist" and "attended a first session" is the whole funnel. Research in Psychiatric Services on altering the attendance rate for new patients at an outpatient mental health clinic has repeatedly found that what happens between booking and the first appointment moves attendance — friction in that window is not neutral.

The trade-offs are real too. Tiering means some capabilities you assumed were included are gated to a higher plan or sold as add-ons, and the documentation is generalist where TherapyNotes is specialist. For a psychiatrist or a practice deep in payer audits, that gap is noticeable.

How SimplePractice handles intake#

SimplePractice handles intake as a packet of consent documents and questionnaires delivered through the Client Portal, often triggered automatically when an appointment is booked. There is a large library of pre-built templates aimed at mental health practices — informed consent, practice policies, notice of privacy practices, credit card authorization, and a range of intake questionnaires — plus a builder for custom questions, with electronic signature throughout.

Within questionnaires, the platform supports some conditional display, so a question can appear based on an earlier answer. That is branching, and branching is genuinely useful: it keeps a 40-question packet from showing 40 questions to everyone. But branching still only routes among questions you wrote in advance. It cannot generate the question you did not think to ask. We go deeper on that specific ceiling in our breakdown of what SimplePractice intake forms can and cannot do.

Jane: Scheduling and Multidisciplinary Charting#

Jane is the strongest scheduler of the three and the clearest choice for multidisciplinary clinics. Its calendar handles multiple practitioners, multiple locations, rooms and equipment, discipline-specific treatment durations, online booking, and waitlists with a level of control the other two do not attempt. If your practice is a therapist plus a physiotherapist plus a massage therapist plus a naturopath sharing a front desk, Jane is built for your problem and the other two are not.

Charting is flexible by design: templates are constructed per discipline, so a counsellor's narrative note and a physiotherapist's body chart can coexist without either being forced into the other's format. Billing is a regional story worth checking carefully — Jane's roots are Canadian and its insurer-billing story is strongest there, with U.S. claim workflows built out more recently. If you are a U.S. practice where insurance is most of your revenue, that is the single question to pressure-test in a trial before you commit.

How Jane handles intake#

Jane handles intake by turning a chart template into a client-facing form. You build the intake form the same way you build a chart, then send it to the client to complete in their account, optionally tied to a specific discipline or treatment so that a new massage client and a new counselling client receive different packets. Signed consents and completed forms land in the chart.

This is elegant, and for structured clinical data it may be the most flexible of the three. It is also the most literal expression of the pattern: the intake form is the chart, pushed forward in time. It captures precisely what the clinician decided in advance to record.

The Shared Intake Gap: All Three Treat Intake as a Static Packet#

All three systems treat intake as a static packet attached to the chart, and none of them probes what a client actually writes. This is not a flaw in any one product — it is the definition of the category. A system of record exists to make sure the record is complete, signed, timestamped, and billable. Its contract with you is a fixed schema, and a fixed schema is what makes downstream billing, auditing, and reporting work at all. You would not want your EHR improvising.

But it means the front door of your practice — the moment a stranger in distress decides whether to keep going — is a document. Three concrete consequences:

• Depth is capped at what you thought to ask. A client writes "stress at work." A colleague would ask one more question and learn it is a hostile manager, a pending PIP, and three months of not sleeping. The form files "stress at work."
• Length trades against completion. Every question you add to raise depth also raises abandonment, so practices settle at a compromise packet that is too long to be pleasant and too shallow to be clinically useful. Our piece on what a counseling intake form should capture — and why static forms miss it works through that trade-off in detail.
• The packet does no relational work. The 2026 meta-analysis of nonattendance at nonspecialist outpatient mental health clinics found pooled first-appointment nonattendance around 34%, and separate work comparing attenders and non-attenders at psychiatric outpatient clinics shows nonattendance tracks clinical and social factors a form never surfaces. Meanwhile, a quasi-experimental study of a brief pre-admission telephone contact found that a short human-feeling interaction before admission reduced no-shows and dropout in treatment. A PDF does not do what that phone call does.

None of this is an argument for switching EHRs. All three will file your notes, submit your claims, and store your consents. It is an argument for not expecting your EHR to fix intake, and for stopping the search for the one system that does both. There isn't one. If you are still narrowing the EHR field itself, our ranking of practice management software for solo therapists, judged on intake applies the same lens across a wider set.

How to Choose Your EHR: A Four-Question Framework#

Choose your EHR by working through billing, documentation, scheduling, and cost in that order, and ignore intake entirely as a tiebreaker. Intake is the same everywhere, so letting it decide is letting noise decide.

Question 1 — What percentage of your revenue is insurance? If it is above roughly half, weight billing depth heaviest. TherapyNotes is purpose-built for this and its claim-to-remittance loop is the tightest of the three for U.S. behavioral health. SimplePractice files claims capably on the appropriate tier. Jane's insurer-billing maturity varies by country and payer mix — verify against your actual payers, not a feature list. Whichever you pick, front-end eligibility still has to happen somewhere; our guide to insurance verification during therapy intake covers where to put it.

Question 2 — How specialized is your documentation? Psychiatry, heavy assessment work, or audit-exposed payer contracts favor TherapyNotes. Mixed-modality allied health favors Jane. General therapy practice is well served by any of the three, and at that point this question stops being decisive.

Question 3 — How complex is your calendar? One clinician, one room, one modality: all three are fine. Multiple practitioners with different treatment lengths, shared rooms, and cross-discipline booking: Jane, and it is not close. Group practice within a single behavioral-health modality: TherapyNotes and SimplePractice both handle it.

Question 4 — What is the real total, not the sticker? Compare the tier that actually contains what you need, plus add-ons, plus per-clinician pricing, plus payment processing, plus e-prescribing if you need it. A cheaper base plan that gates claim filing behind an upgrade is not cheaper. Note that the client portal is included in a TherapyNotes subscription rather than being a paid module — that kind of detail moves the real number.

Run all four against a free trial with your own data, not a demo. And when you get to the intake question during that trial, expect all three to look the same, because they are.

Solving Intake Depth on Top of Any of Them#

Solve intake depth by adding a conversational pre-intake layer in front of your EHR rather than trying to make the EHR's forms deeper. The workflow that works is simple: keep your EHR, replace the inquiry form.

Concretely, that means splitting what most practices lump together into two distinct jobs:

1. Pre-intake — before someone is a client. The inquiry on your website, the "request an appointment" step, the fit-and-screening conversation. This is where you learn what is actually going on, what they have tried, what they are hoping changes, whether you are the right clinician, and how urgent it is. It is typically not a PHI-bound clinical workflow, and it is the part every EHR handles worst. It is also the window where practices lose people — research on the impact of the wait for an initial appointment on kept-appointment rates treats the gap between request and first session as a measurable risk, not an administrative formality.
2. Clinical intake — after they are a client. Consents, HIPAA notices, insurance details, history of record, treatment planning. This belongs in TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, or Jane, full stop. All three sign business associate agreements and are built to hold protected health information.

This is the lane Perspective AI is built for, and it is a different lane from the three systems above — Perspective AI is not an EHR, does not schedule, does not bill, and does not replace your chart. It runs the first conversation. A concierge agent asks an opening question, listens to the answer in the person's own words, and follows up on the vague parts the way a colleague would: "You mentioned the panic started around February — what changed around then?" It arrives at structured output your EHR can consume, but it gets there by conversation rather than by field. Our therapy intake template is the fastest way to see the shape of it, and Intelligent Intake covers the broader pattern.

On compliance, be precise, because this vertical punishes vagueness. Perspective is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 certified, with data encrypted in transit and at rest. Perspective is not HIPAA-certified — for workflows involving protected health information, contact us to discuss your requirements. Keep PHI-bound documentation in your EHR, which is where it belongs anyway. If BAA coverage across your whole intake stack is a hard requirement for you, that is a legitimate evaluation criterion and our review of HIPAA-ready intake tools for private practice treats it as one.

A short checklist for evaluating any pre-intake layer, whichever you end up choosing:

• Does it ask follow-up questions based on what the person actually said, or only branch among questions you pre-wrote?
• Does it return structured output your EHR can ingest, or another PDF someone has to retype?
• Does completion go up or down versus the form it replaces? Measure it; do not assume it.
• Does it handle "I don't know" and "it's complicated" — the answers that matter most — without dead-ending?
• Is the compliance boundary between pre-intake and clinical intake explicit, documented, and something you can explain to a client?

For more on sequencing this without disrupting an existing practice, see our practical guide to replacing forms with conversations, the playbook for designing a client intake process that doesn't lose clients, and our field notes on conversational screening for mental health practices. Practices trying to cut the gap between inquiry and first session should also read how to reduce therapy no-shows at intake, and small practices weighing automation generally will find intake automation software for small counseling practices useful.

Frequently Asked Questions#

Which is better for a solo therapist, TherapyNotes or SimplePractice?#

TherapyNotes is the better fit for a solo therapist whose revenue is mostly insurance, and SimplePractice is the better fit for a solo therapist who wants breadth and polish in one place. TherapyNotes documentation is purpose-built for behavioral health and its claim workflow is tighter. SimplePractice offers a smoother client experience, a directory listing, a website builder, and measurement-based care. Intake is comparable in both, so it should not decide the choice.

How do SimplePractice and Jane compare for a therapy practice?#

SimplePractice is the stronger choice for a mental-health-only practice, while Jane is the stronger choice for a multidisciplinary clinic. SimplePractice's templates, directory, and client experience are tuned specifically to therapy. Jane's advantage is its scheduling engine and per-discipline charting, which matter when several modalities share one calendar. If you are U.S.-based and insurance-heavy, verify Jane's claim workflow against your specific payers during a trial.

Is TherapyNotes or Jane better for documentation?#

TherapyNotes is better for behavioral-health documentation, and Jane is better for multidisciplinary documentation. TherapyNotes note types are structured around what payers and auditors expect from therapy and psychiatry, and 2026 releases made Intake Note templates customizable at the section and field level. Jane's chart templates are more flexible across disciplines, which is an advantage in a mixed clinic and largely irrelevant in a therapy-only practice.

What is the best EHR for therapists in 2026?#

There is no single best EHR for therapists in 2026 — the right answer depends on your payer mix, documentation specialization, and calendar complexity. TherapyNotes leads on behavioral-health documentation and insurance billing, SimplePractice on breadth and client-facing experience, and Jane on scheduling and multidisciplinary charting. Because all three treat intake as a static portal packet, intake capability should not be your tiebreaker. Our ranking of therapy intake software by screening depth covers that axis separately.

Can I use a separate intake tool with my EHR?#

Yes — running a separate pre-intake layer in front of your EHR is a common and workable setup. The pattern is to handle inquiry, fit, and screening conversations outside the chart, then pass structured output into TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, or Jane for the clinical record, consents, and billing. Keep protected health information in the EHR that holds your business associate agreement, and keep the compliance boundary between the two layers explicit.

Do all three sign a HIPAA business associate agreement?#

Yes, all three are built for U.S. healthcare use and offer business associate agreements to covered entities. That is a baseline expectation for a system of record holding clinical documentation, not a differentiator among them. It is worth confirming during your trial which specific modules and integrations are covered, since add-ons and third-party connections are not always in scope by default.

The Verdict: Decide on Billing, Documentation, and Scheduling#

The TherapyNotes vs SimplePractice vs Jane question has a cleaner answer than most comparison articles admit, once you stop asking it about intake. TherapyNotes wins on behavioral-health documentation and insurance depth. SimplePractice wins on breadth and client-facing polish. Jane wins on scheduling and multidisciplinary flexibility. Any of the three will run a therapy practice competently, and the right one is determined by your payer mix, your documentation specialization, and how complicated your calendar is.

What none of the three will do is make your intake deeper, because a system of record's job is a fixed schema and a fixed schema cannot follow up. So decide the EHR on its own merits, then treat intake depth as a separate, solvable problem: keep your EHR, replace the inquiry form with a conversation that actually listens. Start a Perspective AI conversation to see what a client tells you when something asks a second question — or review pricing and what we build for operations teams if you are scoping this for a group practice. Practices comparing telehealth-first setups can also see our roundup of the best telehealth intake tools for 2026, and anyone rebuilding their forms from scratch should start with the therapy client intake form reimagined for 2026 and our notes on cutting drop-off in counseling intake forms.