If you’re weighing Alnora vs Cliniko, the first thing worth saying is that Cliniko is genuinely good software. It has a long track record in allied health, a reputation for treating customers well, and clinics that use it tend to like it. This isn’t an article about a weak competitor.
The two products are simply different shapes. Cliniko is a hosted service: your practice runs on Cliniko’s servers, billed per practitioner every month, independent of whatever your website is built on. Alnora is a WordPress plugin: booking and patient records live inside the site you already run, on your own hosting, under one annual licence. Neither is automatically right — but the choice decides where your patient data lives and how your bill grows as you hire.
What Cliniko does well
Credit where it’s due, because for a lot of practices Cliniko is the right answer:
- Nothing to maintain. Hosting, backups, security patches and updates are their problem, not yours. For a clinic with no technical help, that is worth real money.
- Deep clinical notes. Treatment notes, templates and body charts built up over years for physio, chiro, podiatry and similar work. This is the heart of the product and it shows.
- It doesn’t care what your website is. Squarespace, Wix, a PDF, no website at all — Cliniko works regardless. Alnora needs WordPress.
- Apps and a support team. Native mobile apps for practitioners on the move, and staffed support behind them.
So the question isn’t whether Cliniko is capable. It’s whether a hosted, per-seat service is the right shape for how your practice works and how you want to grow.
Alnora vs Cliniko: where your patient data actually lives
This is the real difference, and it deserves to be stated precisely rather than shouted. Cliniko is not careless with data — they let you choose the region your records are stored in, and they take security seriously. But the structural fact remains: a third party processes your patients’ health data. That means a data processing agreement, a list of subprocessors to keep track of, and a supplier your compliance position depends on.
With Alnora there is no such third party. Records sit in your own WordPress database, on your own hosting, in whatever jurisdiction you chose — encrypted at rest with AES-256 — and the GDPR toolkit (consent logging with timestamp and IP, export, erasure, audit log) runs there too. For a European clinic that has to demonstrate compliance, “nobody outside this practice holds the data” is a much shorter conversation than any processor arrangement, however well run.
Per practitioner, per month — or one licence
Cliniko charges by the number of practitioners, every month. That model is honest and predictable, and at one or two practitioners it is genuinely inexpensive. But it means your software bill scales with your team: every therapist you hire raises it again, forever, and it never stops.
Alnora is an annual licence covering unlimited staff. Adding a fifth practitioner costs nothing. The trade is straightforward and worth stating plainly: you provide the hosting and you own the upkeep, whereas part of what Cliniko’s monthly fee buys is somebody else doing that. A solo practitioner may well find the hosted deal better value; a growing multi-practitioner clinic usually finds the arithmetic flips. (Note too that with hosted services, extras such as SMS are commonly billed on top — check what your quoted price actually includes.)
Where patients actually book
With a hosted service, online booking happens on a booking page the vendor provides — linked or embedded from your site. It works perfectly well, but the patient does leave your website, and the page looks like the platform rather than like you.
Alnora’s booking wizard is a block or shortcode on your own pages, in your own theme, fonts and colours: location, then practitioner, then service, then a real free slot. Patients never leave your site, and payments and deposits, records, reminders across email, SMS, WhatsApp and Telegram, the patient portal and the waitlist are all part of the same plugin.
Alnora vs Cliniko at a glance
| Cliniko | Alnora | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Hosted practice-management service | WordPress plugin |
| Where it runs | Cliniko’s servers, in a region you choose | Your own site, hosting and database |
| Third party processing patient data | Yes — DPA and subprocessors to manage | None |
| Patient booking | Vendor-hosted booking page | Block or shortcode in your own theme |
| Pricing model | Monthly, per practitioner | Annual licence, unlimited staff |
| Who maintains it | Cliniko — hosting, backups, updates | You, on the hosting you already have |
| Needs WordPress | No | Yes |
| Try before you buy | Free trial | Free version on WordPress.org + live demo |
When Cliniko is the better fit
Choose Cliniko if your site isn’t WordPress, if deep allied-health treatment notes are the centre of your day, or if you would simply rather pay somebody to run the software so that hosting, backups and updates never reach your desk. Those are good reasons, and no plugin removes them. Alnora is booking and practice management built into WordPress — it is not a hosted service, and it is not trying to be one.
The bottom line
Cliniko is hosted software that happens to include booking. Alnora is booking and practice management that happens to live inside the website you already run. If you want somebody else to hold the data and handle the servers, Cliniko does that well. If you would rather your patients booked on your own site, your records stayed in your own database, and one licence covered the whole team however large it gets — that is exactly what Alnora is for.
See it for yourself. Try the live demo or see pricing — there’s a free version to start with, and 30-day money-back on Pro.