Cliniko vs Halaxy vs Splose: Practice Management Software for Australian Allied Health and NDIS Providers

Most allied health practitioners choose practice management software the way they choose a phone plan: skim the pricing page, pick the middle tier, move on. That works fine for a phone plan. It works badly here, because the real cost of this decision is not the subscription. It is the twenty minutes a day lost reconciling NDIS claims that did not match, the rebates you could not process at the front desk, and the fact that switching in two years means migrating every clinical note you have written.

For an Australian practice, the friction concentrates in a few specific places: NDIS claiming and the price guide, Medicare and DVA, private health rebates at the point of care, and the record-keeping underneath all of it. This comparison looks at three Australian-built platforms — Cliniko, Halaxy and Splose — through that lens rather than through feature-count marketing.

At a glance

	Cliniko	Halaxy	Splose
Vendor	Red Guava (Australia)	Halaxy (Australia)	Splose (Australia)
Pricing shape	Fixed subscription per practitioner	Free core, transaction-based fees	Fixed subscription per practitioner
Strongest at	Mature general practice management	Low fixed cost, built-in claiming	NDIS-specific workflows
Weakest at	NDIS-specific automation out of the box	Interface polish and learning curve	Breadth outside allied health and NDIS
Typical buyer	Growing clinics, multi-practitioner	Solo and low-volume practitioners	NDIS-heavy and community providers

NDIS-heavy providers should trial Splose first — it is the only one of the three whose product decisions are visibly shaped by NDIS billing. A general allied health clinic that will employ several practitioners is safest on Cliniko, and it is the platform your future practice manager most likely already knows. Starting solo at low volume, with software cost that scales with income rather than sitting as fixed overhead, points to Halaxy. None of the three is a bad product; the wrong answer here is usually a mismatch of shape, not of quality.

Cliniko

Cliniko is made by Red Guava, an Australian company, and is the longest-established of the three. It is a general practice management platform rather than an allied-health-and-NDIS specialist, used by physiotherapists, chiropractors, psychologists, podiatrists, massage therapists and multi-disciplinary clinics in Australia and internationally.

Who it suits. Practices that expect to grow past one or two practitioners, and practices that want a system with a deep bench of documentation, integrations and third-party expertise around it. If you ever hire a practice manager or bring in a bookkeeper, there is a reasonable chance they have worked in Cliniko before.

Strengths. The scheduling and front-of-house tooling is genuinely mature — recurring appointments, multiple locations, resource and room management, waitlists, and online booking pages you can configure per service and per practitioner. Treatment note templates are flexible enough to build proper structured assessments rather than a free-text box with a heading. Permissions and roles are well thought out, which matters the moment you have staff who should see the calendar but not the financials. Cliniko also publishes an open API and supports self-service data export — a meaningful signal about how the vendor thinks about lock-in.

Genuine weaknesses. Cliniko is not NDIS-first. You can run NDIS work in it — custom price lists, billable items, third-party invoice recipients — but more of the configuration falls to you, and you should not assume support item codes and price guide changes will simply appear. Heavy NDIS caseloads often end up maintaining item codes manually or leaning on spreadsheets alongside the software. The fixed per-practitioner subscription also makes Cliniko expensive at low billing volume: you pay the same whether you saw four clients or forty.

Standout capability. Breadth and stability. Cliniko does very few things badly, and what it does is unlikely to change under you.

Halaxy

Halaxy is also Australian-built, and it takes a fundamentally different commercial position: the core practice management software has no per-practitioner subscription fee at the time of writing. Halaxy makes its money from transactions — card payment processing, claiming, SMS, and various optional paid features.

Who it suits. Solo practitioners, early-stage practices, and anyone whose volume is low or lumpy enough that a fixed subscription feels like a tax on a quiet month. It also suits practitioners who want Medicare and DVA claiming as a first-class part of the product rather than an integration they configure separately.

Strengths. The pricing model is the headline and, for the right practice, a real advantage: a full practice management system with calendar, notes, invoicing and online bookings, without a fixed monthly commitment. Claiming is built into the platform rather than bolted on, reducing the number of vendors in your stack. Halaxy also maintains a public practitioner directory, which occasionally produces referrals in a way the other two do not attempt.

Genuine weaknesses. The transaction-fee model cuts both ways. A busy practice processing a high volume of card payments and claims can end up paying more in fees than a fixed subscription would have cost, and the cost is harder to forecast. Model it against your own expected volume before assuming "free" means cheap. The interface is also denser and has a steeper initial learning curve than Cliniko's — a subjective judgement, but one worth testing during a trial. NDIS support exists but, like Cliniko, is not the product's organising principle.

Standout capability. Removing the fixed-cost barrier to starting a practice, with claiming included rather than outsourced.

Splose

Splose is an Australian platform built explicitly for allied health, with NDIS providers as a core audience. Where Cliniko and Halaxy accommodate NDIS work, Splose is designed around it.

Who it suits. NDIS-heavy caseloads, community and mobile practitioners, and multi-disciplinary teams whose revenue is largely funded rather than private-pay. Occupational therapists, speech pathologists, exercise physiologists and support-coordination-adjacent providers tend to find the workflows already shaped the way they work.

Strengths. The NDIS-specific tooling is the reason to look: support item code handling, plan-aware billing, invoicing paths that distinguish plan-managed from self-managed from NDIA-managed participants, and bulk claim generation. Travel, non-labour costs and cancellation billing — the parts of NDIS invoicing that quietly consume hours in a general-purpose system — are first-class concerns. Splose has also invested visibly in reducing documentation time, including AI-assisted note tooling, which matters most for practitioners writing long functional assessments.

Genuine weaknesses. Specialisation is a tradeoff. If your practice is mostly private-pay physiotherapy with a small NDIS tail, you are paying for depth you will not use, and general clinic features may feel less battle-tested than Cliniko's. As a younger product with a smaller install base, there are fewer third-party integrations, fewer consultants who know it, and less accumulated community knowledge when something goes wrong. Roadmaps also move quickly on younger products — good when a feature you need lands, less good when workflows shift underneath your team.

Standout capability. Turning NDIS billing from a manual reconciliation exercise into an ordinary part of the appointment workflow.

Head to head

NDIS claiming and plan-manager invoicing

This is where the three genuinely diverge, and it is worth understanding why. NDIS invoicing is not one workflow, it is three. A plan-managed participant's invoice goes to their plan manager, who pays you — so the software must invoice a third party who is not the client, with the support item code, date, duration and ABN in the format that plan manager expects. A self-managed participant is invoiced directly, pays you, then claims from the NDIA. An NDIA-managed (agency-managed) participant requires you to be a registered provider claiming through the myplace provider portal, typically by uploading a bulk payment request file.

Splose is built around that three-way split. Cliniko and Halaxy both support third-party invoice recipients and custom price lists, which covers plan-managed and self-managed billing perfectly well, but price guide maintenance and bulk claim file generation are more likely to be your problem than the software's. If you are agency-managed-heavy, ask each vendor specifically how bulk claim files are produced and test it in a trial. Support item codes and price limits change, so check the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits published by the NDIA rather than trusting any software's cached copy.

Medicare and private health rebates at the point of care

Two mechanisms often get conflated. Medicare and DVA claiming — including bulk billing and claims against chronic disease management referrals, still widely called EPC referrals — flows through Services Australia's channels. Private health rebates at the point of care flow through a terminal or claiming service such as HICAPS or Tyro Health Point.

Halaxy treats claiming as part of the core product. Cliniko and Splose typically connect through integrated partners, which works well but adds a second vendor relationship and a second fee schedule. For private health, all three integrate with terminal providers to some degree, and the practical question is whether the rebate result flows back into the invoice automatically or whether your receptionist re-keys it. Ask that question specifically, naming your terminal model, before signing anything — terminal contracts often run longer than software subscriptions and are harder to exit.

If a material share of your revenue is Medicare-funded, the per-claim fee structure matters more than the monthly subscription. Multiply your expected annual claim count by each vendor's per-transaction cost before comparing plans.

Clinical documentation

All three support custom treatment note templates and structured assessments rather than free text. The differences are in emphasis. Cliniko's templates are flexible and well-established, with clean formatting if you print or share notes. Halaxy provides a template library alongside custom templates. Splose is oriented towards the longer functional reports NDIS work demands, and its investment in reducing typing time targets practitioners writing assessments rather than short SOAP notes.

Whichever you choose, test two things during your trial: can you build the note template you actually use, and can you get a completed note out in a readable format? Notes that are easy to write and impossible to export are a trap you discover at the worst possible moment.

Online bookings and reducing no-shows

Online booking is table stakes and all three do it competently. The differentiators are configurability — can you restrict a service type to certain practitioners, enforce a longer initial appointment, require intake forms before confirmation, and control how far ahead clients can book — and reminder economics.

Every platform charges for SMS on a usage basis. At a few hundred appointments a month this is a small but real line item; check the per-message rate rather than assuming parity. The bigger lever is a deposit or cancellation policy enforced by the software at booking time, which reduces no-shows more reliably than any reminder cadence. For NDIS work, short-notice cancellation billing has its own rules under the NDIA pricing arrangements — check those directly rather than applying your private-client policy.

Growing from solo to a team

Cliniko is strongest here. Roles and permissions, multiple business locations, resource management and practitioner-level reporting are mature, and the cost model stays transparent as you add people: another practitioner is another subscription line. Splose handles teams well within its allied health focus. Halaxy supports group practices, but the transaction-fee model becomes harder to forecast as volume grows, and the point at which it stops being cheaper than a subscription arrives quietly. A useful test: sketch your practice at eight practitioners and price all three. The ranking often inverts between one practitioner and eight.

Reporting you will actually use

Ignore the dashboard screenshots. In a small practice you need perhaps five numbers: revenue by practitioner, utilisation of available hours, new versus returning clients, outstanding invoices by age, and — for NDIS work — funding drawn down against plan budgets, so you can flag a participant approaching their limit before it becomes an awkward conversation.

Cliniko's business reporting is the broadest of the three. Splose weights its reporting towards funding and budget visibility, the more useful bias for NDIS providers. Halaxy provides solid financial and claiming reporting. All three connect to Xero, where most Australian practices do the serious financial work anyway, so treat in-app reporting as an operational tool rather than an accounting one.

Data portability if you leave

Assume you will switch eventually. Practices change shape and vendors change direction; a five-year software decision is rare.

Cliniko is the most explicit about export and offers an open API, which makes third-party migration tooling viable. Halaxy and Splose both provide export functionality, but the useful question is not "can I export" — it is "what exactly comes out". Client demographics almost always export cleanly. Clinical notes, uploaded documents, scanned referrals, signed service agreements and appointment history frequently do not, or come out in a format that is technically complete and practically unusable.

Run a full export in week two of your trial, with realistic test records including an attachment and a completed note template. It takes an hour and tells you more about the vendor than any sales call will.

Which should you choose?

Sole practitioner, mostly private clients. Halaxy if you want the lowest fixed cost and your volume is modest; Cliniko if you value the smoother interface and predictable billing. At low volume the total cost difference is smaller than it looks — pick the one you enjoy using, because you will be in it every day.

NDIS-heavy caseload. Splose, trialled against your real support item codes before committing. The hours saved on claiming and plan-manager invoicing are the entire argument, so verify the saving is real for your specific mix of plan-managed, self-managed and agency-managed participants.

Mobile or community practitioner seeing clients in homes. Prioritise mobile experience, offline tolerance and travel billing. Splose handles travel and non-labour costs as part of NDIS billing, exactly the pain point for community work. Test every candidate on a phone in a client's driveway, not on a desktop in your office.

Multi-disciplinary clinic with three to eight practitioners. Cliniko, unless NDIS is the majority of your revenue, in which case Splose. At this size, permissions, multi-location support, room and resource management, and the availability of people who already know the system outweigh feature-level differences.

High Medicare and EPC volume. Model the per-claim economics. Halaxy's built-in claiming reduces vendor count and may be cheaper depending on volume; Cliniko and Splose route through claiming partners with their own fee schedules. Multiply out a year of claims for each before deciding.

Prioritising lowest fixed cost while starting out. Halaxy, with a clear-eyed view that "free" means variable rather than zero. Diarise a review at six months against your actual transaction volume, and switch early if the numbers have turned — migrating at 300 clients is far easier than at 3,000.

Setting up for NDIS work properly

Software is one part of NDIS readiness. These are the areas where getting the setup right early saves months of remediation later — and in each case, the authoritative source is the regulator, not your software vendor.

Support item codes and pricing. Your service catalogue should map to current NDIS support item codes with the correct price limits for your discipline and state or territory. Limits and item definitions are updated periodically — confirm them against the NDIA's published NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, and reconcile your software's price list after each update rather than assuming it synced.

Registration. Whether you must be a registered NDIS provider depends on the supports you deliver and the participants you serve — unregistered providers can generally work with plan-managed and self-managed participants, while agency-managed participants require registration. The rules and registration categories are set by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Check the Commission's guidance for your specific supports rather than relying on general summaries, including this one.

Service agreements. A written service agreement setting out supports, pricing, cancellation terms and how the participant can end the arrangement is standard practice and expected for many supports. Store the signed agreement against the client record so it is retrievable, and check the NDIA and Commission guidance on what agreements need to contain.

Invoicing the right party. Plan-managed invoices go to the plan manager with the participant's details and the relevant support item code. Self-managed participants are invoiced directly. Agency-managed claims go through the myplace provider portal. Configure these as distinct billing paths from day one; retrofitting them across an existing client list is tedious.

Worker screening and conduct. NDIS Worker Screening Check requirements apply to certain roles, and the NDIS Code of Conduct applies to workers delivering supports. Requirements differ between registered and unregistered providers and between roles. The NDIS Commission is the authoritative source; your state or territory screening unit administers the checks.

Record-keeping and privacy. Health records carry obligations under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, and several jurisdictions add their own health records legislation — Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT each have their own health records statutes. Minimum retention periods also vary by jurisdiction and by patient age at the time of treatment. Software with access controls and audit logs helps, but does not discharge the obligation. The OAIC is authoritative on privacy, and your professional association or indemnity insurer can usually advise on retention specifics for your discipline.

Frequently asked questions

Which practice management software is best for NDIS providers in Australia? Splose is the most explicitly NDIS-oriented, with workflows built around support item codes, plan manager invoicing and bulk claiming. Cliniko and Halaxy both handle NDIS work through custom price lists and third-party invoicing, but you configure more of it yourself. If NDIS is the majority of your caseload, trial Splose first against your actual item codes.

Is Halaxy actually free? The core software has no per-practitioner subscription fee at the time of writing; Halaxy earns revenue through transaction-based charges such as card payment processing, claiming fees and SMS. Whether that beats a fixed subscription depends entirely on your claim and payment volume, so model your own numbers rather than comparing headline prices.

Can I do Medicare bulk billing and EPC claims from these platforms? All three support Medicare and DVA claiming, though the mechanism differs: Halaxy has claiming built into the core product, while Cliniko and Splose typically route through integrated partners. Confirm the current integration and its fees with each vendor, and check requirements for chronic disease management referrals with Services Australia.

How do I take private health insurance rebates on the spot? On-the-spot rebates are processed through a terminal or claiming service such as HICAPS or Tyro Health Point, not by the practice management software itself. What matters is how tightly the software integrates with your chosen terminal so the invoice reconciles automatically. Support varies by platform and terminal model, so verify it before signing a terminal contract.

What happens to my clinical records if I switch software later? All three offer data export, but the practical question is what format your notes come out in and whether attachments, documents and appointment history come with them. Run a real export during your trial, before you have thousands of records. Your record-keeping obligations continue regardless of which vendor holds the data.

Do these platforms meet Australian privacy requirements for health records? All three are Australian-built and designed for Australian health practices, but compliance is a shared responsibility. The software can provide access controls, audit logs and encryption; your practice remains responsible for the Australian Privacy Principles, any applicable state health records legislation, and your own consent, retention and breach response processes.

---

This article is general information only, current as at the date of publication. Pricing, plans, features and integrations change frequently — confirm current pricing and capability directly on the Cliniko, Halaxy and Splose websites before deciding. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax or compliance advice, and it should not be relied on as a statement of your obligations. For authoritative guidance on NDIS provider registration, the NDIS Code of Conduct and worker screening, refer to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission; for pricing arrangements, support item codes and claiming, the NDIA; for privacy and health record obligations, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the health records legislation in your state or territory. Startup Help is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any product compared here.