Zanda (Formerly Power Diary) vs Cliniko: Which PMS Fits Your Clinic?

Two Australian-built practice management systems, compared on pricing, Medicare claiming, features and ecosystem for Australian clinics, with notes for the UK and New Zealand.

For over a decade, Australian clinics comparing practice management software have weighed the same two home-grown names: Power Diary and Cliniko. One of them no longer exists, at least by name. In November 2024, Power Diary rebranded as Zanda, a signal that the product had outgrown its diary-first origins. The software, the company and the customer base carried straight over.

The two systems have unusually parallel histories. Cliniko was founded in Melbourne in 2011 by developer Joel Friedlaender. Zanda began a year earlier, in 2010, built by brothers Damien and Paul Adler after Damien, a registered psychologist, could not find workable software for his own practice. Both are privately owned, self-funded and Australian to the core, and both now serve clinics across Australia, the UK, New Zealand and beyond.

That shared DNA makes the Power Diary vs Cliniko question, now the Zanda vs Cliniko question, a genuinely close contest. This comparison sets out where each system is strong for an Australian clinic: how the two pricing models behave as a team grows, how Medicare, DVA, NDIS and health-fund claiming work on each, what daily workflow and reporting look like, and how their ecosystems differ.

Zanda at a Glance

Zanda's origin is a clinic, not a boardroom. Psychologist Damien Adler and his brother Paul launched the software in 2010 as Power Diary, signed their first ten Australian customers in 2011, reached the UK in 2013 and the US in 2015. The November 2024 rebrand to Zanda renamed a product that now runs billing, notes, forms, telehealth and team operations for thousands of practices in over 23 countries. The mental-health roots still show: psychologists, counsellors and social workers are a core cohort, alongside physiotherapists and other allied health.

Zanda's Australian pricing runs on two plans, in AUD ex GST. Starter, at $29 a month, covers one practitioner with an allowance of 1,000 appointments, unlimited clients and 100GB of storage. Growth, at $59 a month plus $29 for each additional practitioner, removes the caps: unlimited appointments, unlimited storage and unlimited free admin users. New accounts pay half price on either plan for the first six months. There is a 14-day free trial with no card required, and an unusual backstop: a 12-month money-back guarantee. Add-ons include Telehealth Pro at $9 per practitioner for unlimited calls, SMS at $0.15 per message sent with replies free, and BizzyAI Scribe, the built-in AI notes scribe, at $1 per transcription hour.

Distinctive strengths: built-in Medicare, DVA and NDIS billing with Medicare claiming listed as free, Tyro terminal and HealthPoint integrations for card-present payments and private health-fund claims, a waitlist that texts clients when a slot opens, session packs and deep automations. Two features have no Cliniko equivalent at all: Practice Hive, a built-in team chat, and a Practice Operations Manual with more than 100 editable policy templates. The trade-offs sit at the edges: telehealth is Zoom-powered rather than native, with unlimited calls behind the Pro add-on, and the Zanda API is still in beta, with read endpoints live and write access yet to come, so the third-party ecosystem is thin next to Cliniko's.

Cliniko at a Glance

Cliniko was founded in Melbourne in 2011 and remains owned by Red Guava, a deliberately small, bootstrapped company that donates at least 2% of subscription revenue to charity and makes the product free for registered charities. It is squarely an allied-health system with particular depth in physiotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic and podiatry, and its roots in Australia, the UK and New Zealand run deep: native pricing in all three currencies and long-established claiming integrations at home.

Cliniko's pricing is a flat monthly rate per team-size band: in Australia, $45 for a solo practitioner and $95 for two to five practitioners, with higher bands stretching to 200 practitioners. Every feature is included at every tier, with unlimited admin staff, locations, patients and storage; the only usage cost is prepaid SMS. There is a 30-day free trial with no card required, and paying annually earns a free month.

Distinctive strengths: pricing simplicity, native browser-based telehealth including group calls at no extra cost, group appointment types, and an open API published since 2013 that has grown a large directory of connected apps, from Xero and Physitrack to claiming services and modern AI tools. The trade-offs are the mirror image of Zanda's: no built-in team chat or operations manual, no session-pack memberships, claiming delegated to integration partners rather than built in, and reporting depth is the most consistent request in recent user reviews.

Zanda vs Cliniko: Feature by Feature

Sources: zandahealth.com/au/pricing, zandahealth.com/au/features, cliniko.com/pricing, cliniko.com/connected-apps. Verified July 2026; both vendors update pricing pages, so figures should be re-checked before deciding.

Pricing Compared: Per Practitioner vs Flat Bands

The most important difference between Zanda and Cliniko is not any single price. It is the shape of the pricing, and it is the same contest Cliniko runs against every per-practitioner rival.

Zanda scales per person. Starter suits a solo practitioner working within the 1,000-appointment allowance. Growth removes the caps for $59 a month and adds each further practitioner at $29, with admin staff unlimited and free. Costs track headcount smoothly. Zanda also halves the bill for the first six months, so Growth opens at $29.50 plus $14.50 per additional practitioner; the tables below use the ongoing list prices.

Cliniko scales in steps. One flat rate covers a whole band, so $95 covers a two-practitioner clinic and a five-practitioner clinic alike. Inside a band, hiring is free; crossing a band boundary is a step up, and Cliniko publishes its prices all the way to 200 practitioners.

For a solo Australian practitioner the comparison splits on caseload. A lighter diary fits Zanda's Starter at $29 against Cliniko at $45. A full diary that outgrows the Starter allowance compares Zanda Growth at $59 with Cliniko at $45, and Cliniko is cheaper. From two practitioners upward, the shape takes over. On current list prices, all-full-time Australian clinics land like this:

Prices in AUD ex GST from both vendors' published ladders. The sticker price is not the whole bill, though. Zanda's Growth price includes the waitlist automation, session packs, built-in claiming and the operations toolkit; Cliniko's bands include native telehealth and every feature it makes. Text reminders cost extra on both, and both charge per message: Zanda bills $0.15 for each message sent, with replies free, while Cliniko works on credit top-ups that are drawn down as messages go out. The remaining add-ons belong in any like-for-like total: Zanda's Telehealth Pro at $9 per practitioner on one side, and on the other any third-party subscriptions a Cliniko clinic adds for capabilities Zanda builds in, an AI scribe, say.

In the UK the same crossover arrives slightly later. Zanda's UK pricing runs Starter at £15 and Growth at £25 plus £15 per additional practitioner, against Cliniko's £29 solo and £59 for two to five. Zanda is cheaper up to three practitioners (£55 against £59); from four upward Cliniko's bands win, and the gap widens with every hire. Both vendors include unlimited admin users free, and both publish every price, which makes pricing a real roster on both pages a ten-minute job.

Claiming and Payments: Two Roads to the Same Rebates

For Australian clinics this section is where the products differ most in philosophy, if not in outcome.

Zanda builds claiming in. Medicare, DVA and NDIS billing are native features, with Medicare claiming listed as free on the pricing page, and private health-fund claims run through HealthPoint on an integrated Tyro terminal, which also handles card-present payments and assigns them to the right invoice automatically. For a practice living on bulk-billed sessions, care plans or NDIS invoicing, the whole rebate workflow sits inside one product.

Cliniko reaches the same destination through a partner. Its Tyro Health integration covers Medicare, DVA and HealthPoint health-fund claiming, a workflow Australian allied health has run for years. It works well, but it is a second relationship with its own terms, and clinics should price it into the comparison.

In the UK the positions reverse. Cliniko routes private-medical insurer work to Healthcode, the clearing house used by the major UK insurers, through Effra, a dedicated third-party connected app. Zanda publishes no Healthcode integration on its UK pages, so a UK clinic with heavy insurer caseloads should ask Zanda directly what the claiming workflow looks like before committing; for cash-pay clinics the question matters much less.

On everyday card payments the two are close. Both take online payments through Stripe, and both connect to Xero for accounting. Zanda's edge is the integrated Tyro terminal for in-room payments and its automated invoice chasing; Cliniko keeps payments in its connected-apps layer.

Daily Workflow: Operations Depth vs Everything Included

Zanda's most distinctive territory is the unglamorous machinery of running a practice. Automated invoice reminders chase unpaid bills. A waitlist texts clients the moment a cancellation opens a slot. Recall automation contacts clients who have not rebooked. Practice Hive gives the team a built-in chat with channels and file sharing, and the Practice Operations Manual ships more than 100 editable policy and procedure templates. Clinical notes are strong, with scored outcome forms, and BizzyAI adds writing, refining and session transcription without a third-party subscription.

Cliniko's edge is operational simplicity. Every feature ships to every customer, so nothing needs unlocking as the clinic grows. Its telehealth is native and browser-based with no client download and group calls included, where Zanda's runs on Zoom with unlimited calls behind the Pro add-on. Group appointment types handle classes and rehab groups. The interface has a long reputation for being learnable in an afternoon, and support is praised on both sides: Cliniko for fast in-app chat, Zanda for hands-on onboarding.

Reporting tilts toward Zanda. Practitioner utilisation, revenue dashboards, email-engagement reporting and Excel exports come built in, while reporting depth remains the most consistent request in recent Cliniko user reviews. Data-hungry multi-site clinics should test both reporting suites on their own questions before deciding.

Ecosystem: Open API vs a Platform Opening Up

The deepest structural difference sits under the surface. Cliniko has run a public API since 2013, and a large ecosystem has grown on it: accounting, exercise prescription, online booking aggregators, AI scribes and AI receptionists such as BookedSolid, which connects to Cliniko to answer clinic phones and book directly into the diary. If a clinic has a niche workflow, the odds are good someone has built for it.

Zanda has historically taken the all-in-one road: build the features in, keep the integrations list short and curated (Stripe, Xero, Physitrack, Mailchimp, Zoom, calendar sync). That is now shifting. The Zanda API is in beta, with read endpoints live and write access on the roadmap, so third-party tools cannot yet book appointments into a Zanda diary. Clinics with an established toolkit, or plans for phone automation and other diary-writing integrations, should check the current API state with Zanda before committing; clinics that want one vendor to own the whole stack may prefer Zanda's approach precisely because it keeps everything under one roof.

Neither philosophy is wrong. All-in-one platforms trade ecosystem breadth for coherence; open ones trade built-in depth for choice.

Data Residency, Security and Compliance

Here the two are strong in similar ways. Zanda hosts data on AWS in region-specific data centres: Sydney for Australian practices, London for the UK, Northern Virginia for North America, with other regions assigned to the nearest of the three. It is ISO 27001 certified, which it notes is rare among practice management platforms, and lists compliance with the Australian Privacy Act, GDPR and HIPAA, with hourly encrypted backups and two-factor authentication.

Cliniko stores data in-region for Australia, the UK, the US, Canada and the EU, publishes its GDPR and Australian Privacy Act positions, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and offers two-factor authentication. An Australian clinic keeps patient data in Australia on either system, and a UK clinic keeps it in the UK on either. New Zealand clinics have no in-country option on either platform. Cliniko states that accounts outside its named regions, NZ included, are hosted in Australia, and publishes a dedicated NZ Privacy Act 2020 guide. Zanda's policy assigns NZ accounts to the nearest regional centre, so NZ clinics should confirm the hosting region with Zanda directly.

Which Practice Type Suits Which System?

Patterns from the two products' own positioning and pricing:

• A solo practitioner building a caseload gets the gentlest start on Zanda's Starter at $29 with the 1,000-appointment allowance, then a decision point as the diary fills: Zanda Growth at $59 with the operations toolkit, or Cliniko at $45 with everything included.
• A growing multi-practitioner clinic finds Cliniko's flat bands cheaper from around three full-time practitioners on current list prices, and hiring inside a band costs nothing. Price the real roster on both pages.
• A mental-health or NDIS-heavy practice plays to Zanda's origins: built-in Medicare, DVA and NDIS billing, note-visibility controls, scored outcome forms and recall automation, from a company founded by a practising psychologist.
• A musculoskeletal clinic running classes leans Cliniko: native group appointments, included group telehealth and the exercise-prescription integrations that grew up around its API.
• An admin-light practice without a manager gets real value from Zanda's operations layer: the policy manual, team chat, waitlist automation and invoice chasing replace work someone would otherwise do by hand.
• Clinics with an established toolkit or modern custom workflows, Xero aside, phone automation, AI tools, reporting pipelines, will find Cliniko's open API the safer bet while Zanda's API remains read-only.
• A UK clinic with heavy insurer work has a published Healthcode route on Cliniko (via Effra); on Zanda, ask the vendor to demonstrate the insurer workflow first.

How to Choose Without Regret

Four steps keep the decision grounded. First, price the actual roster, including two years of hiring plans, on Zanda's and Cliniko's pricing pages, with SMS volumes and add-ons in the total. Second, list the five tools the clinic already relies on and check each against Cliniko's connected apps and Zanda's integrations page. Third, trial the workflows that fill the day, booking, notes, invoicing, claiming, using Cliniko's 30-day trial and Zanda's 14-day trial, with Zanda's 12-month money-back guarantee as a further safety net. Fourth, ask each vendor the awkward questions in writing: claiming in the clinic's market, API and integration plans, data region, and what happens to data on cancellation.

Wider context on the selection criteria sits in the Australian and UK practice-management roundups, and clinics also weighing Nookal can compare it against Cliniko in the Australian and UK editions of Nookal vs Cliniko.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Zanda the same as Power Diary?

Yes. Power Diary rebranded as Zanda in November 2024. The product, company, pricing and customer accounts carried over unchanged; only the name and branding are new. The software was founded in Australia in 2010 by brothers Damien and Paul Adler and now serves thousands of practices in more than 23 countries. Anyone comparing Power Diary vs Cliniko today is comparing Zanda vs Cliniko.

Is Zanda or Cliniko cheaper?

It depends on team size. For Australian solo practitioners, Zanda's Starter is $29 against Cliniko's $45, but a full diary that needs Zanda's unlimited Growth plan at $59 makes Cliniko cheaper. At two practitioners Zanda edges it ($88 against $95); from three upward Cliniko's flat bands win, reaching $80 a month cheaper at five practitioners on current list prices. The same crossover happens in the UK at around four practitioners. New Zanda accounts also pay half price for the first six months, which flatters the first-year comparison. Pricing the actual roster on both pages is the only reliable answer.

Which is better for Medicare and health-fund claiming in Australia?

Both handle it, differently. Zanda builds Medicare, DVA and NDIS billing into the product, with Medicare claiming listed as free and HealthPoint health-fund claims running through an integrated Tyro terminal. Cliniko covers Medicare, DVA and HealthPoint through its Tyro Health integration, a long-established partner workflow. Clinics with heavy claiming volume should demo their exact claim types on both before deciding.

Does Zanda work for UK clinics?

Yes, with one check. Zanda publishes UK pricing in GBP (Starter £15, Growth £25 plus £15 per additional practitioner), hosts UK data in a London data centre and is ISO 27001 certified. It publishes no Healthcode integration, though, so UK clinics doing significant private-medical insurer work should ask Zanda to demonstrate the claiming workflow. Cliniko routes Healthcode claims through the third-party app Effra.

Can either system be tried before buying?

Yes, both. Cliniko offers a 30-day free trial with full features and no card required. Zanda offers a 14-day free trial, also without a card, and backs it with a 12-month money-back guarantee. Both vendors help migrate existing clinic data, so trialling with realistic data is practical on either.

What about clinics in New Zealand?

Both systems serve NZ clinics and both publish native NZD pricing: Zanda at $29 Starter or $59 Growth plus $29 per practitioner, Cliniko on its flat bands. Neither offers in-country NZ hosting. Cliniko states that NZ accounts are hosted in Australia and publishes a dedicated NZ Privacy Act 2020 guide; Zanda assigns accounts to its nearest regional data centre, so NZ clinics should confirm the hosting region and Privacy Act position with Zanda directly.

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• Nookal vs Cliniko for Australian Clinics
• Nookal vs Cliniko for UK Clinics