ClinicSense is the one competitor that names holistic practitioners on its own homepage, in those words. So this page cannot tell you that you are not their customer — you may well be. What it can do is show you, in their sentences and ours, that the two products disagree about something more basic than features: what a session note is for.
Do you send your notes to anyone?
Worth answering before anything else, because ClinicSense answers it for you. Here is how their SOAP notes page explains why a good note matters: "insurance companies, physicians, lawyers, and other health & wellness practitioners love it when you send them a professional, detailed, and legible note".
Read that again as a description of a job. The note is written so it can travel — to a claims adjuster, to a referring doctor, to a solicitor building a case. Everything good about ClinicSense follows from taking that job seriously: structured templates, fifteen question types including a pain scale, a format another professional can read without asking you what you meant.
If your notes go somewhere, that is the software you want, and you should stop reading here. If they go nowhere — if the only person who ever opens them is you, three weeks later, trying to remember which hip it was — then you are paying for a document format built for readers you do not have.
Who ClinicSense is built for
This section is longer than the one about us, and it is not a courtesy. Several of these are things we do not have at all.
- A practice that bills insurance. They list "TELUS Health eClaims" among their financial features. We have no claims submission of any kind and no plans for one.
- A practice that needs HIPAA compliance. Their own words: "Yes, ClinicSense is HIPAA compliant. We use a 3rd party monitoring tool called Vanta to verify our compliance." We do not claim HIPAA compliance and do not sign a BAA. If a client, an employer or a regulator requires one, we are not the answer, and we would rather say so now.
- Clinical charting as a first-class tool. Prebuilt SOAP templates or one built from scratch, with "15 questions types including: short answer, multiple choice, pain scale, and more!". Our notes are prose you dictate, and structure is something the software proposes afterwards rather than a form you fill.
- A clinic rather than a person. Their homepage speaks to "Medical spa owners" and "Clinic owners" as well as to individual therapists. We are built for one practitioner.
What a note is for in HoldSpace
Our notes are dictated out loud, usually in the few minutes after a session while the room is still yours. You say what happened, and the software turns it into something you can scan later. There is no template to satisfy and no field that must be filled before the note will save.
That design has an obvious cost. A note written to jog your own memory is not a note you can hand to an insurer. It was not built to be read by a stranger, so it does not defend itself the way a completed SOAP form does. If you ever expect to be asked for records by someone with a form of their own, that is a real risk and you should take it seriously.
The gain is in what you write when nobody is watching. Filling a clinical form makes you write clinical things, and most of what actually matters in your work — how someone arrived, what shifted, what they said at the door — has no field. Speaking it has no such edges.
Getting your data out
Here they are good, and it would be easy and dishonest to imply otherwise. ClinicSense states it plainly on a public page: "Upon cancellation you will have the option to download a single ZIP file that contains all of your client files and appointments." Your records leave when you do, without a support ticket or a negotiation.
Ours works the same way and we hold it to the same standard: one file, exported by you, whenever you want, without asking anyone. On this question there is no difference worth choosing between, and we would rather not invent one.
Where we fit
HoldSpace is practice management for holistic practitioners — voice-first session notes, online booking, and client history in one place, built for people who hold space, not for hospitals.
We fit the practitioner whose notes have no audience. No insurer to satisfy, no referral letters, no case file that a third party will one day read — one person, a handful of regulars, and a memory that needs help between sessions. Dictation and structuring are in the base plan rather than an add-on, booking needs no client account and no password, and the free plan does not expire.
What we are not is clinical software, and the list further up is the proof. If your notes have no audience, try it after your next session: press the microphone, say what happened, and read it back tomorrow. What the product actually does is there if you would rather look first.
FAQ
Can you import my ClinicSense data?
No. They will give you a ZIP of your client files when you cancel, and we have nothing that reads it — you would be entering clients by hand. For a practice with hundreds of active files that alone may settle it.
Is ClinicSense cheaper than you?
Their entry plan costs less than our paid one and caps how many appointments a month it covers; ours has no appointment cap and a free plan with no deadline. Both sets of figures, with the day each was read from the vendor’s own page, are on the pricing page. We keep prices in one place on purpose, because two copies of the same number drift apart without anyone noticing.
Do you do SOAP notes?
Not as a form. You can write a note in SOAP order if that is how you think. But nothing in the software asks you to, checks that you did, or formats it for someone else to read. If you need SOAP as a deliverable rather than a habit, ClinicSense built exactly that and we did not.
Do you work for reiki, tarot or astrology practice?
Yes — that is who we are built for. ClinicSense does not name them in its marketing, which is not the same as saying its software cannot hold them. The difference we are confident about is the one above: who the note is written for.