What all five already do
Cliniko, Jane, Zanda, Power Diary and WriteUpp are the systems speech and language therapy practices run. Every one of them covers the structural thing this diary needs: assessment and therapy held as separate appointment types with different durations, so a long first assessment is never dropped into a thirty-minute therapy slot, plus intake forms that reach the parent before the first visit.
That shared floor is why a feature grid decides very little here. All five will hold your diary. What differs is how each behaves at your size, how much your admin touches by hand, and what the widget does to the page.
No league table, and here is why
What suits a solo paediatric therapist running six-week blocks out of one room is not what suits three therapists sharing a school contract and an adult voice caseload. So what follows are the questions that separate these five for speech and language work. Load your own appointment types into a trial and ask them there.
Whose record is it, the child's or the parent's?
Almost every paediatric booking is made by somebody who is not the client. Check how each system models that: whether the child is the client with the parent held as contact and payer, where consent to treat a minor is recorded, and which number the reminder text goes to. Get it wrong and reminders queue against a file with no phone number in it.
Can a block of sessions be booked in one action?
Therapy usually sells as a block — the same slot weekly for six or eight weeks — not one appointment at a time. Ask whether the system creates that series in a single action, what it does when a family misses week three, and whether the block can be paid for at the start. Rebuilding blocks by hand every term is an admin cost nobody puts in the quote.
Can the intake form change with the appointment type?
An assessment intake for a four-year-old asks about early words, nursery and what the family hears at home. An intake for an adult after a stroke, or for voice work, asks nothing similar. Where a system holds one form only, one of those readers fills in fields that do not apply and you collect the rest over email.
Does an off-site visit fit the diary?
If you work in schools or nurseries, look at what an off-site booking really does: whether travel time can sit either side of the slot, whether the address captured is the setting rather than the family home, and whether off-site availability closes outside term time. A system that treats a school visit as an ordinary clinic slot will book you into two places at once.
Can a parent choose the therapist by name?
Once more than one therapist works in the practice, parents want the person whose profile they just read. Check that availability can be filtered to a single therapist, that each therapist holds their own appointment types and lengths, and that a link exists which books only them. That link is what makes a profile page worth writing.
What happens when the diary is full?
Demand for this caseload regularly outruns the slots, and a parent already told to expect a wait will not wait twice. Ask what the system shows that parent: a waiting list, a captured enquiry, or an empty calendar and nothing else.
Two checks before you sign anything
Open the embed on a real handset on mobile data. Some widgets size themselves to the screen, some push the page around as they load, and whichever you pick it belongs on the page where somebody books and nowhere else. Then ask what an export contains — client records, session notes, documents, appointment history — before you need one. A practice that cannot get its data out ends up shaping its website around what a single system permits.
Where this sits
Every speech and language therapy website we build embeds whichever of these five you already run, wired to your calendar, at a fixed price. To audit the site you have, run the six phone checks, or read why your speech therapy site gets no bookings.