Clio pricing 2026: Clio cost per user, pricing plans and tiers explained

Read on 16 August 2026, Clio pricing page carries a single figure across the whole range: plans start at $49 USD per user per month. There are four plans, Starter, Core, Signature and Elite, and not one of them has a price printed next to it. Core and Signature each show a Try for free button beside a Get pricing button. Elite shows Book a demo beside Get pricing and no trial at all. Starter is the only plan with a trial and no quote request, which is the strongest available clue that Starter is the $49 plan and everything above it is quoted.

That structure matters more than it looks. A starting price is not a price card. It tells you the floor of the cheapest plan and nothing about the three plans above it, and the gap between tiers in this category is routinely double or triple. When MyCase publishes its range, the top plan is two and a half times the entry plan. If Clio spreads similarly, the plans a growing firm would actually buy sit well above $49, but we are not going to invent a number for them and neither should anything else you read.

What Clio does publish, in detail, is what each plan contains. Starter is Clio Manage with contact, matter and document management, time and expense tracking, online payments by card, eCheck, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and trust and operating account reconciliation. Core adds AI drafted bills, documents turned into calendar events and tasks, automatic client updates drawn from case activity, and a secure client portal. Signature adds unlimited custom roles and permissions, matter stages on a kanban board, AI built profitability and productivity reports, multi currency billing and split bills. Elite adds Clio Grow: consultation booking, intake forms and scheduling, automated review requests, and referral and ad spend tracking.

A few things are on every plan from Starter up, and Clio is clear about them: unlimited document storage, encrypted backups, two factor authentication, a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, and unlimited access to training and support. Support hours are worth reading closely, because Clio publishes them as 24/5, available by phone, email or live chat from Monday morning through Friday evening. That is not 24/7, and if your inquiries arrive at weekends it is a real distinction.

If you have read anything about Clio pricing written before this year, it almost certainly describes plans called EasyStart, Essentials and Advanced. Those names are gone. Clio pricing page today reads Starter, Core, Signature and Elite. This trips up a remarkable number of otherwise careful comparison articles, including ones updated for 2026, and it makes older advice about which plan includes which feature impossible to apply.

The mapping between old and new is not published anywhere we can find, but Clio left it in plain sight. Each plan on the pricing page links to a signup or quote URL carrying a campaign parameter, and those parameters were never updated when the plans were renamed. Read on 16 August 2026, the Starter button links with cta=pricing-easy-start, Core with cta=pricing-essentials, Signature with cta=pricing-advanced and Elite with cta=pricing-expand. Three of those four are the exact old plan names, sitting inside the current page, one per tier, in order.

So the translation is available, from Clio own markup rather than from a third party guess: EasyStart is now Starter, Essentials is now Core, Advanced is now Signature, and the parameter on the top plan reads expand. The self-serve plans also carry sequential subscription plan codes, 9 for Starter, 10 for Core and 11 for Signature, which is consistent with three ordered tiers that were relabeled rather than rebuilt. We are reporting what the links say. We are not claiming Clio kept the prices the same when it changed the names, and nobody outside Clio can know that.

The practical use is simple. When you find an article explaining that some feature comes with Essentials, you now know it is describing Core, and you can check that claim against the current page instead of discarding the article or trusting it blindly. It is also a fast credibility test for any Clio page you are reading: if it still says EasyStart, it has not been checked against the source this year, and its prices deserve the same suspicion as its plan names.

Clio Grow is the intake and client acquisition half of Clio: customizable intake forms, online appointment booking for consultations, and Google Local Services Ads. It is the product most firms searching for Clio pricing are actually trying to price, and it is the hardest thing on the page to price.

Read on 16 August 2026, Clio states that Grow is included in Elite and Elite Work, and available as an add-on for Core and Signature. Two things follow. First, Grow is not available on Starter at all, so the $49 floor is the price of the only plan that definitively cannot do intake. Second, Grow has its own Get pricing button and no figure, so the add-on route is unpriced as well. Whichever way you approach Clio for intake, the number is behind a form.

Elite is also the only plan with no self-serve trial. Starter, Core and Signature all offer Try for free; Elite offers Book a demo. The tier that bundles intake is therefore the one you can neither price nor test without a sales conversation, which is a meaningful practical difference when you are trying to evaluate intake software on a deadline.

This is the category pattern rather than a Clio quirk, and it is worth pricing before you assume otherwise. MyCase puts Client Intake Forms and Legal CRM on Pro at $100 per user per month annual against a $50 entry plan. PracticePanther puts Intake Forms on Business at $89 annual against a $49 entry. In both cases the plan that turns intake on runs roughly double the advertised starting figure. Clio follows the same shape and simply does not tell you by how much. There is one further add-on in the same position: Clio for Personal Injury, covering medical records organization, a settlement calculator and lien and expense tracking, is a separate Get pricing item with no published rate.

It would be easy to write this page as though unpublished pricing meant bad value, and that would be dishonest. Two things Clio includes are genuinely better deals than the direct comparison, and both are worth knowing before you assume a published price card is the cheaper option.

Accounting is the clearest. Clio states that accounting is included on every plan from Starter up, not sold separately: bank transaction sync, accounts receivable, trust and operating account reconciliation and financial reports, as part of the subscription. MyCase sells the equivalent as MyCase Accounting at $39 per user per month on top of whatever plan you are on. For a six seat firm that add-on alone is $2,808 a year. A firm that needs real trust accounting should count that difference before comparing headline figures, because it moves the comparison substantially and in Clio favor.

AI is the second. Clio states that AI is included from Core upward as part of the plan rather than as a separate purchase, working inside matters to draft client updates, flag risks, prioritize tasks and prepare billing. That is a different commercial model from most of this category, where AI arrives as a metered add-on. Lawmatics sells lead scoring in credits that do not roll over. MyCase sells its Discovery Assistant with 5,000 pages per user per month and further blocks of 5,000 pages at $30 that expire at the end of the period rather than carrying forward. In-plan AI with no meter is a real advantage, and the fact that Clio does not publish the plan price is a separate complaint from that one.

The honest summary is that Clio gives you less information and, on those two lines, probably more product. What it does not give you is the ability to compare. You cannot put an unpriced Elite plan next to a priced MyCase Advanced plan and reach a conclusion, and no amount of analysis on our side changes that. The only way to price Clio is to request a quote for your specific seat count and then compare it to the published cards from vendors that print theirs.

Only one calculation can be done honestly from what Clio publishes, so here it is with its limits stated. At $49 per user per month, a six person firm pays $294 a month, or $3,528 a year. Twelve people pay $588 a month, or $7,056 a year. Those are floor numbers on the cheapest plan, the one that cannot run Clio Grow intake, so treat them as the least your firm could possibly pay rather than as an estimate of your bill. Any real quote for a plan that includes intake will be higher, and Clio does not publish by how much.

Count the seats before you compare anything, because this is where firms consistently underestimate. It is natural to count attorneys and forget that paralegals, an office manager, a bookkeeper and whoever actually answers the phone all need logins to make the system work. A four attorney firm is very often a seven or eight seat subscription. At the $49 floor that is the difference between $2,352 and $4,704 a year, and the same multiplier applies to whatever the Elite rate turns out to be.

The page carries one other percentage worth mentioning carefully. A Save over 17% label sits with the Elite plan block, which implies an annual billing discount in the usual range for this category. Because Clio publishes no base figure for Elite, that percentage cannot be turned into a dollar amount by anyone outside the company. It tells you an annual commitment saves something, and nothing more.

It is worth being straight about which direction per user billing cuts, including against us. Per user pricing scales with headcount. Per minute and per call pricing, which is how answering services bill, scales with marketing spend. Flat per firm pricing, which is how we bill, scales with neither. None is automatically better. Below roughly three or four users, per user pricing at the low end genuinely beats our flat plans, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The question worth asking is which axis your costs should track: inquiry volume is set by your marketing, your referrals and your reputation, not by how many lawyers you employ, and those two numbers move independently.

Clio is a practice management platform with a client acquisition product attached. Its real strength is that the two halves share one database. Intake captured in Grow lands in Manage as a matter with no re-keying, so the chain from inquiry to consultation to payment to signed retainer stays inside one system of record. Add the largest install base and integration surface in US legal, accounting on every plan and unlimited support, and for a firm that wants a single platform it is a genuinely strong answer. If you are already running Clio Manage, adding Grow is hard to beat on workflow grounds whatever the quote says.

Where it fits less well is the part of intake that happens before any of that. Clio Grow is form, booking and pipeline software. It does not talk to the client. When someone submits a form with three vague answers, Grow records three vague answers. Somebody at the firm still has to call back, ask what actually happened, work out whether it is a matter you take, and chase the documents. Firms that buy intake software for this problem often discover they bought a place to record intake rather than something that performs it.

That gap is the part we work on. Consultations runs the discovery conversation itself: the AI asks your qualifying questions, follows up when an answer is thin, screens the inquiry against criteria you set, collects the documents, books the paid consultation and hands the lawyer a prepared brief. It is priced flat per firm at $49 to $299 a month, so the bill does not move when you hire. We do not do matters, billing, trust accounting or document management, and we are not a practice management platform. Most firms that use both keep Clio for everything after the engagement letter and put us in front of it.

If you are choosing rather than combining, the honest test is where the problem actually sits. If inquiries are captured fine and the mess is in matters, billing and trust, buy practice management and do not overthink the intake module. If the phone goes unanswered, leads wait two days for a callback, and half your consultations open with questions the firm should already have asked, the problem is upstream of anything a matter database fixes.