Gensolve vs Cliniko: The Truth for New Zealand Allied Health in 2026

If you run an allied health clinic in New Zealand, there is a very good chance you are on Gensolve. It is the quiet default. It has been the sensible, safe, everyone else is on it choice for years, and its ACC billing is genuinely deep. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is the story that has grown up around it, the one that says a move to anything else means giving up ACC, giving up compliance, and giving up your peace of mind.

That story is out of date. Badly out of date. And because nobody has really sat down to correct it, thousands of practices are staying put on a desktop bound system for reasons that stopped being true years ago.

So let us do the thing nobody selling you software will do. Let us lay out what each platform genuinely does and does not do in 2026, put the real numbers side by side, and be honest about who we are and why we are writing this. Fair warning up front: we have skin in the game, and we will tell you exactly what it is.

The ACC myth

Let us kill the thing that keeps everyone frozen.

The single reason most New Zealand clinics believe they cannot leave Gensolve is ACC. The fear is simple and reasonable: ACC billing is the lifeblood of an allied health practice, Gensolve does it natively and deeply, and moving to a system that “cannot do ACC” would be professional suicide.

Here is the correction, plainly.

So the honest framing is not “can Cliniko do ACC” but how it does ACC. Gensolve builds it into the core. Cliniko does it through a dedicated, ACC approved layer that sits neatly alongside. One is integrated, one is a bolt on. That is a real difference, and it is worth weighing. But it is a world away from “cannot”, which is the word doing all the damage online.

Worth knowing too: ACC itself has moved. The old eBusiness Gateway is being retired in favour of ProviderHub, ACC’s new online service, from 02/04/2026. Every clinic in the country has to adjust to that regardless of what software they run. So the ground is already shifting under Gensolve loyalists and newcomers alike. If you were ever going to reassess, a year when ACC is rebuilding its own plumbing is not the worst time to do it.

The question was never whether you can bill ACC from Cliniko. It was whether anyone would tell you the truth about it.

Cloud versus desktop

This is the part that actually changes your business.

Strip away the feature lists and there is one architectural fact that matters more than all the rest, especially if you are the kind of clinic owner who has ever thought about building a leaner, better supported practice.

Cliniko is cloud native. It lives in a browser. Any device, anywhere, any time, with nothing to install and no server humming in a back room. Gensolve, for all that it is marketed as cloud, is a hosted client server product. In practice that means a Windows desktop client, a locally cached copy of your data, and Mac users running Parallels just to open the thing. It is hosted, yes. It is not the same as native cloud, and the difference is not academic.

Why does this matter so much? Because the moment your practice management system lives cleanly in a browser, the whole geography of who can help you run your clinic changes.

We will be straight about our bias here rather than pretend we do not have one. We believe most Kiwi allied health clinics are drowning their clinicians in administration that a superb Filipino team could do better, more consistently, and at a fraction of the cost and stress. And we think the tooling has been the thing holding that back. Cloud native software removes the wall. That is not a small thing. For a lot of practices it is the difference between an owner who works in the business every hour and one who finally gets to work on it.

The numbers, side by side

Per user versus per practitioner. It is a bigger deal than it sounds.

Here is where the two philosophies show up in your bank account. Gensolve charges per practitioner, which sounds tidy until you realise how it interacts with an admin heavy model. Cliniko charges a flat fee per band of practitioners and then lets you add as many administrative and reception users as you like at no extra cost. Read that twice, because it is the whole argument for an outsourced admin model in one pricing line.

Cliniko — flat fee per practitioner band, unlimited admin and reception users included, every feature on every tier.

SMS at 10 cents USD each. Data migration free. Prices unchanged since 2011, not even for inflation. Roughly 75 to 660 NZD per month depending on band and the exchange rate on the day.

To be fair to Gensolve, it does not charge for admin staff either, and it bundles accounting that you would pay for separately alongside Cliniko. That bundling is a real advantage for some practices and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the transparency gap is telling. One platform publishes every price and has not raised it since 2011. The other sends you to a salesperson. When you are trying to plan a business, that difference in candour is worth something on its own.

Feature for feature

Where each one genuinely wins.

No spin. Both are good products. They are good at different things, and a grown up decision means being honest about both columns.

Read that table honestly and a pattern falls out. If your practice is complex, multidisciplinary, billing heavy and you value one deeply integrated system with bundled accounting and rich reporting, Gensolve earns its place and we would not talk you out of it. If you are a physio, podiatry or osteo clinic that wants to be light on its feet, easy to staff, reachable from anywhere and ready to work with a remote admin team, Cliniko is built for the life you are trying to build.

If that second clinic sounds like yours, ourCliniko virtual assistant service page sets out what a trained team member covers inside Cliniko day to day.

What about privacy

The offshore question, answered properly.

Whenever offshore admin comes up, someone reasonably asks about patient privacy. Good. They should. So here is the grounded version rather than the scary version.

New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020 and the Health Information Privacy Code 2020 do allow patient information to be handled by an offshore team. The mechanism is not a loophole, it is the intended pathway: you bind your offshore provider by contract to safeguards comparable to New Zealand law, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner even publishes model clauses, drafted by Chapman Tripp, to do exactly that. Add patient transparency about how their information is handled and you are on solid, well trodden ground.

Two things worth sitting with. First, both platforms already store your data offshore, so offshore is not the dividing line anyone imagines it to be. Second, a cloud native system makes compliance easier to actually evidence, because access is scoped, logged and revocable at the click of a button rather than tangled up in who has a desktop client installed on which machine. This is a place where being on Cliniko genuinely helps you sleep at night, not the reverse.

The migration nobody else offers

Here is our skin in the game, stated plainly.

Getting off Gensolve has always had one ugly catch. Cliniko’s free transfer service moves your clients, appointments, clinical notes and files, which is generous and genuinely useful. What it cannot move is your financial history. Invoices, payments, statements, none of it imports. For a practice with years of ACC billing behind it, that gap has been enough to kill the idea before it starts.

So we built the bridge ourselves.

That is the whole truth of why this article exists. We are not neutral. We are a Cliniko native outsourcing provider, and we want to work with Kiwi allied health clinics who are ready to change how their practice runs. The migration is the key we cut so those clinics could walk through the door. If you are not looking to offshore, that is completely fine, and there are plenty of people who will move your data for a fee. This particular tool is for the practices coming with us.

Frequently asked questions

You do not have to stay on Gensolve. That is the sentence the outdated internet will not say out loud. The cloud based options are real, the ACC story is solved, the privacy path is clear, and the migration is built. The only thing left is deciding your clinic deserves the better version.