ModusBill vs Clio
Clio is the largest practice management platform for law firms: matters, calendaring, documents, client intake, a CRM and an integration marketplace, with billing and trust accounting as one part of that. ModusBill is only the billing and trust part, built as a complete product on its own. The right choice depends on whether the rest of the suite is something your firm uses or something it pays for.
Choose Clio if
- You want one system for the whole practice: calendar, documents, tasks, intake and billing together.
- You rely on its integrations with document, email, accounting and court-filing tools.
- Your firm is large enough that a broad platform's administration is worth its cost.
Choose ModusBill if
- Billing, trust accounting and getting paid are what you need done well, and you manage matters and documents elsewhere or simply.
- You bill clients in Spanish as well as English and want the invoice, the email and the payment page in the client's language.
- You want trust safeguards enforced by the system — a ledger that cannot go negative, an audit trail that cannot be edited — rather than by discipline.
- You want one price per user with nothing held back for a higher tier.
| Capability | ModusBill | Clio |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Legal billing and IOLTA trust accounting, as the whole product. | Full practice management: matters, calendar, documents, intake, CRM, integrations, with billing as one module. |
| Pricing model | One per-user price. Every feature, including trust accounting and LEDES, in every tier. | Several plan levels; some capabilities depend on the plan. Check Clio's current plan details. |
| Trust ledger safeguards | A client ledger is refused any disbursement that would take it below zero, at the moment it is recorded. Entries are append-only; corrections are reversing entries. | Trust accounting is included. Ask how overdrafts are prevented and how corrections are recorded. |
| Three-way reconciliation | Built in, with a stored printable record per month and pending fee transfers shown as reconciling items. | Offered. Confirm whether the completed record is stored and printable. |
| LEDES 1998B export | Included in every tier, validated line by line before the file is produced. | Supported; check plan level. |
| Bilingual client invoicing | Each client is invoiced in English or Spanish; the invoice email and payment page follow the client's language. | Not advertised as a standard feature as far as we know. Confirm with the vendor. |
| Online payments | Stripe or PlaceToPay per firm; payments post back to the invoice. | Clio Payments and integrations. |
| Practice management | Not included. | Extensive. |
| Importing your data | Imports Clio CSV exports: contacts, matters, activities, bills and payments, checked before anything is written. | Exports CSV. |
The Clio column describes what Clio publicly advertises at the time of writing and is worded to stay true across plan changes. Confirm specifics with Clio; we would rather you check than take our word for a competitor's product.
Moving from Clio to ModusBill
Export Contacts, Matters, Activities, Bills and Payments from Clio as CSV. In ModusBill, start an import, choose the Clio preset, and upload the files. The Activities export holds both time and expenses; ModusBill reads it twice and picks the right rows for each. It proposes the column mapping, you confirm it, match Clio's user names to ModusBill users, choose the trust account for opening balances, and review a validation report that lists every row and every problem before a single record is written. Invoice numbers, dates and amounts come across as they were; open balances land in the A/R aging from day one. If something is wrong, the import can be undone.
See it against your own matters
Thirty minutes with someone who knows professional billing — not a slide deck. Bring a real invoice and we will show you how it comes out of ModusBill. Then take 30 days with it, free.