Trial Commander vs Clio

Two real products. Here is how to tell which one is yours.

The largest independent legal practice management vendor, with the widest third-party app ecosystem in the category and a product line spanning practice management, payments and client intake.

This page is written by Trial Commander, so read it as what it is. Every claim we make about our own product below is one you can hold us to. We have not reproduced Clio's prices or feature list — go to their pricing page and read the current one.

What Trial Commander does

Claims about our product, stated so they can be checked against the trial.

Deadlines

Computed from statute and court rule for the matter's jurisdiction, not entered from a template. Florida ch. 627 first-party property clocks and ch. 440 workers' compensation ladders; the Federal Rules chain counted under Rule 6(a) against the calendar of whichever of the 94 US district courts the matter is in. Local rules are not computed anywhere in the product, and a judge's scheduling order supersedes almost every civil default — the product says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

Time capture

Entries are drafted from calls, emails, texts and calendar, then held for attorney review. Nothing is billed automatically — a draft an attorney never approves never reaches an invoice.

AI, and who pays for it

Starter runs on the firm's own Anthropic API key, so AI bills to the firm's own account under its own spend controls and we take no margin on it. Managed allowances of $10, $20 and $40 per user per month are available on higher plans. From Bridge up, individual members can connect personal Claude subscriptions over MCP.

Trust accounting

IOTA trust accounting with three-way reconciliation, included from the Bridge plan up at $109 per user per month. Starter and Practice track time and billing but not trust transactions — which is stated plainly rather than discovered at reconciliation time.

Pricing transparency

Every price is on the pricing page: $49, $69, $109 and $149 per user per month, with the practice-area add-ons named. No quote required, and a 30-day trial of the full product with no credit card.

Jurisdictions

The practice system works nationwide. Deep statutory content is live for Florida, Texas and the District of Columbia. California, New York and Illinois are in review and are NOT live — if you practise primarily in those states today, that is a reason to wait or to choose something else.

What we do not have

No SAML single sign-on. No HIPAA Business Associate Agreement on any plan. No Google Workspace integration. No SMS messaging yet. If any of those is a requirement rather than a preference, we are the wrong choice today.

What to ask Clio

Questions rather than claims, because we are not the right source for what another vendor's product does today. Ask us the same ones.

→Which plan includes trust accounting with three-way reconciliation, and what does it cost per user?
→Are court deadlines computed from statute and rule for my jurisdiction, or entered from a template I maintain?
→What does the AI cost per user, and can I use an AI subscription I already pay for instead?
→What is the total per-user price once the features I actually need are switched on?

What we can say about Clio, and where it came from

Each line names the page it was read from and the date it was read. Vendors change their products; if one of these is out of date, it is out of date from that day.

Clio's pricing page could not be read by an automated request on this date (HTTP 403), so no pricing figure is reproduced here. Check their page directly.

Source: https://www.clio.com/pricing/ — read 2026-09-15

Where Clio is the better answer

A firm that needs a specific third-party integration is likelier to find it built for Clio than for anyone else in the category, ours included. If your workflow depends on an app that only integrates with Clio, that is a real and sufficient reason to choose Clio.

Start your 30-day free trial See our pricing All comparisons