Comparison
All comparisonsPertavo
vs Clio.
Written by us, so read it that way. What we can do is be accurate about our own product and generous about theirs, and leave you the arithmetic.
The short answer
If your firm runs its trust ledger, its billing and its court dates inside one system, buy Clio. If those live elsewhere and what you actually open every day is the matter, its documents and the signature at the end, the per-seat bill is paying for a suite you are not using.
01Reasons to buy Clio
Theirs first,
and not hedged.
If none of these matter to your firm, the rest of the page is worth reading. If one of them does, it probably settles it.
It does the whole firm, not half of it
Trust accounting, court-rules calendaring, reporting and the client-facing work, in one system with one login. Pertavo now bills and holds client money against a matter, so that part of the overlap has closed — but trust accounting with three-way reconciliation, and a calendar that computes dates from a court’s rules, are theirs and not ours.
The largest ecosystem in legal software
Integrations, consultants who already know it, migration help, training, a conference. For a firm that wants to hire somebody who has used the software before, that depth is worth money.
It is not going anywhere
They are the market leader and have been for years. We launched this year and are a small company, and you should weigh that honestly — it is the one thing on this page that is not in our favour.
02The price model
Per seat,
or per firm.
We are not printing Clio prices on this page. Their pricing page refuses automated requests, the tier names and numbers differ by region, and several tiers are quote-led — so anything we published would be a number we could not stand behind, and a wrong price about a named competitor is worse than no price. Open their pricing page, take the per-seat figure for the tier you are on, and do the multiplication below.
The arithmetic, in two lines. Take their per-seat price for the tier you are on and multiply by everyone who needs an account — the attorneys, the paralegal, the bookkeeper, the part-time assistant. Then put $59 a month beside it, which is our Professional plan at any headcount, and subtract whatever you would still pay for the parts we do not do.
03What Pertavo does not do
The four that
decide most of this.
Every negative on this page is about us. We have not written a word about what Clio cannot do, because we are not in a position to know.
No trust accounting
Money a client paid up front is held against the matter and spent down by an invoice — but no segregated accounts, no three-way reconciliation, no bar reporting.
No way to pay you inside it
An invoice goes out from Pertavo. It is settled however you already take money, and somebody at the firm records that it arrived.
No docketing
Dates are typed by somebody. Nothing computes a limitation period from a rulebook, and nothing sends a reminder.
Nothing syncs but the diary
Your dates go out as a calendar you subscribe to. Nothing else connects — no email, no accounts package, no API — and nothing reads back in.
04Where Pertavo is the better buy
Four reasons,
if the gaps did not stop you.
Flat per firm, not per user
Add an associate, a paralegal, a bookkeeper or a seasonal assistant and the number does not move. That is the whole commercial difference, and it compounds with every person you hire.
A conflict check that interrupts
Opening a matter searches the firm and refuses to create it until somebody has read what it found and ticked to say so. Not a report you run afterwards.
Ethical walls enforced at the database
Switch them on and an attorney reaches only the matters they are staffed on. The request is refused before it reaches the data, rather than hidden on the screen.
A short enough product to learn in an afternoon
Narrow is the trade we made. There is less of it, so there is less to set up, less to train somebody on, and less that goes unused.
05Three questions
The ones that
come up on the call.
- Can Pertavo replace Clio entirely?
- For some firms, no — and we would rather say so here than on a call. Billing moved across in October 2026: invoices are drafted from the hours and expenses on a matter, and money a client paid up front is held against it. What has not moved is trust accounting with three-way reconciliation, and docketing against court rules. If you rely on either, keep something for them.
- Can you migrate our matters across?
- For the first customers we do it by hand, with you, rather than through an importer. That is slower and it is also how we find out what your filing actually looks like. Your documents and matter list come across; time entries and anything billing-related do not, because we have nowhere to put them.
- Why should we believe a comparison written by you?
- Do not believe it — check it. Every claim about Pertavo on this page is something you can make the product do on a call, and we have listed what it cannot do beside what it can. Nothing here claims anything about what Clio does not do, because we are not in a position to know.
The other comparisons
Clio is a trademark of its owner. Pertavo is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by them. Everything said about their product here comes from their own public pages, and they are free to change it — so check before you decide.
Get started
Set it up before the
next return lands.
Thirty days, every feature, no card. Or tell us about your firm and we’ll walk you through the whole loop — upload to signed PDF — on your own files first.