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Psychology Today alternative — or do you need both?
Prices and features as of August 2026. Check both vendors for current details.
Psychology Today is where most Canadian therapists start marketing, and that is a reasonable place to start. It has the traffic, the brand recognition, and a price low enough that a single retained client pays for a year of it. This page is for BC counsellors working out what to do next: keep paying for the listing, replace it, or run it alongside a profile that comes bundled with the tools you use to run the practice. The answer is genuinely not the same for every practice, and for a good number of them it is “both, for now”.
A fair summary of Psychology Today
Psychology Today runs the largest therapist directory in North America — on the order of 160,000 listed practitioners — and it has spent decades building the consumer brand that makes people trust it. Search for a therapist in a Canadian city from a phone and its directory pages are usually at or near the top of the results. That position is the product. You are not really buying a profile page; you are renting a place in a search result you could not reach on your own.
At $34.95 CAD per month with no contract, the arithmetic works for most practices. One client who stays for a handful of sessions covers the year. The listing also carries a link back to your own website, which has some value for your own search visibility beyond the referrals themselves.
It is worth saying plainly: as pure directory reach in Canada today, nothing else matches it — including Ravanika. A comparison page that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
Side by side
| Ravanika | Psychology Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price (CAD) | Profile included in every plan, including Free | $34.95, no contract |
| What you get for it | Profile plus the practice workspace — calendar, clients, payments, receipts | Directory listing and inquiry forwarding |
| Directory reach today | Early-stage directory, growing — smaller reach, honestly | ~160,000 therapists listed; top of search for city queries |
| After someone contacts you | The inquiry lands in your panel and is tracked: new → contacted → booked | Message lands in your inbox; nothing tracks what happens next |
| Attribution | Each inquiry’s outcome is recorded — received, contacted, booked, declined — with counts by date range | No way to tell which contacts became clients |
| Client reviews | None, by design — BC rules prohibit therapist testimonials | None — same reason |
| Languages | English, plus Persian/Farsi profiles and community support | English interface |
| Lock-in | None — cancel anytime | None — cancel anytime |
Where Psychology Today is ahead
- Consumer traffic at a scale no newer directory has
- Search dominance for “therapist [city]” queries across Canada
- National reach — every province, not one
- A backlink to your own website
- Proven conversion for established practices
Where Ravanika is ahead
- The profile is part of a workspace, not a second bill
- Inquiries are tracked, so none quietly dies in an inbox
- Outcomes are visible — received, contacted, booked — by date range
- Persian/Farsi profiles and multilingual support
- A free plan, so the profile costs nothing to start
The honest middle
Plenty of BC practices run both, and that is not indecision — it is the correct answer while both bills earn their keep.
The division of labour is straightforward. Psychology Today does what it is good at: putting you in front of someone searching from a city page you would not otherwise rank for. Ravanika is where the work lands — every inquiry, whether it arrived through a Psychology Today message, a Google search, your own website, or a friend of a former client, gets recorded and tracked until it is either booked or closed.
The question worth asking each year is not which platform you are loyal to. It is whether each line on your bank statement still returns more than it costs. Keep the Psychology Today listing while it brings you clients you can point to. When your own profile and local search presence bring enough on their own, stop paying for it. That decision is far easier to make once you have been tracking where inquiries actually come from — which is the part most practices are missing, not the reach.
How to tell whether a listing is earning its keep
The honest answer to “is it worth $34.95” is a number, not an opinion, and most practices do not have the number. Getting it does not require anything elaborate.
- Ask at intake where the person found you, and write the answer down. One question, asked once. Most people will tell you plainly, and it is the only data that actually settles the argument.
- Count over a year, not a month. A listing that brings three clients in twelve months has paid for itself many times over, while the same listing looks like a failure in any particular quiet month.
- Compare against the annual cost, not the monthly one. $34.95 a month is $419.40 a year as of August 2026. Set against one client who books ten sessions, the listing is comfortably ahead; set against no bookings at all, it is a subscription you forgot to cancel.
- Check what your own website and profile brought in over the same period. If they are generating inquiries independently, the case for paying separately for reach weakens each year — and that is the moment to reconsider, not before.
Who should stick with Psychology Today alone
You are established, effectively full from Psychology Today referrals, and your practice management is already solved by tools you like. Adding a second profile solves a problem you do not have.
You need national reach outside BC today. Ravanika’s directory is BC-focused and early-stage; Psychology Today lists across the country now.
Common questions
Is Psychology Today worth $34.95 a month?
For most practices with room in their caseload, yes — the maths is forgiving. One client who stays for a few sessions covers a year of listing fees, so it does not need to work often to pay for itself. The harder question is whether it is actually delivering that client, because a listing that quietly stops converting costs the same as one that works. Most practices cannot answer it, because nothing between the message arriving and the client booking is being recorded anywhere.
Can I use both?
Yes, and many practices should. The workflow is simple: keep the Psychology Today listing for reach, and when a message arrives, record it in Ravanika as an inquiry so it joins everything else you are tracking. From there it moves through the same states as any other lead — contacted, then booked or declined — and at the end of the month you can see how many arrived, how many you answered, and how many became clients.
Why does neither platform show client reviews?
Because BC professional rules prohibit therapist testimonials. Soliciting or using a review from a current or former client is not permitted, which is why serious professional directories have no star ratings while general business directories do. Neither Psychology Today nor Ravanika shows them, and that is a feature rather than an omission.
Read the advertising rules guideDoes Ravanika forward inquiries to my email too?
Not today. An inquiry from your public profile appears in your Ravanika panel — on the dashboard as a New Inquiries card, and in full on the Inquiries page with the person’s contact details and what they asked for. There is no email or SMS notification yet. If you are used to a message landing in your inbox, that is a real difference in habit: you check the panel rather than being pinged. Notification is an obvious next step, but it is not built, and this page is not going to imply otherwise.
Can clients find me on Google through Ravanika?
Your public profile is a real indexable page with its own address, structured data, and a place in the sitemap, and the city and language pages link to it. What it does not have is the domain authority Psychology Today has accumulated over decades. In practice your Ravanika profile will rank for your own name and for narrow local phrases well before it competes for a broad city query. That is an honest description of an early-stage directory rather than a promise.
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