Clio and MyCase have been shortlisted against each other for a decade by the same buyer: a firm of one to fifty lawyers replacing spreadsheets, a shared drive, and a billing program. The old routing rule was ecosystem breadth against a cheaper seat.
That rule no longer survives contact with either vendor’s price list. MyCase now starts at $50 per user per month and Clio starts at $49. The cheaper seat is a rounding error. What actually separates them in 2026 is that MyCase publishes every tier it sells and Clio publishes only the floor.
What changed
Clio closed a $1B acquisition of vLex alongside a $500M Series G at a $5B valuation, and rebuilt its lineup around it. The EasyStart / Essentials / Advanced / Complete ladder is gone. The plans are now Starter, Core, Signature, and Elite, and the legal research capability arrived as a separate product, Clio Work, running on Clio Library — over 1 billion legal documents from 100+ jurisdictions, sourced from courts and publishers, with a citator called Cert that checks whether an authority is still good law.
MyCase changed owner branding rather than architecture. AffiniPay renamed itself 8am in August 2025, bringing LawPay, MyCase, CasePeer, Docketwise, and CPACharge under one name. The practice management product is now 8am MyCase, and its AI ships as 8am IQ: a Writing and Document Assistant on Pro, and a Case Assistant plus a Discovery Assistant with OCR on Advanced.
Where Clio wins
Research and drafting sit inside the matter. Clio Work reads your matter documents and the law together, and cites both. Every other practice management vendor at this price point asks you to leave the system to do legal research and paste the result back. That is the capability the vLex money bought, and nothing in MyCase answers it.
Accounting is included at every tier, starting at Starter. Bank transaction sync, accounts receivable, trust and operating reconciliation, and financial reports come with the subscription. MyCase charges $39 per user per month for the equivalent.
Client acquisition is bundled at the top. Elite includes Clio Grow, the intake and CRM product, rather than selling it as a line item.
The integration surface is wider. Clio has spent fifteen years accumulating connections into court filing, document management, and accounting; MyCase advertises 70+ integrations at Pro.
Where MyCase wins
You can price it without talking to anyone. All three tiers carry a number: Basic $50, Pro $100, Advanced $130 per user per month billed annually, or $60 / $120 / $150 monthly. You size a ten-seat budget in a minute rather than in a discovery call.
The AI has a known price. 8am IQ Writing and Document Assistant is included in Pro at $100. On the Clio side, AI starts at Core, and Core has no published price at all.
Discovery work has a published allowance. The Discovery Assistant processes 5,000 pages per user per month, with an optional $30 add-on adding 5,000 more pages for the whole firm. Metered AI usually hides behind a quote in this category.
Payments carry no platform fee. LawPay integration is $0 per month, with processing rates on top — and the payments company owns the practice management product, so trust accounting and reconciliation are built by one team.
Pricing reality
The published numbers are not comparing the same thing, and this is where most shortlists go wrong.
Clio publishes one price: $49 per user per month for Starter. Core, Signature, and Elite are all “get pricing” or “book a demo”. Clio’s own FAQ states that AI is included on Core and above — which means the single Clio tier you can price yourself is the one tier without AI in it.
So the honest matchup is not $49 against $50. It is Clio Core, unquoted, against MyCase Pro at $100 per user per month. A ten-seat firm knows that MyCase Pro costs $12,000 a year and MyCase Advanced costs $15,600. The same firm cannot learn what Clio Core costs without a sales conversation.
Add-ons move the totals more than the tier choice does. MyCase Advanced at ten seats with the accounting module runs $20,280 a year — accounting alone adds $4,680. Clio bundles that same accounting into a $5,880 Starter subscription at ten seats. Annual billing saves up to 16% on MyCase; Clio shows no monthly-versus-annual toggle at all.
The trap to avoid
Reading $49 against $50 and concluding the two platforms cost the same. They might, but nothing on Clio’s pricing page establishes it. If AI is part of why you are buying, Clio Starter is not a candidate and the comparison you actually need is against a number Clio will not print. Guard against it by requesting the Clio Core and Signature quotes in the first week of evaluation, before you have sunk time into a trial, and comparing those against MyCase Pro and Advanced rather than against the $49 headline.
The mirror trap on the MyCase side is treating the published price as the whole bill. Accounting is a separate $39 per user per month, and the Open API is restricted to Advanced. A firm that buys Pro at $100 to keep costs down, then discovers it needs API access to sync with anything the 70+ integration list does not cover, is buying the $130 tier anyway. Decide whether you need the API before you pick the tier, not after.
Verdict
Pick Clio when legal research and drafting are part of the job you are automating, not just matter tracking and billing; when you want accounting inside the subscription instead of as an add-on; or when the firm is heading toward fifty lawyers and will need the wider integration surface.
Pick MyCase when a predictable published price matters more than capability breadth; when the practice is intake-heavy consumer work — plaintiff, family, criminal defense, immigration — where lead conversion is the constraint; or when you already run LawPay and want billing, payments, and trust reconciliation from one vendor.
Pick neither when the practice is litigation-heavy enough that case workup is the real work — Filevine is built for that shape. And if you are an in-house legal team rather than a firm, both are the wrong category: these are firm-side products with time and trust accounting at the center, and the in-house equivalent is a matter management and intake tool instead.
Default pick when you cannot separate those conditions: MyCase Pro. You can start at a known $100 per user per month, with AI included, and find out what your firm actually uses before committing to anything larger. Move to Clio when the trial shows the gap is research and drafting rather than matter management — at that point the quote is worth requesting, because Clio Work is answering a question MyCase has not tried to answer.
Clio and MyCase have been shortlisted against each other for a decade by the same buyer: a firm of one to fifty lawyers replacing spreadsheets, a shared drive, and a billing program. The old routing rule was ecosystem breadth against a cheaper seat.
That rule no longer survives contact with either vendor’s price list. MyCase now starts at $50 per user per month and Clio starts at $49. The cheaper seat is a rounding error. What actually separates them in 2026 is that MyCase publishes every tier it sells and Clio publishes only the floor.
What changed
Clio closed a $1B acquisition of vLex alongside a $500M Series G at a $5B valuation, and rebuilt its lineup around it. The EasyStart / Essentials / Advanced / Complete ladder is gone. The plans are now Starter, Core, Signature, and Elite, and the legal research capability arrived as a separate product, Clio Work, running on Clio Library — over 1 billion legal documents from 100+ jurisdictions, sourced from courts and publishers, with a citator called Cert that checks whether an authority is still good law.
MyCase changed owner branding rather than architecture. AffiniPay renamed itself 8am in August 2025, bringing LawPay, MyCase, CasePeer, Docketwise, and CPACharge under one name. The practice management product is now 8am MyCase, and its AI ships as 8am IQ: a Writing and Document Assistant on Pro, and a Case Assistant plus a Discovery Assistant with OCR on Advanced.
Where Clio wins
Where MyCase wins
Pricing reality
The published numbers are not comparing the same thing, and this is where most shortlists go wrong.
Clio publishes one price: $49 per user per month for Starter. Core, Signature, and Elite are all “get pricing” or “book a demo”. Clio’s own FAQ states that AI is included on Core and above — which means the single Clio tier you can price yourself is the one tier without AI in it.
So the honest matchup is not $49 against $50. It is Clio Core, unquoted, against MyCase Pro at $100 per user per month. A ten-seat firm knows that MyCase Pro costs $12,000 a year and MyCase Advanced costs $15,600. The same firm cannot learn what Clio Core costs without a sales conversation.
Add-ons move the totals more than the tier choice does. MyCase Advanced at ten seats with the accounting module runs $20,280 a year — accounting alone adds $4,680. Clio bundles that same accounting into a $5,880 Starter subscription at ten seats. Annual billing saves up to 16% on MyCase; Clio shows no monthly-versus-annual toggle at all.
The trap to avoid
Reading $49 against $50 and concluding the two platforms cost the same. They might, but nothing on Clio’s pricing page establishes it. If AI is part of why you are buying, Clio Starter is not a candidate and the comparison you actually need is against a number Clio will not print. Guard against it by requesting the Clio Core and Signature quotes in the first week of evaluation, before you have sunk time into a trial, and comparing those against MyCase Pro and Advanced rather than against the $49 headline.
The mirror trap on the MyCase side is treating the published price as the whole bill. Accounting is a separate $39 per user per month, and the Open API is restricted to Advanced. A firm that buys Pro at $100 to keep costs down, then discovers it needs API access to sync with anything the 70+ integration list does not cover, is buying the $130 tier anyway. Decide whether you need the API before you pick the tier, not after.
Verdict
Default pick when you cannot separate those conditions: MyCase Pro. You can start at a known $100 per user per month, with AI included, and find out what your firm actually uses before committing to anything larger. Move to Clio when the trial shows the gap is research and drafting rather than matter management — at that point the quote is worth requesting, because Clio Work is answering a question MyCase has not tried to answer.