Best Counseling Apps: Free and Paid Tools for your Practice

As a therapist, you’re matched with patients in your state after they undergo an initial assessment, then counsel clients via secure messaging and live video sessions.

Subscription-based with no contracts, TalkSpace offers three pricing tiers:

• Unlimited Messaging Therapy Plus: Text, video & audio messaging. Counselors respond to messages daily, five days/week.
• Unlimited Messaging Therapy Premium: Text, video & audio messaging + 1 Live Session/month. Counselors respond to messages daily, five days/week
• LiveTalk Therapy Ultimate: Text, video & audio messaging + 4 Live Sessions/month. Counselors respond to messages daily, five days/week.

Couples’ therapy and additional video sessions are also offered for a fee, and Talkspace is available outside the US.

Clients only need to:

• Answer a few questions about themselves and their challenges
• Create a private username and password, and enter payment information. Plans start at a set fee per week, with financial aid options.
• Be matched with a qualified, licensed professional counselor on a needs-basis. Unsatisfied clients can switch at any time.

Counseling clients as a practitioner involves delivering treatment via text, phone, or video. Requirements to join include:

• A State Board Counseling License (e.g. LCSW, LMFT, LPC, PsyD, etc.)
• US resident status
• Experience counseling teens, adults, and/or couples
• Reliable internet connectivity

Unlike TalkSpace and BetterHelp, MDLive allows clients to communicate with medical, mental health, and dermatology providers.

Counseling services are only available in the United States.

Rather, it can be used by patients as part of your treatment plans, as a self-service approach to mental healthcare.

MoodKit is available in the App Store, but not Google Play. It utilizes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques to help patients cope with negative thinking patterns.

This app has a journal, thought checker, activities to try, and a mood tracker. It is reasonably affordable for clients.

This coaching and mental health app includes a host of features that blended therapists and e-counselors can use to develop custom interventions, as well as fully bespoke treatment plans that cater to a client’s specific goals.

Using the app’s Activity Builder, practitioners can design interactive content such as homework, assessments, quizzes, and meditations to share with those they help. These are then delivered privately and securely through the client’s Android or Apple mobile app so they can complete them from anywhere in the world. Quenza also includes useful Pathway builders for creating full counseling courses or programs, and the app is entirely HIPAA-compliant.

Quenza can be trialed for $1 with the software’s 30-day plan.

This makes Edggi an ideal way for career counselors to grow their client base, deliver more sessions remotely, and expand their existing treatment plans.

Edggi is a free career and mentoring app that connects career counseling clients with experienced professionals or business coaches in a variety of fields and industries. Participants can chat, voice, or video call each other.

Designed for students, parents, and all kinds of professionals, certified career counselors can register with this app to answer client questions via live chat, video sessions, or audio calls.

Users simply log in and schedule a live video session with career counselors, and they can also use CareerGuide for psychometric assessments.

To sign up, counselor applicants must complete CareerGuide’s Certification Course for Guiding Students.

Some coaches use tools like Coach Accountable to assist clients in achieving their goals.

To use this application, coaches, career counselors must add the client by invitation. Once inside, users can access journals, complete assignments and actions, and track goals using a visually-appealing metrics tool.

They also can schedule appointments with their coach.

The Shine Self-Care App, designed by Naomi Hirabayashi and Marah Lidey in collaboration with psychologist Anna Rowley, helps users do this. Key areas addressed by the app are learning how to manage stress better, and calm oneself.

Shine offers free and premium tiers; both include motivational messages and research-backed strategies for stress-reduction, increasing confidence, and becoming more productive. Shine Talks are meditations to help users learn to speak more compassionately to themselves.

The free version has a few of these each week, but the premium version has 500+, plus challenges designed to help people in specific areas like confidence and burnout. There are also gratitude tracking, journaling, and emotion check-in features, though availability depends on the client’s version.

Clients can explore:

• Love Maps
• Open-ended Questions
• Rituals of Connection
• Expressing needs
• Expressing empathy
• Great listening, and more.

Based on “40 years of research with more than 3000 couples” who have participated in The Art and Science of Love weekend workshop, Gottman Card Decks is centered on the idea that that four conditions can increase marital satisfaction and decrease problems with friendships and destructive conflict:

1. Friendship enhancement alone,
2. Conflict management alone,
3. Combined friendship enhancement + conflict management; or,
4. Bibliotherapy.

This app can be a valuable addition to existing counseling plans, encouraging clients to continue making progress between sessions.

• Emotional connection is the foundation of a healthy, lifelong marriage
• Your ‘inner world’ is the foundation of healthy marriage communication
• Selfless, “we-inspired” actions protect and enhance your marriage health

All of the content is based on marriage research conducted by Dr. John Gottman, Dr. Sue Johnson, Dr. Lesley Verhofstadt, Dr. Ted L. Huston, Dr. Renate M. Houts, Dr. Robert Levenson, Dr. Clifford Notarius, Dr. Howard Markman, Dr. Thomas Bradbury, Dr. Frank Fincham, and others (Lasting, n.d.). To begin using the app, complete a relationship quiz.

The Foundations sessions are free, but anything beyond that is for a fixed fee per month after a 7-day free trial.

For clients, each partner shares the same account and communicates together or independently with their counselor. Accessible, convenient, and discreet, the app is designed to make relationship goal achievement easier.

All information is confidential, as users can use a nickname that is seen by the therapist and partner. Emergency contact information is requested and made available to the counselor if a need arises.

Counseling costs through Regain varies per week and are billed monthly.

Partners do not necessarily receive the same questions in their daily quizzes. This keeps things exciting and fresh.

Each partner answers five questions and guesses their partner’s response. You also receive daily tips and personalized challenges. The app is designed to spark conversation through gamification. Users can even comment on each other’s responses using GIFs.

Developed by leading researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical school, the games help children gain self-regulation skills.

As children engage with the games, the wristband monitors their heart rate. If their heart rate exceeds a predetermined level, the game stops, allowing the child or teen to practice specific calming techniques. Neuromotion Labs tested their system in “four trials, including two double-blind, randomized controlled trials.” [2] Their research has shown the following results:

• 40% less oppositional behaviors
• 19% lower parent stress
• 62% reduced child outbursts

Parents can use Mightier to track and set goals for their child and interact with a larger parent community. Each parent also receives clinical support through coaching.

The gaming library includes 25+ fun but educational games, such as racing, problem-solving, pattern recognition, and adventure games. Mightier is designed and tested for children aged 6-14 but can be used by the entire family. The games address emotional control challenges faced by individuals with:

• ADHD
• ODD
• Autism
• Anxiety
• Anger
• Tantrums & Meltdowns

Neuromotion Labs offers a 30-day, risk-free trial. Mightier is available internationally.

It is a digital panic button to get the person immediate help when they need it most, but might otherwise not reach out. It is based on the premise that peer support, according to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA):[3]

• Yields improvement in psychiatric symptoms and decreased hospitalization
• Leads to more extensive social support networks
• Enhance self-esteem and social functioning, and
• Leads to decreased lengths of hospital stays, plus lower services costs overall.

To set things up, clients add up to five trusted contacts. These contacts choose to accept or decline. On accepting, all a user needs to do is tap the red notOK button. From there the following message is sent:

“Hey, I’m notOK! Please call, text, or come find me.”

Features include a simple message that is immediately sent to the person’s trusted contacts, along with an accurate GPS location. Trusted contacts do not need to download the app to assist the person.

While intended for teens, it can be used by any client that needs added support.

The app includes a diary, habit tracker, catastrophe scale, a grounding game, and three easy-to-learn breathing techniques.

It can be used as a therapeutic complement to help patients learn simple tools. These are useful in managing twelve of the most common negative thinking patterns.

Included are quick relief activities, a thought journal, coping cards, belief experiments, facing fears and expanding your comfort zone activities, a chill zone to listen to guided meditations, a check-in, tips for creating healthy habits, and goal-setting tools.

Clients can use it to track their thoughts, activities, develop a safety plan, take the PHQ-9 depression questionnaire, and discover useful YouTube videos.

All of the suggested activities are based on Behavioral Activation Therapy, making MoodTools a good complement to Applied Behavior Analysis therapies.

Recommended: How ABA Software Can Improve Your Practice