The short answer
Should you choose Mallowa or CentralReach?
They do different jobs. If you run an ABA or multidisciplinary practice, CentralReach is purpose-built software for operating it — and a leading choice. If you're a family or care manager coordinating one person's care across many providers, that's the job Mallowa was built for. Many teams would honestly use both: the practice on CentralReach, the family's whole circle on Mallowa.
What CentralReach is best at
Running a practice
CentralReach describes itself as "the #1 AI-powered Autism and IDD Care software platform," and by its own published figures serves 4,000 ABA and multidisciplinary practices and over 200,000 professionals. Its platform unifies practice management — intake, AI-assisted scheduling, insurance claims, payroll, authorization tracking — with clinical data collection, mobile session notes, and an AI suite for scheduling, note drafting, note auditing, and claim checking. It publishes an audited security posture (SOC 2 and annual third-party HIPAA assessments), and offers CR Essentials for small practices.
If you operate a practice and need those capabilities, that's exactly the job it's built for — Mallowa does not compete for it.
What Mallowa is best at
The family-owned layer across every provider
Mallowa is the record the family owns: notes, goals, medications, appointments, crisis plans, and files on one timeline, with per-note visibility controls and per-member permissions — shared with every provider in the person's life, not tied to any one practice's software. Professionals work in the same record as the family, providers can capture reimbursable care-coordination time as they work (CMS care-management programs like CCM and BHI — a different reimbursement lane from the ABA CPT units practice systems process), and the record connects to medical charts through FHIR. It stays with the family through every provider change.
Mallowa is not an ABA practice-management system, not an EHR, and not a claims/RCM platform — deliberately.
The real difference
One practice's instance vs. the family's own record
CentralReach's caregiver tools — CR CareCompanion and its client portal — are genuinely useful for caregiver training and communicating with that practice. They live inside the practice's CentralReach instance: the practice's subscription, the practice's data boundary. Mallowa inverts the ownership — the family holds the record, invites every provider into it, and keeps it when providers change. Neither shape is wrong; they solve different problems, and they compose.
Common questions
Choosing between them
Is Mallowa a replacement for CentralReach?
No. CentralReach is practice-management and clinical software an ABA or multidisciplinary practice runs its operations on. Mallowa is a family-owned care-coordination platform that spans every provider in a person's life. A practice that needs scheduling, clinical data collection, insurance claims, and payroll needs a system like CentralReach — Mallowa doesn't do that job.
Can a family use Mallowa if their provider uses CentralReach?
Yes — that's the intended shape. The practice runs its operations in CentralReach while the family's whole team — that practice, plus schools, physicians, other therapists, and relatives — coordinates in the family's own Mallowa workspace. The record belongs to the family and survives provider changes.
Doesn't CentralReach already have a family portal?
It has caregiver tools — CR CareCompanion and a client portal — and they're genuinely useful for caregiver training and communicating with that practice. The structural difference is scope: those tools live inside one practice's CentralReach instance. Mallowa is a record the family owns across every provider, whether or not any of them use CentralReach.
What does each one cost?
Mallowa publishes pricing: Roots is free forever for families, Roots+ is $9/month, Growth is $19/month, and provider plans are listed on the pricing page. CentralReach doesn't publish pricing — its plans are quoted per organization with per-seat terms — so we can't make a cost comparison, and you should request a quote from them directly.
Last reviewed July 17, 2026. CentralReach details are drawn from centralreach.com's own published pages as of that date; CentralReach figures are their own reported numbers.