The Best Therapy Tools Online for Remote and In-Person Sessions

Search for the best therapy resources and you mostly get libraries of PDFs. PDFs are useful, and we have a lot of them. They are also where most therapy sites stop. A tool earns the word best in the session you actually run: the Tuesday telehealth call with a fourteen-year-old whose video keeps freezing, or the Thursday office hour with a client who has left every handout you ever gave him on the passenger seat of his car.

So these are the tests we built against. A tool has to work over a video call and across a table without changing anything. It has to take no prep. The client should never need an account, an app, or a password. Homework should be impossible to misplace. Nothing clinical about a client should sit on our servers. And the whole kit should cost less than the pile of apps and printouts it replaces. The rest of this piece walks through how Therapy Resource meets each test, where it deliberately stops, and how to run it on an ordinary day.

Here is the shelf in one paragraph. There are 374 therapy worksheets, free to read and print, grouped into topic collections. There are 13 scored assessments, free, including the PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5, and EPDS. There are 14 free guided exercises: panic attack first aid, TIPP skills, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, progressive muscle relaxation, worry time, a coping skills picker, leaves on a stream, and more. The Pro plan adds the session tools (an interactive thought record, mood tracker, safety plan builder, and breathing timer), client links, nine practice forms with e-signatures, and six live two-player games for kids and teens.

The real value of one shelf is the hand-offs. The worksheet on panic links to the panic walkthrough. The walkthrough links to the breathing timer. The breathing timer can sit on the client's own page between sessions. Every piece knows about the others, so you never rebuild the same idea in three different apps.

Remote therapy loses the table. There is no sheet of paper between you, nothing to point at, nothing for a restless kid to hold. The tools here were designed to put that table back, and there are two ways to do it.

The first is screen share. Open any tool, press Full screen, and it fills the display with nothing else in view, no site menus and no tabs. The breathing circle, the muscle relaxation player, and the leaves on a stream all read clearly at video resolution. If your platform supports remote control, hand the client the mouse and let them drive; the telehealth screen-share guide covers the settings for the common platforms.

The second is often better. Send the client their link and have them open the tool on their own phone while you keep your eyes on their face. They tap through the grounding prompts or rate their urge, you coach, and nobody fights a laggy screen share. A check-in works the same way: the client fills in the GAD-7 on their phone, it scores on their screen, and they read you the number. For kids, the live games run on the same principle. You host, the child joins from a link, and turns sync instantly, so a round of Connect Four fits into the first five minutes of a session.

Nothing about this is remote-only. In the office, turn a laptop or tablet toward the client and run the same tool on it. Put the breathing timer on the wall monitor during a relaxation segment. Print a worksheet with your letterhead and work it together with a pen.

The in-person move we like best: build the safety plan on the client's own phone before they leave. You sit together, open their link, and fill in warning signs, coping steps, and the people they can call. The plan saves on their phone, the phone numbers become buttons they can tap, and the crisis lines sit at the top. It walks out of the office in their pocket, which is where it needs to be when things get hard.

Because it is the same set of tools in both settings, there is no second system to learn when a client switches between office visits and video. A hybrid caseload runs on one kit.

Most of the effort in a session goes into structure: deciding what to do, finding the materials, explaining the exercise, and making sure it continues at home. The tools carry that structure for you. A walkthrough like the STOP skill or TIPP already contains the teaching script, the practice, and the reflection at the end. Your job shrinks to choosing the right one and staying present while the client does it.

Take a fifty-minute session with a client who has panic attacks. Open with the GAD-7 as a check-in. Spend the middle on the panic first aid walkthrough: name the attack, slow the breath with the paced circle, ground in the room, ride the wave, then rate the intensity again and compare. Close by adding the walkthrough and the breathing timer to the client's link, so the exact steps you just rehearsed are on their phone the next time panic hits at 2 a.m. That session works the same over video or across a table, and it needed no preparation beyond knowing which tool fits the client.

Homework is where this pays off most. Clients who actually do between-session assignments tend to improve more, and the quality of the homework matters along with the quantity (Kazantzis et al., 2016). A task that opens on the client's phone with one tap gets done far more often than a photocopy that has to survive a week in a backpack.

Every worksheet, guided tool, and check-in page has an Add to client link button. Assigning homework takes a couple of taps and happens right where you already are. You create a client's link once, at intake, and reuse it for the whole course of treatment. New assignments simply show up on the page they already bookmarked. There is nothing to email, nothing to print, and no instructions to write.

The paperwork side is covered too. Intake, informed consent, telehealth consent, the financial agreement, the good faith estimate, releases, treatment plans, closure letters, and SOAP, DAP, and BIRP progress notes are all templates on your letterhead, and consents and agreements can go out for e-signature. The paperwork guide walks through the full stack.

Small savings add up across a full caseload. Five minutes of prep saved per session, across twenty-five sessions a week, is two hours back every week. That is the hunt for the right handout, the copy machine, the email with the attachment, and the rewrite of instructions you have written a hundred times. You get those minutes back to spend on the clients or on the rest of your life.

The free tier is real. All 374 worksheets, all 13 assessments, and all 14 guided exercises cost nothing and need no account. Plenty of clinicians run on the free side for months.

Pro is $15 a month, or $120 a year, with a seven-day free trial. One subscription covers the session tools, fillable and branded worksheets, client links for up to 50 clients at a time, the practice forms with e-signatures, and the games. There are no per-client fees and no charge for the client, ever. Compare that with what the same capabilities usually take: a homework app, a forms and e-signature service, a stack of printer paper and toner, and a games site for the kids. Most practices are paying for several of those separately.

A client link opens with your practice name and logo at the top. Our name stays in one small footer line, and Pro lets you switch even that off. The tools look finished: calm type, large buttons, and a layout that works one-handed on a phone. Printed worksheets and forms carry your letterhead. To the client, it all reads as your practice being prepared for them.

That impression does clinical work. A teenager who gets a real page of tools on their phone, labeled with their therapist's practice, treats the homework as something that matters. A parent who sees a clean, organized plan trusts the process a little more. And a client in a bad moment finds the right tool in two taps, because their page groups everything under plain labels: My plan, Right now, Wind down, and Think it through.

Paper homework has a short life. It gets folded into a pocket, left in the car, recycled with the mail. The client link replaces the folder. It is a single bookmark that holds every tool and worksheet you have assigned, plus the crisis lines, and it is on the client's phone every time they reach for it. When you add something new, it appears on the same page. They never have to find an email from three weeks ago.

Your own side is covered as well. Pro session tools auto-save to your account when you use them, signed forms come back as a downloadable record with an audit trail, and every link shows you how often it was opened in the last 7 and 30 days, so you can see who has gone quiet without asking.

One honest note. Answers a client types on their link are saved on their own device, which is what keeps them private. Clearing browser data erases them, and on iPhones Safari can clear site data after about a week without a visit. The safety plan tells clients to keep a screenshot or printout, and we suggest you say the same when you build it with them.

The client never makes an account. We never learn their name. What they type into a tool on their link stays on their device, and assessments score on their own screen. On our side, a client link is a long random token and a count of how many times it was opened each day. Your label for the link, the one that says who it belongs to, lives only in your browser. Revoke a link and it stops working immediately.

The same care applies when you run tools yourself. If you are signed in and use a public tool page in session, anything personal typed into it, such as a list of worries or a body map, clears when you leave the page. So the client you see at four o'clock never sees what the three o'clock client wrote.

Therapy Resource is not an electronic health record, and it doesn't try to be. It doesn't host video; use the telehealth platform you already trust. It isn't built to be a client record: drafts of practice documents delete themselves after 14 days, and tools on a client link never send a client's answers or scores back to you. If you track scores over time, write them in your own chart.

Those limits are the reason the rest works. A tool that stores nothing about the client can be handed to anyone, on any device, with no login and no signature, which is exactly what makes it fast to use in a session and easy for the client to keep using at home.

Does the client need an account or an app? No. A client link works in any phone browser. They tap it and bookmark it.

What about HIPAA? Client links and the guided tools store nothing a client types on our servers: no names, no answers, no scores. Drafts of practice documents you write are deleted after 14 days. Run the session itself on your own HIPAA-compliant video platform.

Does it work with kids? Yes. Muscle relaxation has a kids' version with playful cues, grounding has a tap-to-count mode for kids who don't want to type, and the live games are built for child and teen sessions. The child rapport guide has more on using them.

What if I only see clients in person? Everything works in the room. Print the worksheets, run the tools on a tablet, and use client links for the time between sessions.

What does it cost? The worksheets, assessments, and guided exercises are free. Pro is $15 a month or $120 a year, with a seven-day free trial.

Kazantzis, N., Whittington, C., Zelencich, L., Kyrios, M., Norton, P. J., & Hofmann, S. G. (2016). Quantity and quality of homework compliance: A meta-analysis of relations with outcome in cognitive behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy, 47(5), 755-772.