Start here: this is not a like-for-like comparison
Most "X vs Y" pages pretend the two products are the same thing at different prices. This one is not, and saying so up front is the only honest way to write it.
Moneypenny is a hybrid. It sells an AI receptionist that escalates to its own team of trained human PAs. When a call needs a person, a person picks it up — a real one, employed and trained by Moneypenny, often the same named PA who has learned how your business works.
Remi is software. It is AI. There is no human team behind it, and we will never suggest otherwise. When a call needs a person, Remi warm-transfers it to your people.
So the real question is not "which is better". It is: what kind of calls does your clinic actually get, and which model fits them? That question has an honest answer, and for some practices the answer is Moneypenny.
What Moneypenny is
Moneypenny is a UK institution. It has been answering calls for British businesses for decades, at serious scale, and it is very good at the thing it is good at. Its PAs are trained, they work in teams that get to know an account, and a caller who reaches one is talking to a professional who can read a room. That is not a small thing, and it is not something software replicates.
The service splits roughly two ways. There is Moneypenny AI Receptionist, advertised at from £25 a month, and there is the human message-taking service, advertised at from £55 a month, with 24/7 cover quoted as an add-on from £35 a month. Those figures are as published and were checked on 24 August 2026. Pricing is a snapshot; check the current figures yourself before deciding anything.
What Remi is
Remi answers your calls and your WhatsApp messages, and then finishes the job rather than passing it back to you.
It books into the diary you already use — Google Calendar, Acuity and Cliniko. It sends no-show reminders, takes deposits at the point of booking, applies your no-show fee when someone does not turn up, backfills cancelled slots from your waiting list, chases unpaid invoices, wins back patients who have drifted away, and asks happy patients for reviews. It works in 11 languages in text, with English and Afrikaans on voice. When a call plainly needs a person, it transfers it to your team, warm, with context.
It starts at £89 a month ex VAT on the Lite tier, including 500 talk-minutes, with the Standard tier at £149 for 1,000 talk-minutes, then 15p a minute above the included pool. One-week free trial, no setup fee, cancel any time. Setup is done for you.
Why there is no cost table on this page
Every other comparison we publish has a worked cost table in it, because we can put real published numbers into one. We cannot do that here, and building one anyway would be dishonest.
Moneypenny does not publish a rate card. Their /pricing URL returns a 404, and everything beyond the two "from" figures above is quote-only. We are not going to estimate their per-call or per-minute charges, invent a mid-market figure, or model a clinic's monthly bill from numbers they have not published. Any table we produced would be guesswork dressed up as fact, and you would be right not to trust it.
What we can say plainly is this. Both of Moneypenny's published "from" prices sit below Remi's £89 entry tier. A "from" price is an entry point, not the price you will pay — it is the floor for the smallest possible package, and with a per-call or per-minute service the volume charge is usually where the real money is. Neither published figure tells you what a month of your actual call volume costs.
So do the thing we would do. Ask for a written quote and make sure it states: the monthly base, the per-call or per-minute rate, how a call is measured and rounded, the minimum contract term, what out-of-hours costs, and what happens when you exceed the plan. Then put that against Remi's £89 plus 15p a minute over 500 minutes, or £149 plus 15p a minute over 1,000, and do the sum on your own call volume. If you want the general version of that arithmetic, our guide to what an AI receptionist costs in the UK shows the working at four different call volumes.
Capability comparison: model and fit
Because we cannot compare prices fairly, compare the models instead. Everything in the Moneypenny column is drawn from their published material as at 24 August 2026. "Not published" means they do not state it, not that it is impossible.
| Remi | Moneypenny | |
|---|---|---|
| What answers the call | AI only | AI, escalating to their own trained human PAs |
| Human judgement on a difficult call | No — transfers to your team | Yes — real trained PAs |
| Available out of hours | 24/7, included | AI cover 24/7; human 24/7 quoted as an add-on, from £35/mo as published |
| Books into your diary | Yes | Yes (AI receptionist) |
| Diaries it books into | Google Calendar, Acuity, Cliniko | Not published |
| Clinical practice systems | Cliniko, Nookal | Not published |
| WhatsApp booking and messaging | Yes, native | Not published |
| No-show reminders | Yes | Not published |
| Deposits at booking | Yes | Not published |
| Applies your no-show fee | Yes | Not published |
| Chases unpaid invoices | Yes | Not published |
| Win-backs, cancellation backfill, review chasing | Yes | Not published |
| Published rate card | Yes — from £89/mo ex VAT for 500 minutes, £149 for 1,000 minutes, 15p/min | No — "from" prices only, rest by quote |
| Free trial | One week, no setup fee | Not published |
Where Moneypenny is the better choice
This section is not a formality. There are calls where a trained human being is straightforwardly the right answer, and if those are most of your calls you should hire people or use a service like Moneypenny, and not buy software.
- A distressed patient. Someone ringing in pain, or frightened about a result, or in the middle of something awful. A good receptionist hears it in the first three words and changes everything about how the call goes. Software does not do this as well. We are not going to claim it does.
- A serious complaint. An angry patient needs to feel heard by a person with the standing to acknowledge what went wrong and promise it will be looked at. Handle that badly and you lose the patient and pick up a public review. This is a human's job.
- Nuanced, high-value sales conversations. If a first call is really a consultation — a long treatment plan, cosmetic work, anything where the caller is weighing up several thousand pounds — a person who can read hesitation and respond to it converts better than a script. That is a real commercial argument for humans.
- Very low call volume with high stakes per call. If you take four calls a day and each one is worth a lot, the premium for a named PA who knows your business by name is easy to justify.
- You want nothing to configure. Moneypenny is a service, not a system. There is no diary to connect, no message templates to review, no settings. For some practices that is exactly the point.
- Callers who expect a person. In some professions and with some patient groups, reaching an AI at all is a negative signal regardless of how well it performs. That is a legitimate reason to choose humans, and no feature list overrides it.
Where software is the better answer
Here is the observation Remi is built on, and you can test it against your own call log this week: most clinic calls are not delicate. They are "can I move Thursday to Friday?", "what time am I in on the 14th?", "do you take Bupa?", "how much is a first appointment?", "I need to cancel". Sort a week of calls by reason and the top five will cover most of the volume.
For those calls, software is not a compromise. It is better:
- It answers immediately, every time. No hold queue, no "we are experiencing higher than usual call volumes", no lost call at 8.55am when three people ring at once. At 3am on a Sunday it works exactly as well as it does on Tuesday morning.
- It completes the job rather than taking a message. This is the structural difference. A message-taking service, human or otherwise, hands the request back to you and then you do the booking. Remi writes the appointment into Cliniko, Acuity or Google Calendar during the call, and the patient rings off knowing they are booked.
- It handles the money. Deposits at booking, your no-show fee applied when someone does not turn up, and unpaid invoices chased until they are paid. A message-taking service does none of that, and it is where a lot of a clinic's leaked revenue actually sits.
- It fills the gaps. A cancellation on Tuesday afternoon gets offered to your waiting list automatically, instead of staying empty because nobody had time to ring round.
- It works on WhatsApp. Patients who ignore a voicemail answer a WhatsApp message within minutes. Rebooking over WhatsApp costs nobody a phone call at all.
- The bill barely moves. £89 a month ex VAT includes 500 talk-minutes, which at a three-minute average is roughly 165 calls, and £149 includes 1,000, roughly 330 calls, then 15p a minute. A service billed per call or per minute costs more every time your practice gets busier, which is precisely the wrong direction.
And when a call is one of the difficult ones, Remi hands it to a person on your team, warm. That is the point of the transfer: software takes the routine 70 or 80 per cent so your own staff have the time and attention to take the calls that deserve them.
How to choose, and why it may not be either/or
Do this before you talk to anyone. Take a week of your call log and sort it by reason. Count what proportion is scheduling and admin, and what proportion genuinely needed a person's judgement.
If most of your calls need judgement — a complaints-heavy practice, a consultative sales line, a service where callers arrive upset — buy humans. Moneypenny is a serious, long-established option and we would rather you chose well than chose us.
If most of it is "move my Thursday", software handles the bulk instantly, round the clock, and warm-transfers the rest. That is the common case in clinics, and it is why a flat monthly figure works: the routine calls are the ones that scale with your growth, and they are the ones that cost the least to automate.
It also does not have to be a single choice. Plenty of practices put software on the front line and route the genuinely human calls to their own reception team — the team that now has time to take them, because they are not answering forty rescheduling calls a day. If you want to see what that looks like in a practice setting, there is a clinic-specific walkthrough on the Remi for UK clinics page, and a comparison of the underlying models in AI receptionist vs answering service.