The Best Online Grief Counseling, According to a Therapist

Paying for Online Grief Counseling

Some of the companies on this list, such as Thriveworks, accept insurance; Thriveworks even lets you look to see if it is in-network with your insurance before signing up for services. If your insurance is accepted, you’ll only be responsible for your copay.

Other companies are out-of-pocket. BetterHelp is subscription-based, meaning you’ll pay a set amount each month for services; others, like E-Therapy Cafe, are pay-per-session, though you can buy bundles of sessions for a discount. Group support, like that offered by The Compassionate Friends and Grief in Common, is often free or much more affordable than therapy, and is a great complement to individual grief counseling.

How I Review Online Therapy Services

I’ve spent years testing and surveying real therapy users and reviewing their experiences to help rate and share the best online therapy services. You can see a full breakdown of our online therapy research and testing process on Verywell Mind. Here is an overview of how I capture and evaluate firsthand experience and survey data.

Firsthand Experience

I had 65 different people sign up for talk therapy with all 55 online therapy companies reviewed. Over the past three years, I’ve published 153 reviews (here are our reviews for BetterHelp and Talkspace, for instance). I had my testers try out each company’s therapy services, and if the company offered other services (like couples therapy and kid or teen therapy) we tested those too. 

I asked each tester to try each service for at least a month, which usually meant between two and six sessions at each company. I also asked testers to switch therapists partway through, if possible, in order to get a holistic idea of the offerings and quality of each company. My testers were located all across the United States and abroad, meaning I gained extensive information about each company’s services in a variety of areas.

Choosing Grief Counseling Services

In order to compile this list of online grief therapy services, I focused on online therapy companies that specifically say they treat grief and loss. I then determined which particular services set each company apart from its competitors, identifying which companies were best for different kinds of grief-related services.

User Surveys

I surveyed more than 8,000 therapy clients who are currently using one of the 55 online therapy companies tested or who had used one in the recent past, as well as users of 27 different online therapy directories. I asked users to evaluate each company’s services, from their therapist’s qualifications to whether they found a therapist who met all their needs to how they’d rate the company overall—all told, I gathered 350 different data points. 

Why Trust Verywell Mind

Hannah Owens is Verywell Mind’s Mental Health Editor. Hannah is a licensed social worker with a clinical background in community mental health. She’s worked at programs treating those with serious mental illness, providing both individual and group therapy. In her time at Verywell Mind, Hannah has designed and run years of online therapy testing, overseeing and editing reviews of the top online therapy companies out there and writing and editing roundups of the best online therapy services based on our extensive and thorough testing. Hannah brings her unique combination of both clinical and editorial expertise to her work for Verywell Mind.

• Licensed social worker since 2019
• Clinical background in community mental health
• Specializes in serious mental illness
• Believes in the mission of online therapy to make mental healthcare more accessible