CS PracticeWorks Software vs. Open Dental Software

PracticeWorks is best suited for a smaller office who wants easy to use software without a lot of bells and whistles. It is very user friendly but is limited with customization options. There are better software systems for an office that wants to incorporate extensive marketing with the software. Overall it is easy to use.

Incentivized

Open Dental [Software] is well suited to a practice that is willing to put time into customizing it to their needs. Since it is open-source software, it's not completely ready to use right out of the box, but comes with flexibility that other dental software lack. As such, you can make it work for whatever you need for your individual practice. If you're not super tech-savvy, they have a team that will help you with these customizations at a reasonable cost.

• Scheduling - the schedule is easy to read and color code by procedure, doctor, or patient status.
• Imaging - we also implement Kodak Imaging through PW and it is great.
• Overall layout is easy to use.

Incentivized

• User Interface is simple to learn
• Integrates well with all imaging programs
• Support techs are amazing, and remember your name when you call
• It's cheaper than almost all alternatives, but the value is higher
• Lots of plug-ins are available
• Awesome user community of dentists that love to talk about how they've incorporated plug-ins and other features
• Lots of reports to choose from, or you can make your own

• The patient handouts such as treatment plans and billing are very outdated looking.
• Buggy at times
• Marketing is behind the times. It is very difficult to run email lists for targeted procedures and no way to send an email blast from PW directly.

Incentivized

• Open Dental [Software] has issues when users try to open more than one window at a time.
• There is no way to copy/paste provider schedules, so you have to schedule each day individually.

Our practice functions well using Open Dental [Software] and it's a very affordable option. So long as the customer service remains excellent and the price stays competitive, we have no reason to go through the hassle of changing software.

Open Dental [Software] works great....until you try to open multiple windows. This is the one feature that needs serious improvement with the product. I've had to force quit/terminate the software more times than I can count because it froze when I tried to open up a second window to complete a task. Other than this one issue, it's a very usable product.

Open Dental's customer support team has gone above and beyond for us. There was a 2-3 month period where we couldn't go more than 5 minutes without the software crashing - which was an issue with our server and not with their product. Despite it being our issue, the customer service team remained in constant contact with us and with our IT support company until the issue was resolved.

We evaluated Dentrix at the time of purchase. At that time PracticeWorks had bought out our software vendor. We chose to go with Practice Works since they would get a better conversion of our current patients. As time has passed, we have been told Dentrix has more customization options.

Incentivized

Open Dental is faster than the alternatives, and the support is much better with very low hold times. It's more customizable with lots of plug-ins available, although they aren't really needed. A strong user community group is available as well, where you can see different use cases and read up on experiences of other users of the software.

• PracticeWorks helps us keep up to date with patient recall and keeping the schedule full.
• PracticeWorks tracks treatment needed.
• PracticeWorks Office Expert tracks daily/weekly goals and things to do easily.

Incentivized

• The cost of Open Dental is minimal, so ROI is huge.