For a smaller practice that does not need a lot of customization it might be great, but for a bigger company that is focused on branding and adding extra bells and whistles, it is limited.
Open Dental is becoming the primary dental software for a lot of dentists by providing affordable pricing, yet still powerful enough to cover most of the needs of a standard dental office. It has good scalability and real-time updating, allowing staff to work on the same chart on multiple workstations. If there is something Open Dental DOESN'T do, it usually provides strong integration with 3rd party software to increase functionality
The overall cost for the basic is great, it is all the extras that make it more expensive - we have a few locations so it is not horrible and we use what we pay for to the fullest.
The only real down fall is the time lapse - it pulls every 30 minutes from the server, I wish it was more real time as sometimes we have an opening that has already been filled and someone still gets a notification of an opening
We can only text so many words to a patient in response or trying to send a notice - which isn't that big of a downfall.
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.
When I did use Solutionreach - they did not have as many functions as Lighthouse 360 like immediately sending out a text when we had a hygiene opening within 48 hours. And their templets were very limited to what we could change.
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.
