Open Dental Forum

We are currently using Ace Dental software and are considering switching to open Dental. If anyone could give us feedback on their experiences with Open Dental that would be great! Thanks

housedentistry wrote:We are currently using Ace Dental software and are considering switching to open Dental. If anyone could give us feedback on their experiences with Open Dental that would be great! Thanks

I switched from SoftDent at the beginning of this year. It is the absolute best decision I ever made for my office. The Open Dental people were extremely helpful in transferring over my old data (15 years). My staff and I are thrilled with the performance of the software and would recommend it without reservation.

I agree with the above post. We just past our 2 year anniversary switching from Softdent to OD. I still consider Softdent to be the most comprehensive package outside of OD. We switched away from Softdent when they were going to require a $10,000 upgrade in hardware and software. We already have all modern 64 bit computers and workstations but Softdent wanted us to use a very expensive MS server product. Even though a change over like this is very painful, we couldn't be happier that we did it. The most important factor to me was the unsecured nature of OD. It is not locked down with dongles, encryption, etc, etc. You used to be able to take Softdent home and use it on a read-only basis, but then they made you leave your server on 24-7 and access it remotely. This was an unacceptable security risk to me. Now I can take my database home and read it like the old days of Softdent.

I'd recommend downloading the trial and playing around with Open Dental and see how you like the feel of it. If that's too much of a "sandbox" and you want to get a feel for what your data would be like within Open Dental, give us a call and we can get what we call a "test/trial conversion" to you.

We switched away from Dentrix almost 2 years ago and it's been the best software move. Out of curiosity, what is prompting the switch away from Ace? Are there certain features or aspects about Open Dental that look good or is there something annoying about Ace?

We having been running Ace Dental for several years now and we have always had problems with it. The features never work correctly and when we contact support we are given the run around or told that the program isn't meant for that feature and they have to charge an additional $300.00 on top of the fee we pay every month for support for them to figure it out. My question is why offer a feature on your program that the program wasn't designed to do? We are just fed up with it. I have been researching programs for awhile now and I am finding that most of Open Dental's customer love the program and there are rave reviews about the customer service, which is what we are looking for.

If you ever have a question about OpenDental's support just look at the time the questions are posted and when they are answered by OD support, almost in real time.
You can't beat that for service.
Plus they will encourage you to call in if that will solve the problem.

drtmz

To add to Jason's comment, the test conversions are free of charge.
You know your data in Ace and where everything should be. By doing a test conversion to Open Dental you have a chance to play with the system, test it out and make sure it is a fit for your practice. It also gives your staff a chance to make mistakes, change things around before the final conversion.