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Open Dental

Open Dental, for the people doing the work.

Open Dental trades hand-holding for openness and lower cost. These guides cover the parts that decision actually affects day to day — support, training, verification, and what self-hosting really costs.

How we work in your PMS
Guides

Working in Open Dental

GuideOpen Dental support: how to get answers fasterOpen Dental's support model is different from the big vendors' by design — more documentation, more community, less hand-holding. That suits some practices and frustrates others.Read GuideOpen Dental training for front office staffOpen Dental gives you an exhaustive manual, which is a gift and a trap: new hires try to read it. Sequence beats completeness.Read GuideOpen Dental pricing: how the model worksOpen Dental is among the cheaper practice management systems on licence cost. Whether it is cheaper in total depends entirely on who runs your server.Read GuideOpen Dental insurance verification: a practical workflowOpen Dental has a dedicated verification workflow, which is more than most systems offer. It still cannot tell you the things that actually cause denials.Read
Comparing systems

Open Dental vs the alternatives

We keep one page per comparison rather than writing both sides — two of our own pages competing for the same search helps nobody.

Dentrix Ascend vs Open Dental All Dentrix Ascend guides
Questions

Open Dental basics

What is Open Dental?

Open Dental is a practice management system from Open Dental Software with an unusually open architecture — a documented MySQL database and a published API. It can be self-hosted on your own server or run through a hosting provider, which is the main structural difference from cloud-only systems.

Is Open Dental good for multi-location practices?

It is used by groups, and the absence of a per-seat licence charge makes it economical at scale. The question to settle honestly is who manages the servers and backups, because that responsibility does not disappear — it moves to you or your IT provider.

Can an outsourced team work in our Open Dental?

Yes. Permissions are granular, so a billing or front-office team can be scoped to exactly the areas it needs and nothing more. That is how we work with client practices, under a signed BAA.

Let's talk

Ready to stop losing money
at the front desk?

Tell us which locations you run and which system you're on. We'll show you exactly what we'd take over first.

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