How we compare
This page exists so you can check our work and know where the limits are. If a claim on this site is not traceable to a source, it should not be here — tell us.
Pricing: published figures only
We publish a price only when it appears on the vendor's own website. Every price carries a link to its source and the date we read it. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so, and we leave the field empty.
We do not use figures from review aggregators, even to fill gaps. That rule exists because when we cross-checked the widely republished figures in this category, several were wrong: four separate sites listed Open Dental at "$179 then $129", which are in fact Practice-Web's prices for a different product. Another put CareStack at "$698 per user per month" against a published $829 per month that is not per user. The full audit is in which dental software publishes its prices.
Currently 5 of 14 vendors publish a price. Prices were last checked on 2026-08-01. They change without notice — treat this site as a shortlisting tool and confirm the current figure before you buy.
Features: documented, not inferred
We track 19 modules per product and record each as built in, a paid add-on, available via integration, unavailable, or not stated. That last category matters: where a vendor does not document a capability publicly, we mark it "not stated" rather than assuming. A blank is more honest than a guess.
Comparison pages derive their differences from this dataset programmatically. Nobody hand-picks which differences to highlight, so a vendor cannot be favoured by selective presentation.
Rankings
We do not publish a single "best" ranking, because the question has no single answer — a solo practice optimising for cost and a twelve-location DSO optimising for control are not shopping in the same market. Our shortlist is organised by use case, and each entry states the catch as well as the case for it.
The default sort on comparison tables is cheapest published price first. Vendors that publish nothing sort last — not as a penalty, but because an unknown cannot be placed in a price order.
How we make money, and what it does not buy
We earn affiliate commission when a reader visits some vendors through links on this site. No vendor can pay for placement, a better score, a softer review, or removal of a criticism. Several products we rate highly pay us nothing, and several that pay carry prominent criticism on their own pages.
Every page carrying an affiliate link discloses it above the first link, not just in the footer. Full details on the disclosure page.
What we do not do
- We do not run star ratings or scores out of ten. They compress incomparable things into a number that looks objective and is not.
- We do not aggregate user reviews. Review volume in this category is small, heavily gamed, and dominated by the largest vendors regardless of quality.
- We do not claim hands-on testing we have not done. This site compares documented pricing, deployment and capabilities. It is not a lab review, and where a judgement is editorial we frame it as one.
Known limits
- US market only at present. Pricing, insurance workflows and regulation differ enough elsewhere that a single dataset would mislead.
- Fourteen systems, not every product on the market. We cover the systems with meaningful US search demand and installed base.
- Published information only. A vendor that documents its product badly will look worse here than one that documents it well. That is a real bias, and we would rather state it than hide it.
- Point-in-time data. Everything here was accurate on 2026-08-01.
Corrections
If a price, feature or claim on this site is wrong, we want to fix it — particularly if you are the vendor. Send the correction with a link to the source and we will update the page and the check date.