The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: What the Internet Says About Open Dental (And What We Think)

We came across a post in one of the Open Dental Facebook groups recently that stopped us in our tracks. Someone asked a simple question: tell me everything about Open Dental, the good, the bad, the ugly. Their office got burned by another software and they weren't ready to make the same mistake twice.

The thread blew up. And honestly, it deserved more than a comment section. So we turned it into this.

What the community said

The responses were overwhelmingly positive. Office after office chiming in with things like "I will never say anything bad about Open Dental" and "I hope to never use another software again." People coming from Eaglesoft, Softdent, Practiceworks, Carestack, Curve... all saying the same thing. Open Dental won them over and they're not looking back.

A few things came up consistently across the thread:

User friendly. It came up so many times it almost became a running joke. Offices of all sizes, all backgrounds, all previous software experiences, landing on the same word.

Great support. Multiple people called out Open Dental's support team specifically, describing them as friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. That's not nothing when you're running a busy practice and something goes sideways mid-day.

Affordable and flexible. One person in the thread pointed out that Open Dental is month to month, which means if you genuinely don't like it, you're not locked in. Spoiler: most offices end up liking it.

Multi-location capable. For offices managing more than one location, the Clinics feature came up as a strong option for centralized management, especially when paired with a solid IT setup.

There were a couple of critiques too. Someone mentioned the ledger, saying it "suuuuuuucks." We hear that one occasionally. The ledger has a learning curve and if it's not set up correctly it can feel clunky. That's less a software problem and more a setup and training problem, but we'll come back to that.

Someone also asked whether Open Dental has its own insurance verification platform. The short answer is no, not natively. Insurance verification runs through third-party integrations, which actually brings us to our take.

Here's what we think

We're a little biased here and we'll own that. Open Dental is the only software we work with. It's the only software we recommend. And it's not because we haven't looked at the alternatives.

It's because Open Dental is hyper customizable in a way that most practice management software isn't even close to. No two offices using Open Dental have to use it the same way. You build it out to fit your practice, your workflows, your team, your values. That customization is what makes patient charts more compliant, ledgers easier to understand, and day-to-day operations more efficient. Efficiency is one of our core values, and Open Dental lives that in a way other platforms just don't.

The "shell" thing is worth addressing directly because it comes up a lot. Open Dental is the practice management software. Everything else, your clearinghouse, your patient communication tool, your payment processor, your insurance verification platform, gets added on through third-party integrations. Some offices see that as a downside because other softwares bundle everything together. We actually see it as a feature. It means you're choosing the best tool for each job instead of being locked into whatever the software company decided was good enough for everyone.

Now. The training gap is real and we're not going to pretend it isn't.

The general advice you'll find online is to watch the YouTube videos, use the free resources, self-train your team. And those resources are genuinely good. We're not knocking them. But self-trained and well-trained are two different things, and we see the gap play out constantly. Offices come to us three, four, five years into using Open Dental and they're realizing that the money they saved on training upfront is now a much bigger bill on the back end. Cleanup projects, retraining, breaking bad habits that got baked into daily workflows... it adds up fast.

Use the free resources. Absolutely. And then invest in actual organized training too. If you can find a trainer who also does customization, even better, because you'll walk away with a system that's built specifically for your practice, not just a generic install that technically works.

The ledger comment? We'd push back on that one a little. A well-built Open Dental ledger is one of the clearest, most readable ledgers in the industry. The issue is almost always that it wasn't set up correctly to begin with. That's a setup problem, not a software problem.

The bottom line

Open Dental is worth it. The community said it, and we'll say it too. But like any powerful tool, you get out of it what you put into it. A solid conversion plan, real training, and the right third-party setup will make the difference between an office that tolerates their software and an office that actually loves it.

If you're considering the switch and want a head start, we have free resources to help you get moving in the right direction.

👉 SKF Practice Solutions