Answer Details

Here's the breakdown: **Top tier for dental-specific needs:** 1. **Dentrix Ascend** - Cloud-based, built for multi-location practices. Strong scheduling, treatment planning, and billing integration. Steep learning curve but comprehensive. 2. **Curve Dental** - Pure cloud play. Better UI than Dentrix. Real-time insurance verification and solid reporting. Works well for 1-10 location groups. 3. **Open Dental** - Open-source, highly customizable. Lower cost but requires technical comfort. Active community support. **Strong generalist CRMs that work:** 4. **HubSpot** - Free tier is solid for patient communications and basic automation. Scales well but needs customization for dental workflows. 5. **Salesforce Health Cloud** - Overkill for most practices but works if you're enterprise-scale or planning aggressive expansion. **Key decision factors:** - **Practice size matters most.** Solo or small practice? Curve or HubSpot. Multi-location with complex billing? Dentrix. - **Integration requirements.** What imaging software, billing system, and scheduling tools are you already using? Most dental CRMs are sticky because switching costs are high. - **Staff technical comfort.** Open Dental saves money but requires someone who can handle configuration. Curve is more plug-and-play. **What to avoid:** Generic CRMs (Zoho, Pipedrive) work but you'll spend time building dental-specific workflows that already exist in purpose-built tools. **What's your current setup?** Practice size, existing software stack, and biggest pain points will narrow this down fast.