If you are a dental practice, you almost certainly already own dental appointment software. It is called Dentrix, or Eaglesoft, or Open Dental, and you are not going to replace it. The real question is a much smaller one.
The practice management system is the source of truth: the chart, the treatment plan, the insurance claim, the ledger, the recall list. Bookafy replaces none of that and should not try to. What most practices are actually searching for when they type “dental appointment software” is narrower and more frustrating: patients cannot book online, and the front desk spends its whole day on the phone.
| The problem | The answer |
|---|---|
| You need charting, treatment plans, insurance claims, a ledger | A practice management system. Bookafy is not one and never will be. |
| Your PMS has an online booking module and you like it | Use it. Do not add a second calendar. Two calendars is worse than a slow one. |
| Your PMS has no patient-facing booking, or the module is an expensive add-on you refuse to pay for | Bookafy as a front door — a booking layer patients use, with the front desk entering the confirmed appointment into the PMS. |
| You want consults, hygiene checks or new-patient enquiries booked online without touching the PMS | Bookafy. This is the clean use case: a defined slice of appointment types. |
Bookafy does not integrate natively with Dentrix, Eaglesoft or Open Dental. Nothing writes itself into your chart. That means somebody at the front desk copies the booking across — and if you skip past that sentence, you will be annoyed later.
It is worth it when the alternative is a receptionist on the phone for four hours a day, and it is not worth it if your PMS already publishes a booking page. There is no clever way around this. Bookafy has an open API and webhooks on Pro+, so a practice with a developer or an agency can push bookings into a PMS that accepts them — but treat that as a project, not a checkbox.
A failed hygiene appointment is an hour of chair time you cannot resell at short notice. Email reminders come on every plan; SMS reminders come on Pro. For dentistry, the SMS is the one that matters — nobody reads email about a filling.
People decide to sort their teeth out at night, on their phone, after the practice has closed. A booking link that answers at 9pm captures a patient who would otherwise ring three practices in the morning and reach whichever one picks up first.
A new-patient exam, a scale and polish, and an emergency toothache are not the same appointment. Give each its own duration, its own instructions, and route it only to the clinicians who take it. Bookafy’s skill-based scheduling handles that; a generic “book an appointment” button does not, and it is how you end up with a 20-minute slot booked for an hour of work.
If you are collecting patient information — and taking a dental booking, you are — HIPAA support sits on the Pro+ plan at $11 per user per month. Do not build this on the Free or Pro plan and assume you are covered. You are not.
| Plan | Price | In a practice |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | One user, no SMS, no payments, no HIPAA. Useful to test the booking flow. Not a practice deployment. |
| Pro | $7/user/mo billed yearly | Two-way calendar sync, SMS reminders, payments. Still no HIPAA. |
| Pro+ | $11/user/mo | The dental plan. HIPAA, a second SMS reminder, custom API and webhooks for pushing into a PMS. |
Not natively. There is no built-in connector, so a booking taken in Bookafy has to be entered into the practice management system by the front desk. Bookafy does offer an open API and webhooks on Pro+, so a developer can build a push into a PMS that accepts one, but that is a project rather than a setting.
HIPAA support is available on the Pro+ plan at $11 per user per month. It is not included on the Free or Pro plans, so a dental practice collecting patient information should budget for Pro+.
No. Bookafy does no charting, no treatment planning, no insurance claims and no billing. It is a patient-facing booking layer that sits in front of the system you already have.
It should. SMS reminders on the Pro plan are the effective lever in dentistry, because patients do not read email about appointments. Automated email confirmations are included on every plan.
Yes, and that is the recommended way to start. Publish new-patient exams, hygiene visits or consults, keep everything clinical in the practice management system, and route each type only to the clinicians who take it.
Try it on your own calendar. Bookafy is free for one user with unlimited appointments, and Pro is $7 per user per month billed yearly.
If you are still working out which tool you need, start with the overview: appointment scheduling software — what it does, what it costs, and when you should buy something else.
Also useful: every Bookafy integration, in three honest lists — what is native, what needs Zapier, and what we simply do not do. And the pricing page, where the feature matrix is the real answer to “is that on the free plan”.
