Gesden alternative: moving your dental clinic to the cloud

You have had Gesden in the clinic for years. It works, you know it, your team knows the shortcuts by heart. And still, every time a PC gets old, every time a version needs updating, every time a dentist asks whether they can see the calendar from home, the same question comes back: shouldn’t all of this be in the cloud by now?

This guide is for you if you are weighing it up. No hype: what actually changes when you move from dental software installed on your own machine to a cloud alternative, what you lose along the way, what you gain, and how a real migration works from an export of your current system. If you finish the article and decide to stay with Gesden, that is fine too — you will have the arguments to defend the decision.

Why more clinics are considering leaving Gesden

Gesden, developed by Infomed Software, has been one of the best-known names in dental practice management in Spain for over two decades. Its classic installable version is still running today on a PC in the back office or a small server behind the front desk of a great many clinics. That history is not in dispute: Gesden is there because it has been a solid option for years.

What has changed is the context. Three things in particular:

• A clinic is no longer just premises. Dentists working across two sites, owners checking occupancy from a phone between patients, front-desk staff who need to answer a patient message from home. Software anchored to one specific PC starts to show.
• The real cost of keeping a local server rises every year. Once you add the machine it lives on, the backup somebody has to verify, the antivirus, the manual updates and the call-out when something breaks, the “annual” ticket price stops looking cheap.
• The risk of data loss in poorly maintained local setups is real. It happens every year to small clinics that discover too late that the backup had not run correctly for months. In a well-designed cloud setup, that problem sits outside the clinic’s perimeter.

Key differences between Gesden and cloud dental software

First, a distinction that matters: there is the classic installable Gesden, which lives on a local PC or server with per-machine licences and manual updates, and there is Infomed’s more recent web version, accessed through a browser on a monthly fee. If you are comparing against the latter, the gap is much narrower than this article suggests — the big jump is leaving the installed model.

Against the installed model, a cloud platform gives you:

• Zero installation. Works in any modern browser. No setup on each PC, no server in the clinic, no per-seat licences.
• Genuine access from anywhere. From the front desk, the dentist’s laptop at home, or a phone between patients. Same data, same calendar, same patient.
• Continuous, transparent updates. New features arrive without coordinating versions across the clinic’s machines.
• Automatic, encrypted backups. Patient data lives on cloud infrastructure in the European Union, with backups managed as part of the service.
• A clear monthly fee with no per-seat licences. Hiring a dentist or a hygienist does not raise the bill. If you open a second site, that site carries its own subscription; what does not exist is a per-user or per-chair charge.

One note on tone: we are not claiming this is “better than Gesden” in the abstract. If your clinic has a trusted technical person who looks after the local server and verifies the backups every Monday, classic Gesden can keep doing its job for years. The question is whether that describes your clinic, or whether you are actually carrying one patch on top of another.

What you lose by migrating

• Memorised shortcuts. Your front desk finds a patient in Gesden with a keystroke their fingers have known for years. The equivalent flow exists in Dently, but the keystroke is different. Expect one to two weeks where productivity dips slightly before it climbs.
• Accumulated customisations. Very specific service lists, treatment plans with a particular layout, reminders written a certain way — all of that needs reviewing and rebuilding. Most of it imports; the oddities need manual attention.
• Specific integrations with clinical equipment. If your Gesden is wired to an imaging unit or a particular insurer gateway, check up front that the alternative covers it or offers a reasonable substitute. With Dently it is the first thing we review before migrating.
• The feeling of physical control. “The data is on my PC, I can see it” is a legitimate feeling — even though, paradoxically, that is usually where it is least safe. But it is a mental shift you have to accept.

What you gain

• A calendar on any device. A dentist checks Wednesday’s free slots from a phone between patients. Front desk takes an urgent call on a Saturday from home and moves an appointment in thirty seconds. No VPN, no remote desktop, no “I have to get to the clinic”.
• No local server, no recurring IT call-outs. The panic calls when the back-office PC will not boot are over. So is “this machine has to be a good one because Gesden lives on it”. Any mid-range laptop will do.
• Automatic, encrypted, geographically redundant backup. It does not depend on somebody remembering to plug in the external drive on Friday.
• One platform for multiple sites. Consolidated visibility of occupancy, revenue and patients across sites, with nothing installed in either location.
• Product improvements at no extra cost. No “this year you have to pay for the upgrade”.

Migration step by step, with human guidance

1. Export from your current Gesden. You generate an export with patients, future appointments, dentists and services. We tell you exactly what we need so you export neither too much nor too little.
2. Review before loading. Before anything is imported, we go through the export with you to spot duplicate patients, empty fields and inconsistencies. This clean-up phase makes the biggest difference to the final quality, and skipping it is the origin of most later pain.
3. Load into your Dently environment. Patients, future calendar, dentists and treatment catalogue. Treatment structure, plans and notes are mapped to the equivalent without manual rebuilding.
4. Cross-validation. You, or someone you trust in the clinic, logs into Dently and checks that the patients are there, that the future calendar is there, that the dentists appear with their hours. In a typical clinic this takes 30 to 60 minutes.
5. Day one in Dently. The next morning your team logs in from the browser, the patients are where they should be, and the 9:30 appointment is still in the calendar. Gesden stays as a historical archive.

Reading a dental software invoice without fooling yourself

Compare total cost of ownership, not licence price. On the installed side, add the licence or annual maintenance, the machine that acts as a server and its replacement cycle, the technician’s call-outs, and the hours somebody spends on backups. On the cloud side, ask the two questions that actually move the number: does the price go up per user, and does it go up per treatment room? If either answer is yes, your growth is a price increase.

Dently is 50 €/month per clinic plus taxes, with the whole product included, no per-user cost, and migration guided by us at no charge.

Is Dently the right choice? It depends on your clinic

It probably fits if you are on classic installed Gesden and the next hardware refresh creates more friction than value; if you have or will soon have more than one site and coordination is becoming painful; if you want real mobile access without remote desktop or a VPN; or if your team is small and nobody is dedicated to looking after a local server.

It probably does not fit if you depend on a specific integration with clinical equipment that we do not cover yet — ask before you migrate, not after — or if your clinic is deep into a large installed setup that genuinely works and nobody is complaining about.

The honest way to find out is to try it: 14 days, no card required, and load a real Monday from your own calendar into it.