What a children's booking has to carry
An adult books themselves. In a children's practice, one adult books two or three patients, none of whom hold the account, and the contact details, consent and reminders all belong to the adult rather than to the patient. That is the whole difference, and it is where most booking setups on paediatric sites fall down.
So the questions to ask of any system are narrower than the usual feature list. Can one parent account hold several child records. Can a parent take two appointments back to back in one flow. Do reminders go to the parent, on the channel the parent reads. Can the after-school and holiday slots be released online without the whole diary being exposed. And can the website hand a parent into all of that in a single tap.
Below are the systems children's practices actually run, judged on those questions. Features move, so confirm the specifics with the vendor before you commit to anything.
Dentally
For: UK practices, single site or small groups.
Website side: hosted online booking on a practice web address, branded with your logo and colours, showing live diary availability. The site links to it rather than embedding it, which keeps your pages fast.
Paediatric side: family relationships between patient records, appointment types with their own durations so a first visit is not squeezed into a check-up slot, SMS and email reminders, and control over how much of each clinician's diary is offered online.
Watch: decide deliberately which appointment types a parent may self-book. New patient children usually want a longer first slot.
Software of Excellence
For: established UK practices, often multi-surgery.
Website side: a patient-facing portal and online booking as part of the wider suite.
Paediatric side: strong recall and reminder management, which is the part of a children's practice that quietly drives the year. Family accounts and household grouping.
Watch: it is a large system, so the online booking configuration is worth doing with your account manager rather than guessing.
Dentrix
For: US practices, including group practices.
Website side: online scheduling and patient communication through the Dentrix ecosystem and its partner tools.
Paediatric side: family and household records are core to how it thinks about patients, and the communication add-ons handle appointment reminders and recall.
Watch: exactly which pieces you have depends on your Dentrix edition and which communications product sits alongside it. Check before you promise parents anything on the website.
Open Dental
For: practices that want control and are comfortable with configuration.
Website side: a web scheduling module and patient portal, with a fair amount of tailoring available.
Paediatric side: family accounts are central, recall is flexible, and the openness means an unusual scheduling rule is often achievable.
Watch: the flexibility is real and so is the setup effort. Budget time.
Curve Dental
For: cloud-first practices in North America.
Website side: online booking and patient forms delivered from the cloud platform.
Paediatric side: household records, digital forms a parent can complete before arrival, and reminder messaging.
Watch: confirm how forms carrying health information are stored and covered by your agreement with the vendor before you link them from the site.
Jane
For: clinics that sit across dentistry and allied health, or a paediatric practice inside a wider children's clinic.
Website side: an online booking site and embeddable widget, well designed on a phone.
Paediatric side: it handles dependants and family booking cleanly, and the intake forms are strong.
Watch: it is a clinic system rather than a dental one, so imaging and dental charting are not its territory.
What your website needs from any of them
- A Book button in the header on every page, one tap, on a phone, at nine in the evening.
- Family booking presented as family booking, with a line on the booking page telling the parent they can add a sibling. Most parents do not discover the feature on their own.
- Back-to-back slots where the diary allows it, so two children are one trip rather than two.
- Reminders to the parent by the channel they actually read, with the appointment length and what to bring.
- Health information collected inside the practice software or a tool built for it, never in a website contact form, and never by email.
- A way to flag a request at booking, such as a quiet appointment or extra time, without a phone call.
- After-school and school-holiday availability released online, because that is what the parent is searching for.
- The emergency route kept separate, since a knocked-out tooth is a phone call and a same-day slot, not a self-service booking.
- Tracking of booking clicks and call taps by page, so you know which page fills the diary.
Choosing
- UK, single practice or small group: Dentally.
- UK, larger established practice: Software of Excellence.
- US: Dentrix, or Open Dental if you want configurability.
- Cloud-first North America: Curve Dental.
- Paediatric dentistry inside a wider children's clinic: Jane.
Already on something that works? Stay on it. Changing practice software to improve a website is almost always the wrong way round. The site's job is to get the parent into whichever system you run, in one tap, with the sibling question already answered.
Where this sits
Wiring whichever system a practice runs into the site, surfacing family booking so parents actually find it, and keeping health information out of the website entirely is the core of a paediatric dental practice website, and the same pattern runs through the other dental practice websites we build. Packages are on pricing. The practice software holds the child's record. The site gets the parent into it before they ring the practice down the road.