Viva AI Alternative: Why Dental Practices Choose Enamly

You are watching a Viva AI demo. The presenter walks through the regional manager view: aggregate call volume across eight locations, multi-site scheduling oversight, outbound recall queues pulling from multiple practice databases at once. It is polished and technically capable.

You have one location. Two hygienists. A front desk who just handed you a two-week notice. The problem you need solved fits in one sentence: when your phone rings at 7 PM on a Tuesday and no one is there, you want that caller booked into your Open Dental schedule, confirmed, without anyone needing to call them back.

The demo is solving a different problem. That gap explains most of the searches for a Viva AI alternative happening right now.

What Viva AI Actually Is

Viva AI is a real product with genuine HIPAA compliance and real PMS integrations. Their Gold, Platinum, and Diamond tiers serve different growth stages. The Diamond Plan explicitly targets full automation across large or multi-site practices.

Their platform handles inbound calls, outbound recall campaigns, and multi-channel communication (phone, email, web chat) from a single dashboard. They report native integrations with Dentrix Ascend, CareStack, and Cloud 9, with broader PMS coverage as well. Their multilingual voice AI handles over 100 languages, which serves DSOs operating across linguistically diverse markets.

For a dental group with multiple locations and an operations team reviewing aggregate analytics, Viva is a legitimate product to evaluate. This comparison is not about quality. It is about fit.

Where the Fit Breaks Down for Solo Practices

Viva's own plan descriptions tell the story. Its homepage describes Platinum as "Full automation for most offices," and answering every call 24/7 starts on that plan, at $899 per month. The Gold plan, at $349, covers after-hours and overflow calls.

If you are a solo dentist with four operatories, you fall below their intended Platinum customer profile. You are either on the entry-level Gold tier or paying Platinum prices for capacity you will not use.

The practical problem extends beyond pricing. Enterprise products carry enterprise setup complexity. Multi-location dashboards, aggregate analytics configuration, and outbound campaign routing are not features you skip over during onboarding. They are part of how the product is structured. A solo practice owner should not have to become a platform administrator before their AI receptionist answers its first call.

ADA Health Policy Institute data shows that most U.S. dentists work in single-location practices: about 73 percent in 2024, with only about 16 percent affiliated with a DSO. Viva AI's product roadmap appears calibrated to the DSO buyer, not to the practice that represents most of the market.

When I was evaluating AI platforms before building Enamly, I kept running into the same pattern. Every enterprise dental AI tool had a version of the same message: "we work for practices of all sizes." When I dug into the actual configuration and onboarding, the product had been built and tested against the DSO reference customer. The single-location path was an edge case, not the core use case.

That observation drove every architectural decision at Enamly. Start with one practice. Make it work without ceremony. Build outward from there.

How Enamly Works for Solo and Small-Group Practices

Enamly is a dental voice AI with a live connection to your practice management system. When a patient calls, the AI checks your actual appointment schedule in real time before offering any slot.

That distinction is worth unpacking, because it is where booking accuracy lives or dies in practice.

Real-Time Schedule Access

Enamly maintains a live data connection to supported practice management systems. When a patient calls at 7 PM and asks about Wednesday at 9 AM, the AI returns the actual available slots from your Open Dental or Dentrix calendar at that moment. Provider availability, operatory blocks, custom time-slot rules, and any blocks added in the last five minutes are all reflected.

If your hygienist added a column block at 6:55 PM, the 7 PM caller will not be offered that slot. There is no sync window. No polling interval. No risk of double-booking because a walk-in filled the spot between refreshes.

For practices with complex scheduling rules (hygiene columns, specific provider availability, buffer blocks between certain appointment types), this real-time layer matters in ways that show up in your schedule by the end of the first week.

Supported PMS Systems

Enamly connects to Open Dental, Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Eaglesoft, Denticon, CareStack, and Cloud 9. The full integrations list includes activation timelines per system.

Appointments book directly into your existing PMS with no manual import, no double-entry, and no separate sync to manage. Your front desk sees the same schedule your AI receptionist is working from.

HIPAA Compliance

Both Viva AI and Enamly are HIPAA compliant and sign Business Associate Agreements with every practice. This is a baseline requirement for any dental AI in 2026, not a differentiator between vendors. The questions worth asking are who is accountable when a compliance question comes up and what the escalation path looks like. That answer differs by vendor size and team structure.

Pricing: What You Pay Before Your First Call Is Answered

Viva AI publishes its plans on its homepage: Gold at $349 per month with 4,000 credits, Platinum at $899 with 7,000 credits and Diamond at $1,199 with 12,000 credits. AI-answered calls use 10 credits per minute, and extra credits are billed per credit. DSO pricing is volume-based and quoted by Viva's sales team.

Enamly starts at $399 per month. That number is published. It covers your PMS integration, AI call handling, appointment booking, and 600 minutes of talk time per month, sized for a typical practice. Most practices never come close to it.

Use the missed-call revenue calculator to see what your current after-hours gap costs per week. Most practices handling 40 or more weekly calls find the return resolves within the first month.

Front-desk turnover is one of the most expensive staffing problems a practice has. The comparison between what a practice spends to cover gaps through staffing and what an AI receptionist costs per month is often the number that closes the evaluation.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Three Questions to Ask Before You Decide

Who is the reference customer in their demo? If every case study is an 8-location DSO or a 200-provider group, the product was built and pressure-tested against that use case. Your Open Dental single-location practice is a configuration path that was not the core design reference.

How does the PMS connection work? Ask directly: is this a live read-write connection to my PMS, or does it sync on a schedule? A sync-based integration functions, but it creates a window during which a booking confirmation may involve a slot that was just filled by another call or a walk-in. For practices with high same-day volume, that window is not theoretical.

What is your price on month one? If the answer requires a tier discussion and a sales cycle, you are in an enterprise buying process. That process has its place. But it adds weeks between "I want to try this" and "I know what I am paying," and it costs more for a practice that does not need the DSO feature set.

If You Are Currently on Viva AI

Switching to Enamly involves three steps: connecting your practice management system, setting your scheduling rules in an onboarding session, and switching on call forwarding once you have tested the agent. Enamly works with your existing phone number, so most practices never port their number at all.

The integrations page shows current PMS coverage.

The Bottom Line

Viva AI is a credible product for dental groups that need multi-location visibility, enterprise analytics, and outbound campaign management at scale. For DSOs and multi-site groups, it is worth a serious look.

For solo practitioners and small groups on Open Dental, Dentrix, or Eaglesoft, the calculation is different. You need an AI receptionist that was designed for your scale, not adapted downward from a DSO template. Enamly starts at $399 per month, connects to your PMS in real time, and starts with a 15-minute demo, with no enterprise sales cycle required.

One call after close on a Tuesday shows whether it works. That is the right bar.

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Dr. Bethel Ozumba, known as Dr. B-Bay, is the Founder and CEO of Enamly. He holds a DDS from Howard University College of Dentistry and ran his own dental practice in the Houston area before selling in 2025 to build AI infrastructure for independent practices. Connect on LinkedIn or read more at /about/dr-bbay.