Comparison
ChairGap vs Weave
Weave suits an office that wants phones, messaging, and patient touches on one vendor, while ChairGap suits an owner who mainly wants tomorrow's hygiene column full.
Comparison
ChairGap vs Lighthouse 360: Automation or Worked List
Lighthouse 360 fits an office that wants reminders and confirmations handled automatically, while ChairGap fits an office whose problem is the patients with no appointment at all.
The short answer
Lighthouse 360 is dental specific and built to run in the background off your practice management system, sending the reminders and confirmations that keep booked patients showing up. That is a different job from the one ChairGap does. ChairGap targets patients who have nothing on the books, ages them by hygiene recall interval, and gives you a short daily list to text against tomorrow's open chair time. If confirmations are your leak, automate them. If empty hygiene hours are your leak, work the overdue list.
ChairGap and Lighthouse 360 side by side
| What you are deciding | ChairGap | Lighthouse 360 |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Fill open hygiene chairs from patients who have no appointment | Keep booked dental patients confirmed and reminded automatically |
| Patient it targets | The overdue patient with nothing scheduled and no reason to call | The scheduled patient who needs a nudge before the appointment |
| Mode of work | A short list a person works each morning against real open time | Background automation running off the practice management schedule |
| Recall handling | Overdue aging by hygiene interval with same week gap fill built around it | Recall messaging sits inside a wider automated communication set |
| Who it suits | One to three chair owners who want to see and choose who gets texted | Offices that want messaging handled without daily attention |
| Visibility | You see the list, pick the patients, and send the offer yourself | Messaging runs to configured rules rather than a daily human pass |
| Pricing shape | Flat monthly tiers, Solo Chair $39, Practice $79, Multi Site $149 | Pricing you should confirm with the vendor before comparing options |
Everything in the right hand column describes the general shape and intent of Lighthouse 360 as a product category, not a priced feature list. Products change, so check the current details with them before you decide. ChairGap is published by MLJ, SASU and this page is written by Jimenez Julien.
Choose ChairGap when
- Your confirmations are already fine but the hygiene column still has holes in it.
- Yesterday's cancellation left ninety minutes open tomorrow and you need a person seated in it.
- You want to choose which overdue patients get the offer rather than letting a rule decide.
- Your overdue list has grown past a few hundred names and needs to be worked down deliberately.
Choose Lighthouse 360 when
- Broken appointments and no shows are your main leak, not empty recall time.
- You want messaging that runs without anyone in the office thinking about it daily.
- You prefer one dental vendor tied closely to the practice management system you already run.
Two different leaks in a hygiene schedule
A hygiene column loses production two ways. Booked patients fail to show or cancel late, and patients who should be booked never get scheduled at all. Automated reminders and confirmations attack the first leak well, and an office with a high broken appointment rate should fix that before anything else.
The second leak is quieter and larger in most small practices. Patients finish a visit, do not preschedule, drift past their interval, and stop being visible to any system that works from the schedule. They never appear in a reminder queue because there is nothing to remind them about. Working that population is what ChairGap is for.
Automation you trust versus a list you look at
Background automation is the right answer when the rules are stable and the volume is high. Confirm two days out, remind the morning of, ask again if there is no reply. Nobody needs to think about it, and a dental specific tool tied to your practice management system can run that quietly for years.
Reactivation resists that treatment. Whether you should text a patient who has been gone eighteen months depends on why they left, whether they still have unscheduled treatment, whether their benefits reset in January, and whether you have chair time worth offering them. A person looking at a short list makes better calls than a rule, especially in an office with one or two hygiene chairs.
Working the two together
The clean division of labor is simple. Let automation own everything about appointments that already exist, and let a worked list own everything about appointments that do not. If a patient books from a ChairGap text, your reminder system picks them up the same as any other appointment and takes it from there.
The only real conflict is duplicate messaging. Before you add a second sender, check whether your existing system has a recall or reactivation message switched on, and decide which tool owns the overdue patient. Patients notice when two systems in one office text them about the same cleaning in the same week.
Questions people ask before they choose
Does ChairGap send appointment reminders and confirmations?
No. ChairGap works the overdue side, not the scheduled side. If you need confirmations, keep the tool that sends them or use what your practice management system offers, and let ChairGap handle patients with nothing booked.
Will patients get texts from two different systems?
Only if both are configured to message the same patients. Turn off any reactivation or recall message in your other system when you start with ChairGap, and let each tool own one clear population.
Is a worked list slower than automation?
It takes a person a few minutes a day, which is the trade. In exchange you decide who gets offered which opening, and you can aim the good slots at patients with unscheduled treatment or expiring benefits rather than sending the same message to everyone.
Other comparisons on chairgap.com
Comparison
ChairGap vs Solutionreach
Solutionreach fits a practice that wants one engagement platform across many patient touches, while ChairGap fits the owner who wants the overdue hygiene list worked before tomorrow.
See the same numbers on your own dental practice
Send us the way you run it today and we will walk through what ChairGap changes, what it leaves alone and what the first month looks like.