Comparisons
Orla vs Zanda
Zanda — formerly Power Diary — is an established practice management system with deep scheduling and communication features. Orla is newer, EU-only, and built around the clinic day rather than the record of it.
Zanda, which most people still call Power Diary, has been running clinics for years and is particularly strong on scheduling and patient communication. If it suits your practice, it suits your practice.
Orla is in build. It is recruiting build partners, not customers, and a system that has been in production for a decade will do things one in its first year does not. That is the honest starting position for this page.
Here is where the two differ by design.
A system that acts, not only records
Most practice software is very good at recording what happened: this patient came, this was charged, this note was written. Recording is genuinely hard and the mature products solved it.
What Orla adds is obligation. When a fact changes, something in the system has to act on it:
- A cancellation at 14:02 does not sit waiting to be noticed. Every waiting patient who matches the freed slot is offered it at once, and the first to tap takes it — auto-fill.
- A care plan with sessions left and nothing booked surfaces on its own, rather than waiting for somebody to run a report.
- An unsigned note is flagged rather than discovered at audit.
The argument for why that is the whole point is in why we built Orla.
Messaging that proves consent before it sends
Both systems send SMS and email. The difference in Orla is where the rule lives: the message template declares the consent it requires, in one place, and every send is checked against it. A new campaign type inherits the marketing rule automatically rather than depending on whoever added it remembering to declare it.
A send without the required consent is refused, and the refusal is recorded on the patient's thread — so "why didn't Máire get her reminder?" has an answer at the desk instead of a shrug. There is exactly one deliberate exception, a waitlist offer with a 30-minute life, and the page says so plainly.
EU-only, by construction
The application, the database and every patient file stay in the EU. Not as a region setting, but as the only place they exist. Separation between clinics is PostgreSQL row-level security applied under every query, not application code remembering to filter, and reads are journalled as well as writes.
If nobody in your practice has had to answer a question about where patient data lives, this will read as pedantry. If somebody has, it will not.
What to check before you move — including on us
Take none of this on trust. Ask any vendor, us included:
- Can you export everything, in a readable format, with no exit fee? Ours is described in exporting your data.
- Are reads logged, or only edits?
- Does a migration run as a dry run first, with counts on both sides?
- What is genuinely live today versus on a roadmap? Ask for the distinction explicitly — we will give it to you on the call rather than after you sign.
- How many practices are running it in production? Zanda's answer here is much better than ours.
Moving, if you decide to
Zanda exports CSV, and Orla reads it directly: patients, appointments, notes, documents and balances, with duplicate detection before anything is written. You run a parallel week with your existing system still live, then switch — or do not. The full process is here.
When Zanda is the better choice
- You need maturity now. Years of production use is not a feature we can match by writing code faster.
- You are outside the EU. EU-only hosting is a constraint, and outside the EU it buys you nothing.
- You rely on a specific integration or telehealth setup. Ask us about the one you actually use rather than assuming.
- You want a finished product. Being a build partner means weekly calls and honest criticism. That is a real ask, and it is not for every practice.
If shaping the thing appeals more than buying it, apply here.