Comparison

Why OptiFlow

Most stores do not arrive at OptiFlow from a competing product — they arrive from spreadsheets, a paper diary, a generic CRM, or a handful of separate tools that each hold a different piece of the business. Each of those ways of working has genuine strengths, and this comparison does not pretend everything is always better here. It examines one thing: how well each way of working fits an optical store — the workflows only this trade has, like a prescription that continues into an order.

Dimension	Spreadsheets & manual work	A generic CRM	Separate calendar & sales tools	A generic ERP	OptiFlow — purpose-built for optics
Optical workflows	Everything built by hand from scratch	No optical concepts at all	Each tool knows only its slice of the process	Needs costly custom work	Exams, prescriptions and work orders built in
Prescription history	Scattered across files and folders	Free-text fields, no prescription structure	Kept in none of the tools	Not a concept it has	On the customer, beside the previous one
From appointment to exam to order	Manual and duplicated	Stops after the meeting	Hand-carried between the systems	Built for the sale, not the exam	One continuous flow, no retyping
Multi-branch work	A separate file per branch	Depends on plan and setup	Every branch is its own island	Supported, usually a heavyweight rollout	One customer, one history, across all branches
Inventory, only if needed	Manual counts, if any	Usually absent	Only if the till supports it	Built in, and hard to opt out of	Optional — work with stock or without it
CRM & customer follow-up	Runs on people’s memory	Strong — it is what it is for	Split across the tools	Present as an add-on, not the centre	Wired to exams, prescriptions and orders
Role-based permissions	Everyone sees everything	Present, with no clinical distinction	Different and separate in every tool	There, and complex to configure	By role, clinical access included
Hebrew-first interface	Depends on who built the file	Often only a partial translation	Varies tool to tool	Depends on the implementation	Full right-to-left Hebrew, documents and printing included
Device & service integrations	Copied by hand from device to paper to file	No optical-device connection	Every connection is its own project	Possible, with custom development	Supported devices, point-of-sale and messaging — subject to provider and a compatibility check
Data in one place	Scattered files and versions	Only the customer side	Each tool keeps its own version of the truth	Central, but missing the clinical side	Customer, clinic and sale in one place

This comparison is about categories of tools, not specific products — deliberately. A good general-purpose tool can serve a business with no optical workflows perfectly well, and if a tidy spreadsheet does the job today, it may genuinely be the right answer for you. The difference starts to be felt as prescriptions, orders and branches multiply.

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