Compare · Hospital service
Vivetra vs. the referral, specialty & ER field
Most hospital software makes you pay per doctor, and the closest purpose-built competitor has years of track record that we, as a new vendor, simply don’t have yet. This page lays that out straight: where Vivetra’s flat-rate, managed-hosting model genuinely beats the field, and where an established competitor or an open-source project is the honest better fit. Available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
$200/mo covers shared-core plus your first service — unlimited doctors and staff, fully managed hosting included in that price, not a footnote. Each additional service adds +$50/mo to the same monthly bill.
This is Vivetra’s own comparison. We compiled it from each vendor’s public materials; all product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners, who are not affiliated with and do not endorse Vivetra. Feature and pricing details on this page were verified as of August 23, 2026.
Software changes fast, and we’d rather fix a mistake than defend one. Spot something wrong or out of date? Report an inaccuracy. We correct confirmed inaccuracies within 5 business days.
The Hospital comparison, side by side
Vivetra against every named competitor in this segment. The pricing and fit notes below are our category-level assessment; only the two claims in the sourced-claims table carry a citation.
| Product | Pricing model | Flat price, any headcount? | Managed hosting | ER / specialty depth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vivetra (Hospital service) | $200/mo for shared-core + your first service, +$50/mo per additional service | Yes — the price never changes with headcount | Yes — included in the price; you never touch a server | Purpose-built: triage-acuity ward board, treatment-conflict detection, controlled-substance logging, real-time treatment sheets |
| Instinct Science | Quote-based; no public figure | Not published as flat/unlimited | Yes — hosted SaaS | Purpose-built ER/specialty EMR — the closest direct competitor and the category benchmark |
| ezyVet | Per-user monthly; no public figure | No — priced per user | Yes — hosted SaaS | General-practice platform stretched to hospital use |
| Vetspire | Per-DVM monthly; no public figure | No — priced per DVM | Yes — hosted SaaS | General-practice-oriented (Pathway-owned; has an AI-scribe feature) |
| ImproMed / Avimark | Legacy license + annual support (per vendor) | No — license plus per-seat | Varies — on-premise or hosted | Broad general-practice suite, not ER-first |
| eVetPractice / Covetrus Pulse | Per-user cloud subscription | No — priced per user | Yes — hosted SaaS | Broad general-practice cloud PMS |
| Shepherd | Per-user cloud subscription | No — priced per user | Yes — hosted SaaS | Built for small general practices — weak fit, no real ER tooling |
| Hippo Manager | Per-user cloud subscription | No — priced per user | Yes — hosted SaaS | Small-practice PMS — weak fit, no ER tooling |
| VetBlue | Per-user cloud subscription | No — priced per user | Yes — hosted SaaS | General-practice-oriented cloud PMS |
| Provet Cloud | Per-vet + monthly platform fee | No — priced per vet | Yes — hosted SaaS | General-practice / multi-site cloud PMS |
| OpenVPM (openvpm.com) | Free to self-host; no per-user fees (see sourced claim below) | Yes — unlimited staff, no per-user fees | Self-hosted (you run the server) or their own hosting | Community-maintained, general-purpose open-source project |
Every sourced claim on this page
These are the specific competitor facts we cite — each shown with its exact wording, its status, and a link to the source we retrieved it from, verified as of August 23, 2026. Everything else on this page is category-level characterisation, not a sourced assertion.
| Competitor | Claim (as verified) | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instinct Science | ~90-second average 24/7 live support response time | verified |
View source for Instinct Science (opens in new tab)
Retrieved July 23, 2026 |
| OpenVPM (openvpm.com, NOT openvpms.org) | free to self-host, unlimited staff, no per-user fees | verified |
View source for OpenVPM (openvpm.com, NOT openvpms.org) (opens in new tab)
Retrieved July 23, 2026 |
| Provet Cloud | Referral Portal — a native (non-add-on) referral-hospital feature: referral centers create intake forms and define departments, clinics, and referral-types; referring vets share notes, DICOM images, and results through one portal across the referral lifecycle to discharge | verified |
View source for Provet Cloud (opens in new tab)
Retrieved August 2, 2026 |
| ezyVet | markets itself for "UK Primary Care, Emergency and Specialty referral" — positions emergency/specialty referral as a distinct served segment, not general practice only | verified |
View source for ezyVet (opens in new tab)
Retrieved August 2, 2026 |
| ezyVet | founded in New Zealand (Auckland HQ, est. 2006), states it is built to "run Primary Care, Emergency, Specialty and University veterinary practices"; IDEXX-owned since 2021 | verified |
View source for ezyVet (opens in new tab)
Retrieved August 2, 2026 |
| Vet Radar | Auckland, New Zealand-origin hospital patient-care tool (electronic treatment sheet + digital whiteboard for hospitalized-patient treatment, charting, and monitoring, incl. referral/emergency caseloads); integrates with practice-management systems; IDEXX-owned | verified |
View source for Vet Radar (opens in new tab)
Retrieved August 2, 2026 |
Where Vivetra genuinely wins for a hospital
One flat price, any headcount
A twelve-doctor overnight ER pays the same base price as a three-doctor referral clinic. Add a fourth overnight doctor or a second surgery team and the number above doesn’t move — no per-seat quote, no headcount to report. That’s the opposite of the per-user and per-DVM models the rest of this table runs on.
Managed hosting, no server ops
Vivetra’s hosting is fully managed for you — Vivetra operates the deployment as part of the monthly price. Your team never patches an OS, never restores a backup, never touches a server. That’s the concrete difference from OpenVPM’s run-your-own-server path, where all of that is your job.
ER-grade depth on shared-core
A triage-acuity ward board, automatic treatment-conflict detection, controlled-substance logging, and real-time treatment sheets — on the same patient record and billing system as every other Vivetra service, not a general-practice product stretched to cover a hospital floor.
What the pet owner sees while their animal is with you
A referral or ER stay is the moment an owner most wants information and is least able to ask for it. Vivetra ships a client portal for exactly that, reading from the same record your floor is working in.
- Live hospitalization status. The owner can see that their animal is admitted and where the stay stands, without a receptionist relaying it between treatments.
- Medical records, vaccine history, and lab results they can download. Results and history are available to the owner directly — and downloadable, so a referring vet or a second opinion gets a real file instead of a phone call.
- Discharge instructions that don’t get left in the car. The discharge write-up stays in the portal, so the person medicating at 2 a.m. is reading the actual instructions rather than remembering them.
- Remote e-approval of estimates. An owner who is at work, or three hours away, can approve a revised estimate from their phone — so treatment isn’t waiting on a signature that has to happen in your lobby.
- Appointment and refill requests. Recheck and refill requests arrive as requests your team approves, rather than as another round of voicemail.
- And a print/scan-back paper path for the clients who want one. This is the unusual one, and it’s deliberate: every client-facing document can be printed, filled in by hand, and scanned back into the same record. “Our clients aren’t tech-savvy” is a fair objection to a portal, and most software in this field answers it by shrugging. Vivetra answers it by letting the paper route be a first-class path that lands in the same chart as the digital one.
Where we’re honest about the gaps
No comparison is worth reading if it only lists the wins. Here are the places a competitor — or an open-source project — may be the better call for your hospital. We’d rather you hear it from us.
- Instinct Science has a track record we don’t. This is our weakest flank in this service, and we’ll say it plainly: Instinct is a purpose-built ER/specialty EMR that has spent years earning trust on hospital floors exactly like yours, with a vendor-stated average 24/7 live support response time of about 90 seconds (see the sourced-claims table above). Vivetra is a new vendor; we do not have years of hospital-floor support history or a comparable published support SLA behind us yet. If a long, proven ER support relationship is your top priority today, weigh that seriously.
- OpenVPM can be cheaper — if you run your own server. OpenVPM (openvpm.com specifically — a different project from a similarly-named, subscription-gated one) is free to self-host with unlimited staff and no per-user fees — the closest pricing shape to ours in the whole segment. For a practice with the in-house IT capacity to run, patch, and back up its own server, that can genuinely cost less than Vivetra. What you trade for our price is that we run all of it for you and back it with vendor support, versus a community-maintained project you operate yourself.
- You bring your own Stripe account — and there’s a platform fee. Clients pay bills and estimates online through a Stripe account that belongs to your hospital, so you keep your own Stripe relationship and your own processing rates and the money lands in your account, not ours. On top of Stripe’s own rate there is a small Vivetra platform fee. If your hospital would rather not use Stripe at all, that part of the product won’t suit you. (This is unrelated to how you pay us for the subscription.)
- We’re new and unproven next to the incumbents. ezyVet, Vetspire, ImproMed/Avimark and the rest have years in the field. Vivetra doesn’t. If a long reference list and a decade of uptime history are decisive for you, that’s a real reason to choose an established vendor — and a fair one.
Common questions
Where do the numbers in this comparison come from?
Every source-linked claim on this page comes from a single internally-maintained dataset that stores the exact claim, its source URL, and the date we retrieved it. For the Hospital service that dataset holds two verified claims — Instinct Science's vendor-stated support response time and OpenVPM's free-to-self-host, no-per-user-fees model — and each is shown with its source. Any dollar range marked "approx." (for example ezyVet or Vetspire per-seat pricing) is an approximation drawn from vendor and third-party materials, not part of that verified dataset, and is labelled as such.
Is Vivetra really the best choice for a hospital or ER?
Honestly, it depends. Instinct Science is a purpose-built ER/specialty EMR with years of hospital-floor track record and a vendor-stated ~90-second average 24/7 support response time — a real, earned advantage a brand-new vendor like us has not matched yet. Where Vivetra wins is the pricing model: one flat monthly price, unlimited doctors and staff, managed hosting included, on the same shared-core deployment as every other service. If your priority is a long, proven ER support relationship today, weigh that seriously. If it's flat, predictable, headcount-proof pricing with hosting you never have to run, that's us.
How is this different from OpenVPM, which is free?
OpenVPM (openvpm.com specifically — a different project from a similarly-named, subscription-gated open-source product) is genuinely the closest pricing shape to ours: free to self-host, unlimited staff, no per-user fees. If your practice has the IT capacity to run its own server, patch the OS, and restore its own backups, OpenVPM can be cheaper than Vivetra — we're not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is that Vivetra's architecture is fully managed for you (Vivetra operates the deployment as part of the price, so nobody on your staff touches a server), and it ships ER-grade clinical depth backed by a vendor support relationship rather than a community-maintained project.
What do our clients actually get, and what if they won't use a portal?
The client portal shows hospitalization status, medical records, vaccine history, discharge instructions, and lab results they can download, and it takes appointment requests, refill requests, and remote e-approval of estimates — so an owner three hours away can approve a revised estimate from their phone instead of your treatment waiting on a signature in the lobby. They can also pay bills and estimates online, and save a card, through a Stripe account that belongs to your hospital: you keep your own Stripe relationship and rates, the money lands in your account, and a small Vivetra platform fee applies on top of Stripe's own rate. And for the clients who genuinely won't use a portal, every client-facing document can be printed, filled in by hand, and scanned back into the same record — the paper route is a first-class path, not an apology.
Can I dispute something on this page?
Yes — please do. This is Vivetra's own comparison, compiled from public vendor materials, and we'd rather fix a mistake than defend one. Email [email protected] and we correct confirmed inaccuracies within 5 business days.
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Shopping from the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand? See the UK & Ireland comparison or the Australia & New Zealand comparison.