Choosing clear aligner software
Why GuideMia for orthodontics
Almost every planner can take an intraoral scan, segment the teeth, build a setup and generate aligner models. We put 8 systems against 73 criteria to find what still separates them. Every claim below links to the criterion it rests on.
What the comparison concluded
Automatic planning is no longer the differentiator. A free, open-access program automates every planning step the published review measured, and 4 of our 73 criteria are met right across the field. The value is in what happens before the setup and everything after it: planning, appliance design, production, collaboration and revision carried as one piece of work.
The published comparison stops where the work starts
The nine steps that review measured — segmentation, registration, arch curve, movement, occlusion, IPR, attachments, staging — are all planning steps. Design begins where they end. Models, trim paths, bonding guides and marking are the half a laboratory actually spends its hours on, and no column in that paper reaches them.
One GuideMia run crosses all three: setup, IPR, occlusion and staging; then aligner and arch models, attachments as geometry, bonding guides and trim paths; then case tags, laser-marking offsets and a trimmer fixture definition. The result is not an approved plan. It is a case ready to become an appliance.
Where we come out ahead, and why
Four clusters. Each names the criteria behind it, so you can read our cell and everyone else’s in the same place.
Plan against the whole tooth, not the crown
Most of this field never takes a volume at all, which is why so much of it plans from the crowns a scanner can see. GuideMia fuses CBCT, intraoral, model and facial scans into one model, segments the CBCT locally, and carries roots through every later step.
Virtual roots when there is no volume, apical centres from the CT slices when there is, root-centre travel reported as a number beside crown travel, and bone density on the root surface while the movement is simulated. You are judging where a root is going through bone, not where a crown is going through air.
The AI runs here, and so does the case
CBCT segmentation runs on your own GPU, in a two-stage local pipeline whose results cache to disk, so reopening a case skips work already done. The patient’s volume does not have to leave the building for a routine case.
That is a control question as much as a privacy one: which hardware does the work, whether the workflow depends on an upload, and whether planning continues during a service interruption. Browser access is still there when it helps — the two are complementary, not alternatives.
Tell the automation the treatment you want
Automation is only worth having when it follows clinical intent. GuideMia plans from named clinical quantities rather than a strength slider: expansion and retraction, anterior intrusion and extrusion, curve of Spee, molar vertical deviation, sagittal and coronal inclination, distalization, per-tooth IPR limits.
As those change, the crowdedness is recomputed, because expansion, protraction and distalization answer the same space question rather than three unrelated ones. You are not handed a setup to accept — the objectives that produced it stay visible and adjustable.
Your correction survives the recompute
Any system lets you drag a tooth. The question is what happens when the staging recalculates. GuideMia uses tooth-level key frames: the position you set becomes a constraint the plan must pass through, and the software re-derives the movements around it, redistributing staging and adding steps where a collision demands them.
Align key frames across several teeth to make a shared movement stage, edit the table tooth by tooth and step by step, and let collisions clear across the whole plan. Automatic staging, without surrendering the result.
Treatment is a lifecycle, and the software should expect that
Patients fall behind, attachments come off, teeth move differently than planned. GuideMia treats that as normal rather than exceptional — and separates operations most software runs together.
With a progress scan, it finds the step the patient actually reached rather than assuming the scheduled one: the number you enter is a hint, and the match can come back earlier. Without a scan, you can take step 20 as a baseline and revise what follows because you want to, not because anything went wrong.
Either way, steps already manufactured stay untouched, and movements can be added to a plan that is already finished without replanning the finished steps. Fewer remakes, and a clear line between the original plan, what actually happened, and the revision.
Own as much of the workflow as you want
Three ways in, on one engine, so growing capability never means starting again on a different platform.
ClearAligner.AI
Planning as a service. Send the case, get a design back. Start without buying production software or building a design department.
OrthoClic
The chairside edition — the same engine on an all-automatic route, for a practice that wants a plan in minutes without operating every design control.
OrthoPlus
The full clinical, design and production environment, including the unattended batch route for labs running volume.
The economics matter as much as the features. Some platforms give the planning software away and charge as each case is exported into production. GuideMia keeps those separate: planning is available as a service, and organisations bringing design and production in-house run on a subscription rather than paying again for every additional case. For a laboratory, that is a cost that stays predictable as volume grows instead of scaling with it.
The case does not have to stay on one workstation
A plan is made by one person and judged by several. Cympha Studio opens the case in a browser from a link — the referring dentist, the lab, a second opinion — with nothing installed, while the production workstation stays where the production is. A later scan shows deviation from the plan tooth by tooth.
Orthodontic and implant treatment are usually planned as separate projects even when each decision depends on the other. Here an anchorage implant is planned inside the orthodontic case, on the surgical-guide engine, with the implant-centric cross-section to read it on. When implant position depends on where the teeth are going, that is one problem.
What this is worth
Of 73 criteria, 4 are met right across the field. Arguing from those would be arguing from nothing. The value is in what the rest of the table implies about how the work runs.
Judgement stays with the clinician
The anatomy, the planning parameters, the movement limits, the staging decisions and the production assumptions are all visible and all editable. Automation speeds professional judgement up instead of hiding it.
More of the work stays in the building
Planning, appliance design, production preparation and revision happen in one workflow. The practice or laboratory keeps the capability, the control and the margin that would otherwise be sent out with the case.
Fewer handoffs to reconstruct
Patient data, clinical objectives and production settings do not get exported, explained and rebuilt in an unrelated application each time responsibility moves between clinician, lab and production.
Problems surface while they are still cheap
Segmentation, collisions, model quality, production output and treatment progress are each checked while they can still be corrected. An appliance caught before it is printed costs nothing; one caught in the chair costs a remake and a visit.
And the workflow grows with you. Begin with planning as a service, move to chairside planning, bring design and production in-house, then connect orthodontic and implant work in one environment — without changing platform at each step.
GuideMia automates and connects the whole orthodontic workflow — from the first scan through planning, appliance design, production, collaboration and revision — and keeps the clinician in control of all of it.