Practo built its name on patient-facing appointment booking, and Ray extends that into clinic practice management. OneCity is built for running the hospital itself — wards, ICU, OT, pharmacy, blood bank — as one connected operation. Here's the honest comparison, dimension by dimension.
Practo Technologies was founded in Bengaluru in 2008 and has raised roughly $231 million across its funding history. Company profile and funding data are tracked independently by Tracxn. Its core consumer product connects patients with doctors for appointment booking, video consultations and diagnostic test bookings — a marketplace, not a hospital operating system. Practo's own product page for Ray describes it as clinic management software: appointment scheduling, electronic medical records, SMS alerts, billing and a payment solution that charges a transaction fee of 1.8-2.0% plus GST per patient payment collected. Independent review aggregators such as Capterra list its core use cases as practice management, clinic management and EMR for individual doctors and small clinics, and its publicly listed top competitors — Adysoft, MyOPD, Smart Clinic — are all solo-practice and small-clinic tools, which is a reasonable signal of which market Ray is actually built and sold for.
Practo does describe broader "Enterprise Solutions" aimed at hospitals in its marketing language — hospital information systems, EHR, patient engagement, analytics — but this line of business is far less documented publicly than Ray, with no published feature depth comparable to what a tier-2/3 hospital would need to evaluate for IPD, ICU, OT or NABH-specific documentation. Practo also does not publish a simple base subscription price for Ray; getting a number requires a sales conversation, and the transaction-fee structure on the payment product is one of the few cost components made public.
Practo's second major product, Practo Consult, is a telemedicine platform layered on top of the same appointment infrastructure, letting doctors run video consultations rather than in-person visits. It gained significant adoption during the COVID-19 period when remote care became a necessity rather than a convenience, and it remains part of Practo's core offering today. Both Ray and Consult share the same underlying design assumption: a single doctor or a small group practice managing their own patient relationships, not a multi-department institution coordinating dozens of staff across wards, an OT, a pharmacy and a lab simultaneously.
None of this makes Practo a weak product — its consumer network and appointment infrastructure are genuinely large and well-established, which is exactly why a fair comparison has to be specific about what each product was actually built to do, rather than treating "hospital software" as one undifferentiated category.
| Dimension | Practo Ray | OneCity |
|---|---|---|
| Core design point | Individual doctor / solo clinic appointment & billing | Multi-department tier-2/3 hospital |
| Patient acquisition marketplace | Yes — Practo's consumer app and doctor-discovery network | No — OneCity is operational software, not a patient marketplace |
| IPD / bed management | Not a documented feature area | Live bed board, admission-to-discharge tracking |
| ICU charting | Not a documented feature area | Ventilator settings, hourly vitals, APACHE/SOFA scoring |
| OT scheduling & WHO checklist | Not a documented feature area | Digitised Sign In / Time Out / Sign Out, implant tracking |
| Blood bank & dialysis | Not a documented feature area | Dedicated modules for both |
| NABH-structured documentation | Not a documented focus | Discharge summaries and quality indicators built to NABH structure |
| PMJAY / ABDM integration | Not documented for Ray specifically | ABHA linkage, claims-ready admission data |
| Published pricing | No base price public; sales conversation required; 1.8-2.0%+GST payment transaction fee | Transparent tiers from ₹999, self-serve "Start free" |
| Founded | 2008, Bengaluru | 2009, Bengaluru |
Fair comparison means naming this directly: if what you actually need is patient acquisition — getting discovered by patients searching for a doctor in your specialty — Practo's consumer network is a real asset that no hospital ERP, including OneCity, replicates. A solo dermatologist or a small single-specialty clinic whose main bottleneck is filling the appointment book, not running a multi-ward inpatient operation, may get more practical value from Practo Ray's marketplace visibility than from a system built around ICU charting and blood bank registers they don't operate.
This is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a lesser concern. Patient volume is the top-line input every other hospital metric depends on — occupancy, revenue, staffing needs, all of it. A hospital with excellent operational software but no patients to admit has a worse problem than a hospital with average software and a full bed board. The two concerns aren't in competition with each other; they're sequential. Acquisition gets a patient to your door. Operations software determines what happens once they're there, and how well that experience is documented for accreditation, insurance and legal purposes afterward.
It's also worth noting that the two products operate at different layers of the technology stack entirely, which is part of why direct feature-for-feature comparison only goes so far. Practo's marketplace layer sits in front of the hospital, facing outward toward patients searching the internet. OneCity's ERP layer sits inside the hospital, facing the staff who run it day to day. A hospital could, in principle, use both without any real conflict between them — Practo for the front door, OneCity for everything that happens after a patient walks through it.
The distinction is about what kind of buyer you are, not which product is objectively better. A hospital running inpatient beds, a pharmacy, and pursuing NABH accreditation has an entirely different operational surface than a solo practitioner's appointment book, and that's the surface OneCity is built for.
Feature lists are abstract. A concrete scenario is more useful: a patient is admitted for a scheduled procedure, spends three days on a general ward, one night in the ICU post-operatively, and is discharged with a follow-up plan.
On a system built around Ray's OPD-centric design, that admission is largely outside the product's documented scope — there is no published bed board, no ICU vitals charting, no OT checklist, no discharge-summary structure tied to NABH's format. A hospital using Practo for its front-desk appointment scheduling would need a separate system, or a manual paper process, for everything from admission onward.
On OneCity, the same admission moves through one connected record: the IPD and bed management module tracks the ward stay and bed status in real time; the ICU management module handles the post-operative night with hourly vitals and ventilator charting if needed; the OT scheduling module runs the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for the procedure itself; and discharge produces a NABH-structured summary pulled directly from the admission record, not retyped from scratch. That's the difference a feature table doesn't fully capture: whether the hospital's actual clinical pathway lives inside one system or gets stitched together across several.
Because Practo doesn't publish a base Ray subscription price, a fair cost comparison has to include the one component that is public: the Payment Solution's 1.8-2.0% plus GST transaction fee on patient payments collected through the platform. For a hospital processing meaningful patient billing volume, that percentage-of-revenue fee compounds differently than a flat subscription — it scales up as the hospital grows, rather than staying predictable. OneCity's pricing is published in tiers starting from ₹999, with a free self-serve tier to start and evaluate before committing, which is a structurally different cost model: predictable and disclosed upfront rather than requiring a sales conversation to discover.
Our full hospital management software pricing guide breaks down what to actually ask any vendor — including Practo — before signing, beyond just the headline number.
A question worth asking before committing to any platform, Practo or otherwise: what happens to your patient data if you switch systems in three years? We've written in detail about vendor lock-in and data ownership for exactly this reason — a system built around consumer appointment booking and a system built around clinical operations tend to structure their exportable data very differently, and it's worth confirming export terms in writing rather than assuming.
If you're evaluating this comparison on behalf of a hospital group running more than one facility, the relevant question shifts again. Practo's marketplace model is inherently per-doctor and per-clinic — there is no documented mechanism for a group to see consolidated bed occupancy, staff rosters, or OT utilization across sites from Ray. This is a structural consequence of what the product was built for, not a missing feature that might get added. Our note on multi-location hospital ERP for chains and groups covers what a group actually needs from a system built to operate across facilities rather than within one clinic.
It would be dishonest to frame this comparison as simply "OneCity does more." Practo's core strength — patient discovery — is not a feature a hospital ERP can replicate by adding a module. Practo has spent since 2008 building a consumer-facing network where patients actively search for doctors, read reviews, and book appointments; that network effect is the product of many years of consumer-side investment, and it genuinely helps solo practitioners and small clinics generate new patient volume in a way that pure operational software cannot.
The honest framing is this: OneCity and Practo Ray answer different questions. "How do I get more patients to discover and book with me" is Practo's question. "How do I run my hospital's wards, OT, pharmacy and billing as one connected, NABH-ready operation" is OneCity's question. A hospital that genuinely has both needs might reasonably use a patient-acquisition tool for its top-of-funnel marketing alongside operational software like OneCity for actually running the facility — the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, they're just answering different parts of the business.
India's hospital regulatory environment is not optional reading — NABH accreditation, PC-PNDT compliance for any facility doing ultrasound, biomedical waste rules, PMJAY empanelment requirements, and ABDM integration are all real operational obligations for a functioning hospital, each with its own documentation requirements. None of these appear in Practo's public feature documentation for Ray, which makes sense given Ray's design center is appointment scheduling and billing for a clinic, not compliance-grade documentation for a licensed inpatient facility.
OneCity's module set is explicitly built around this regulatory reality: NABH-structured discharge summaries, a dedicated biomedical waste management module, ABHA-linked patient registration, and PMJAY claims-ready admission data. This isn't a case of OneCity having "more modules" as a marketing checkbox — it reflects the fact that a licensed hospital in India has compliance obligations a solo clinic's appointment book was never designed to carry.
Everything above is drawn from Practo's own published product pages and independent third-party review aggregators, not from assumptions about what Practo "probably" does. Where Practo's public documentation doesn't cover something — hospital-grade IPD tracking, for instance — we've said exactly that: not documented, rather than claiming it doesn't exist at all. If Practo's enterprise hospital product has capabilities beyond what's publicly documented, that's a fair question to put directly to a Practo sales representative during your own evaluation, and we'd encourage exactly that rather than taking any vendor's comparison page, including this one, as the final word.
The same standard applies in reverse: if you're evaluating OneCity, ask us to show the specific module relevant to your hospital's actual operations — bed management, ICU charting, OT scheduling, blood bank — live, rather than taking a feature list at face value. A comparison page is a starting point for the questions worth asking, not a substitute for asking them.
Strip away the feature table and the pricing detail, and this comparison reduces to one question: what is the actual bottleneck in your hospital right now? If patients aren't finding you, that's an acquisition problem, and Practo's marketplace addresses it directly. If patients are finding you but your ward, OT and pharmacy operations are running on paper, spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group between shifts, that's an operations problem, and it's the one OneCity is built to solve.
Most tier-2/3 hospitals we talk to have already solved the acquisition problem to a reasonable degree — they have a steady patient base, often built over years of local reputation and referral relationships that predate any software decision. Their actual daily pain is almost always operational: a bed board that's really just a whiteboard, a discharge summary that takes hours to compile from scattered notes, an OT schedule managed by phone calls between the nursing station and the surgeon's office. That's the specific gap this comparison is really about, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which gap your hospital actually has before choosing based on either vendor's marketing.
If you're not sure which bottleneck applies to you, a simple internal exercise helps: count how many hours per week your front desk spends on the phone trying to schedule new patients versus how many hours your nursing and administrative staff spend reconciling paper records, chasing discharge summaries, or manually compiling data for a compliance report. Whichever number is larger tells you which problem to solve first — and which of these two products, or possibly both together, actually addresses it.
If yes, ask any vendor — including Practo — for a live demo of admission-to-discharge bed tracking specifically, not just OPD scheduling.
Ask to see a discharge summary generated by the system and check whether it follows NABH's structure natively or would need to be reformatted by staff.
If it's acquisition, weigh Practo's consumer network seriously. If it's running the hospital itself — wards, OT, pharmacy, billing as one system — that's a different evaluation entirely.
Get Practo's full commercial structure, including the payment transaction fee, in writing before comparing it against OneCity's published tiers.
For the wider evaluation, our guide to choosing a hospital ERP for tier-2 and tier-3 hospitals covers the full checklist beyond just this one comparison.
One more practical test worth running during any demo: ask to see the exact same admission-to-discharge scenario walked through end to end, on camera, not described in slides. A vendor confident in its own product will happily show a live bed assignment, a live ICU chart entry, a live discharge summary generation — the actual screens, not a narrated feature list. If a vendor can't show that walkthrough for a genuine multi-day inpatient stay, that's informative in itself, regardless of which vendor it is.
Not primarily. Practo's core products are a patient-facing appointment and doctor-discovery marketplace, and Practo Ray, a practice management tool aimed at individual doctors and small clinics. Practo markets broader "Enterprise Solutions" toward hospitals, but this is far less publicly documented than Ray, with no published feature depth for IPD, ICU, OT, or NABH-specific documentation.
It is not a documented feature area for Ray. Ray's public feature set centers on appointment scheduling, EMR, billing, and inventory for outpatient-style clinic operations, not multi-ward inpatient tracking.
Practo does not publish a simple base subscription price for Ray; getting a number requires a sales conversation. One publicly disclosed cost component is the Payment Solution's 1.8-2.0% plus GST transaction fee. OneCity publishes transparent pricing tiers starting from ₹999, with a free self-serve tier to start.
If your main bottleneck is patient acquisition — getting discovered by patients searching for a doctor in your specialty — rather than running multi-department hospital operations, Practo's consumer marketplace is a genuine asset that a hospital ERP doesn't replicate.
No. OneCity is operational software for running a hospital — IPD, ICU, OT, pharmacy, billing, compliance — not a consumer marketplace for patients to discover and book doctors.
Running a tier-2/3 hospital and want to see IPD, ICU and OT in one connected system?
Book a demo