We sell offline software, so take this for what it is. But talking a hospital into the wrong product wastes everybody's time and ends in a refund, so here is the comparison as straight as we can put it.
Choose cloud if
- You have more than one location and they need the same data, live
- Doctors or owners need to see figures from outside the hospital
- Your internet is genuinely reliable, including during power cuts
- You would rather pay monthly than once a year, and you want someone else responsible for backups
Choose offline if
- One location, one or two people at the counter
- The internet drops often enough that you have stories about it
- You do not want patient records held by a third party
- A predictable annual cost suits you better than a bill that grows with staff count
The part nobody mentions
With cloud software, the day you stop paying is the day you stop seeing your data. Some vendors give a grace period and an export; some do not. With software on your own machine the file is already yours — our licence gate stops new entries when it lapses, but reading, printing and exporting your existing records never stops. We wrote it that way on purpose. Locking a hospital out of its own patient records is not a business model we are willing to use.
Cost, roughly
Cloud, small clinic: ₹24,000–96,000 a year, plus per-user charges on many plans. Adhrit HMS Solo: ₹11,999 a year for the machine, no matter how many people use it. Over five years that difference buys a fair amount of equipment.
Questions we get asked
Which is more secure?
Neither, automatically. A good cloud vendor has better security engineering than any small hospital. But cloud also means your patients' records sit on someone else's server under their access controls. Offline means the risk is entirely yours to manage — a locked room and a real backup routine.
Can I move from cloud to offline later, or the other way?
Moving is mostly about whether you can get your data out. Before you sign with anyone, ask how you export everything and in what format. If the answer is vague, that is your answer.