Compared
ShiftCare is the largest name most providers weigh us against. The difference worth understanding is not the headline rate — it is which plan your compliance obligations land in, and what the bill does once you are rostering casuals.
Assessed August 2026 from ShiftCare's own published pricing and feature pages. Their plans change; check anything decisive with them directly.
ShiftCare leads us on three things and we would rather say so plainly than have you find out later: their entry plan is $9 a person against our $11, their cheapest tier includes AI billing-anomaly detection that we have no equivalent for at any price, and they ship a family portal, a public job board and an annual discount where we ship none of the three. The table below has all of it, including the rows we lose.
ShiftCare puts Advanced Incident Management and eMAR medication tracking in Intelligence, which is $25. With us, incidents, the 24-hour reportable clocks and medication records are all in the $11 plan. A four-person provider carries exactly the same statutory duties as a four-hundred-person one, so charging a premium for meeting them is a strange way to price software in this sector.
We could not find one in any published ShiftCare plan. Ours holds the authorisation state, the link to the behaviour support plan, and a required review date the register orders by — so a practice whose authorisation has run out shows up without anyone running a report. If you use regulated restrictive practices you have to keep that register somewhere, and a spreadsheet is somewhere.
What they describe is SCHADS visibility before payroll runs. Ours checks five specific breaches while the roster is still a draft — minimum engagement, the daily cap, the rest break, the weekly cap, the broken shift — and prices each one in dollars at your own casual loading and on-costs. Seeing the problem before you publish is a different job from seeing it before you pay.
Your readiness against the Practice Standards is worked out from your actual records every time you look at it, not stored as a number somebody updated. Overnight, the database walks your obligations, expiring credentials, lapsing documents and overdue risk reviews and raises what needs a person. Then evidence packs come out on demand, and your auditor gets a read-only portal that expires by itself.
The rows we lose are in here too. If they were not, you would be right not to believe the rows we win.
| Capability | CareOp | ShiftCare |
|---|---|---|
| Rostering and scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| Worker mobile app with offline mode | Yes | Yes |
| GPS-verified clock in and out | Yes | Yes |
| NDIA bulk claimingBoth include it from the mid tier. Ours is a PACE-ready file you upload. | Partial | Yes |
| Incidents and 24-hour reportable timersTheirs is Advanced Incident Management in the $25 tier; ours is in the $11 tier. | Yes | Partial |
| Restrictive-practices registerNot listed in any published ShiftCare plan. | Yes | No |
| Medication recordsTheir eMAR is in the $25 tier. | Yes | Partial |
| Audit readiness and evidence packsThey list audit trails and documentation oversight at the top tier. | Yes | Partial |
| SCHADS award interpretationThey describe visibility before payroll rather than an interpretation engine. | Yes | Partial |
| Participant-level marginThey ship shift profitability and costing insights. | Yes | Yes |
| AI note drafting and transcriptionBoth in the base paid plan. | Yes | Yes |
| AI billing-anomaly detectionIn their cheapest tier. We have no equivalent. | No | Yes |
| Family and participant portal | No | Yes |
| Public job board for vacant shiftsWe have an open-shift pool; they advertise to a job board. | Partial | Yes |
| Annual prepay discountUp to twenty per cent. | No | Yes |
| Free tierTheirs is a seven-day trial, then a five-staff minimum. Ours is in draft pricing and not live yet — see /pricing. | No | No |
their $9 tier covers what you need and you are not claiming yet, if AI billing-anomaly detection would genuinely change your week, or if a family portal and a public job board are things you would really use rather than things that sound good.
you think incidents, medications and restrictive practices belong in the plan you actually buy rather than the one above it — or if you want the award interpreted and priced rather than made visible, and evidence assembled rather than trailed.