Compared

ShiftCare and Astalty, compared

These are the two products providers most often tell us they are choosing between. We assessed each of them separately, against ourselves, and this page puts those two assessments side by side — which turns out to be a more useful comparison than either one alone, because the places they differ from each other are not the places either differs from us.

We are not a neutral party

We make CareOp, which competes with both of them. So read this the way you would read any comparison written by a third party with a horse in the race: check the table against their own sites before you decide anything. Every verdict below is lifted from a dated assessment, and both dates and methods are printed at the foot of the page.

What each of them leads on.

ShiftCare — The bigger name, and the broader product around the edges

ShiftCare is the largest name in this category by some distance, and their reach shows in the things neither of the other two ship: a family and participant portal, a public job board for vacant shifts, AI billing-anomaly detection in their cheapest tier, and an annual prepay discount. Their entry plan is also the cheapest of the three at nine dollars a person. If breadth around the roster matters more to you than depth inside compliance, that is a real argument and it is theirs.

Astalty — The established one, and the only one that lodges through PRODA

Astalty is the most established product of the three and the finance pipeline is where that shows. They lodge to the NDIA through PRODA rather than handing you a file to upload, they sync both ways with Xero, and they publish a genuinely free Lite plan where ShiftCare offers a seven-day trial and a five-staff minimum. They also have around fourteen hundred businesses and public reviews behind them. For a provider who de-risks a decision by looking at who else made it, that is not nothing.

Side by side, on what both were assessed for.

Every verdict here is taken from the assessment of that vendor linked at the foot of this page — not written for this table.

CapabilityShiftCareAstalty
Rostering and schedulingYesYes
Support-worker mobile appYesYes
Works offlineAstalty's teardown records no offline mode; ShiftCare's app is documented as working offline.YesNo
Reportable-incident 24-hour timersPartial for different reasons. ShiftCare's Advanced Incident Management sits in their top tier; Astalty records incidents without an escalating statutory clock.PartialPartial
Restrictive-practices registerWe could not find one in any published ShiftCare plan.NoPartial
Medications and clinical recordsShiftCare's eMAR is in their top tier. Astalty's documentation carries none of it.PartialNo
SCHADS award interpretationBoth partial. ShiftCare describes visibility before payroll; Astalty raises award alerts.PartialPartial
Audit readiness and evidence packsPartialPartial
Participant-level marginYesNo
NDIA bulk claimingBoth yes, by different routes — Astalty lodges through PRODA as an integrated pipeline.YesYes
Free or self-serve tierAstalty's Lite plan is free. ShiftCare offers a seven-day trial, then a five-staff minimum.NoYes
What is missing from that table, and why

Some rows you might expect are missing, deliberately. Each teardown was scoped against CareOp rather than against the other vendor, so several capabilities were only ever assessed for one of them — two-way Xero and STP lodgement for Astalty, the family portal, the job board, AI billing-anomaly detection and the annual discount for ShiftCare. Not finding a row is not the same as finding an absence, and we would rather leave a gap in the table than invent a finding about a named company.

And where we sit, since you are on our site.

Where we would put ourselves, and where we would not. The table shows both of them partial or absent on safeguarding, medications and the award — which is the ground we built on, so of course we would say we are ahead there. What matters more for a decision you are making today is where we are behind both of them: we do not lodge through PRODA, we export to Xero one way rather than two, we have no free tier live, and we are new enough to have no public reviews at all. Astalty has all four.

And behind ShiftCare specifically. Their cheapest plan includes AI billing-anomaly detection that we have no equivalent for at any price, and they ship a family portal, a job board and an annual discount where we ship none of the three. Their entry rate is lower than ours.

So which one should you pick?

Choose ShiftCare if…

you want the widest product around the roster, a family portal matters to the people you support, you want a public job board filling vacant shifts, or the anomaly detection in their entry tier would pay for itself. Check which tier your obligations land in before you sign — incident management and eMAR are in their top plan.

Choose Astalty if…

PRODA lodgement or two-way Xero is decisive for your finance process, you want to start on a genuinely free plan, or a long customer list and public reviews are how you sensibly de-risk picking a vendor. Check what they carry for medications if you deliver personal care.

Talk to us if…

the compliance side is what keeps you up — reportable-incident clocks that escalate on their own, a restrictive-practices register that notices a lapsed authorisation, medications on the participant record, and the SCHADS award checked and priced while the roster is still a draft. That is the part of this we built first, and the table above is the reason we did.

How and when this was checked.

ShiftCare. Assessed August 2026 from ShiftCare's own published pricing and feature pages. Their plans change; check anything decisive with them directly. Our full ShiftCare comparison →

Astalty. Assessed August 2026 from 465 pages of Astalty's own published documentation. Their product changes; check anything decisive with them directly. Our full Astalty comparison →

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