Care Centre vs Breathe HR

Care Centre brings together rota planning, time and attendance, leave, timesheets and payroll information, HR onboarding and compliance, policies, staff communication and recognition, staff, resident and family surveys, and maintenance management, connected through a single staff record and staff app.

Breathe's core plans cover employee records, holiday and absence, unlimited document storage with e-signature, onboarding checklists, performance and reporting for a flat monthly fee, with Rota, Time & Attendance, Learn, Recruitment, Expenses and Health and Safety as add-ons and the Breathe – People Portal app for employees on iOS and Android.

For an organisation whose main requirement is HR administration, this may provide everything required.

In residential care, HR records also serve as evidence of safe recruitment and continuing compliance.

Care Centre provides configurable standard onboarding covering DBS checks, right-to-work documentation, references and training certificates, which new employees complete from their phone, including document capture, and which managers approve item by item or return. A compliance matrix shows every employee against every step for each home; documents with expiry dates generate advance reminders at a lead time set for each document; and policies are version-controlled with acknowledgement records.

Breathe provides employee records, unlimited document storage with e-signature, onboarding checklists tailored by role, department or location with a portal for the new starter, document expiry notifications, and policy acknowledgements with read-receipts covering safeguarding, infection control and whistleblowing, alongside appraisal and goal workflows, applicant tracking and training courses. Its healthcare page presents these with right-to-work checks in the context of CQC compliance. Based on available information, a compliance matrix for each home, onboarding completed by scanning documents on a phone, and a per-document reminder lead time are not described.

For organisations already satisfied with records and document control, this approach may be suitable.

Group standards need to hold while individual homes work to their own staffing requirements.

In Care Centre, settings are established at company level and configured per home: role levels, leave limits by role, staffing budgets, pay rates and wage visibility, clock-in settings and terminals, shift claim, swap and drop rules with their notice periods, onboarding requirements and maintenance approvers. Employees working across several homes use one staff record and login, and managers move between homes in the same system.

Breathe manages offices, departments or regions within a single account, filters reports and calendars by location, and tailors onboarding by location; based on available information, company-level rules with per-home overrides are not described, and published bands reach 151–200 people.

Care home rotas need to account for roles, skills, contracted hours, availability, leave and staffing budgets, not only headcount on a shift.

Care Centre plans rotas around care roles such as nurses, senior carers and carers, with the required skill mix visible alongside allocated hours. Contracted hours are tracked against individual staff members; holidays, days off and availability are considered during planning; Working Time requirements form part of the rota rules, including individual opt-outs; and bank and agency workers sit within the same rota.

Breathe's rota add-on provides drag-and-drop planning with roles and shift times, recurring shifts, saved templates, availability by role, leave drawn from the HR record, clash alerts, swaps, and events with forecast sales. An hours budget by care role, contracted-hours tracking and Working Time rules are not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre builds budgets into the rota using hours per role, per day, per home, and homes can restrict the rota to the agreed budget, so a shift beyond a role's allocated hours is prevented rather than flagged. Dropped hours return to the budget, and the resulting open shift can be offered to suitable staff, who claim it from the app subject to approval and the home's notice rules. Published shifts are sent to employees through the app for confirmation.

Breathe provides the Salary Forecaster, which forecasts wage cost by day or week once shifts are planned. For homes that mainly want to forecast staffing cost this is a straightforward approach; Care Centre is structured around care-role hours and budgets together.

Care Centre allows staff to clock in at a shared tablet within the home or on their own phone within a defined location, with a photograph at clock-in where required. Whether an employee may clock in without a rostered shift is a setting that can allow, block or hold the clocking for approval, and managers are alerted when a scheduled employee has not clocked in or a clock-out is missed. Additional time is held for approval before counting as overtime, timesheet status is shown visually, and payroll periods can be weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly, monthly or 4-4-5, with the period locked and exported as CSV or XLSX, including a Moneysoft-ready format. These functions are included within CareRota.

Breathe provides Timeclock on a tablet or computer in the workplace, or through the People Portal app; organisations set how early staff may clock in and the lateness allowed, unique logins discourage buddy punching, and timesheets are approved in one click. Payroll information is exported as four CSV files, with a Xero payroll integration. Based on available information, a clock-in radius, a setting for clock-ins without a rostered shift, alerts for a rostered employee who has not clocked in, and additional time held for approval are not described.

Care Centre shows employees their remaining entitlement in days or hours and allows requests from their phone; once approved, leave updates the rota, timesheet and payroll information. Homes can limit how many people within particular roles are away at once, with those limits set across a group and adjusted per home.

Breathe includes holiday and absence management in every plan, with allowances, calendars, one-click approvals, sickness trends, fit notes and trigger points. A role-based leave limit per site, and leave feeding directly into timesheets and payroll information, are not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre includes internal communication and employee recognition within the same staff app. Colleagues can be recognised against organisational values, with monthly champions shown in the app; homes can publish news, events, polls and priority messages, including posts requiring acknowledgement; and one-to-one and group chat provides a workplace alternative to personal messaging services such as WhatsApp.

Posts can include photographs, uploaded video and YouTube or Vimeo links, so a home can share an event, a celebration or news from the home with the whole team. Recognition can be given as a thank-you, a star, congratulations, a work-anniversary message or employee of the month, and chat messages can include photographs.

Breathe provides Kudos, including a leaderboard, within the People Portal app; a company feed with priority posts and in-app chat are not described. Recognition is therefore available on both platforms, and the difference is largely one of setting.

Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside resident and family surveys, distributed by QR poster and scheduled email invitation. Results can be analysed using AI for sentiment, themes, differences between groups of respondents and year-on-year movement within the same home, with quotations and recommendations, and findings can become action plans in a You said · We said · We did format with owners, dates and reminders. Short pulse questions can be asked at clock-out between surveys.

Breathe provides an employee NPS, a single anonymous and customisable question, and Polls & Surveys within Performance Management, with templates and anonymity options; both are available on Regular plans and above, from 21 people. Resident and family surveys, QR distribution, AI analysis of responses and an action-planning format are not described.

Care Centre also extends beyond people management into the operation of the home. Maintenance requests can be submitted with photographs, scheduled checks organised by room or asset, and the platform holds an asset register and records for fire, gas, electrical, PAT, LOLER and legionella compliance, with a view organised around Regulations 12 and 15.

Breathe offers a Health and Safety add-on covering risk assessments, accidents and near misses, safety roles, and training and certifications. Maintenance requests, scheduled checks and an asset register are not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre uses AI selectively within administrative and communication tasks rather than operational decisions, assisting with recognition messages, survey creation, survey analysis and staff-data import. According to Care Centre, personal information is redacted before relevant import processing and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI model. AI is deliberately not used for rotas, clocking, payroll or leave, where configured rules remain in control, and AI credits are included in the price.

Breathe AI is available in early access as an assistant that answers employees' questions from an organisation's own policies, and Breathe describes itself as moving towards an AI-first platform.

The platforms use different pricing structures. Care Centre is priced per registered bed rather than per employee. Current pricing is:

• CareRota: £6 per bed per month
• CareHR: £6 per bed per month
• People Management Platform: £10 per bed per month
• Setup: £0
• Contract: monthly rolling with 30 days' notice

The full platform combines CareRota and CareHR with additional functionality, including CareChat and CareMaintenance. Staffing numbers therefore do not affect the price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees is charged for 60 beds rather than 80 users.

Breathe charges a flat monthly fee for the business rather than per person, in published bands excluding VAT: from about £24 a month for 1–10 people, through £44 for 11–20, £99 for 21–50, £175 for 51–100 and £419 for 101–150, to £579 for 151–200, the top published band. Rota, Time & Attendance is from about £11 a month, with Health and Safety at £12, Expenses at £14, Learn at £15 and Recruitment at £16. Discounts are available for annual payment, and the subscription can be cancelled at any time.

On cash alone, Breathe is therefore less expensive than Care Centre for a single 60-bed home. Two points sit alongside that: the bands stop at 151–200 people and the About page positions the software at up to 200 employees, so two or three homes of that size reach or pass the top band; and the comparison is between HR administration with a rota add-on and a platform that also covers rota budgeting by role, clock-in rules, resident and family surveys, chat and maintenance.

Both platforms are cloud-based and relatively quick to implement.

Care Centre requires no proprietary hardware: staff can use their own phones, and standard Android tablets can be used within homes. Initial configuration of homes and rota rules, staff-data import and live training for managers and employees are provided without a setup fee, and support comes from a UK-based team focused on the care sector, by in-app chat and email, without tiers.

Breathe takes a more self-service approach, with a 14-day trial of every feature and add-on without a card, guides and onboarding materials, and a UK-based support team. Its published documentation states that most businesses are up and running in under a week, and the subscription can be cancelled at any time without a fee.