Care Centre vs Deputy

Care Centre brings rota planning, attendance, leave, payroll preparation, HR and compliance, policies, communication and recognition, surveys and maintenance onto one staff record and app.

Deputy focuses more closely on scheduling and time and attendance, with further functionality through plan tiers, add-ons and integrations.

For a care home wanting a rota and a time clock, that may be everything required; for organisations consolidating people management, Care Centre goes wider.

A care home rota turns on roles, skills, safe staffing, contracted hours, availability and budgets. Care Centre bands it by care role — nurses, senior carers and carers — so the skill mix is visible beside allocated hours. Contracted hours are tracked per employee, bank and agency workers sit on the same rota, and Working Time rules allow individual opt-outs.

Deputy provides flexible rota planning for shift-based workforces: past patterns and seasonal templates, auto-scheduling, demand forecasting, micro-scheduling, and guardrails for breaks, qualifications and fatigue. Its healthcare page describes qualifications matched to shifts, and reporting it says simplifies CQC compliance: qualification assurance, audit administration, staffing levels and delivered hours.

Managing a group means holding company standards while each home staffs itself to its own needs. Care Centre is structured that way: company settings are configured per home — role levels, leave limits, budgets, pay rates, clock-in settings, shift rules, onboarding and approvers — and staff working across homes keep one login.

Deputy supports multiple locations and areas under one account, and Pro adds Location Hierarchies, Pay Centres, Custom Access Levels and single sign-on. Company rules with per-home overrides for budgets, rates, clock-in settings, notice periods or approvers are not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre builds staffing budgets into the rota as hours per role, per day, per home. Homes can restrict the rota to that budget, so a shift beyond a role's hours is prevented rather than flagged; dropped hours return, and published shifts go to staff to confirm.

Deputy's budgeting, through Wage and Labour Budgets on Core and above, is wage cost against sales, forecast before publishing; its auto-scheduling can optimise for lowest cost or an even spread of hours. An hours budget by care role, or a hard stop when one is exceeded, is not described in its published documentation.

For homes that primarily monitor wage cost, Deputy is flexible; Care Centre is structured around care-role hours and budgets.

Staff clock in at a shared tablet with a six-digit PIN and an optional photograph, or from their phone within a defined location; visitors use the same screen. Rules are set before the shift: clocking in without a rostered shift can be allowed, blocked or held for approval; managers are alerted when nobody has clocked in or a clock-out is missed; and additional time waits for approval before overtime. These functions are included within CareRota.

Deputy provides kiosk and mobile clocking: its Time Clock runs on an iPad or Android tablet using facial detection, or in the app with a GPS stamp, and is also a separate app. Missed breaks are flagged, timesheets are created automatically and can be auto-approved on Core, and hours export in one click to payroll.

Its time-and-attendance page describes unscheduled clock-ins, missing clock-outs and no-shows being found afterwards through Deputy AI. A rule tying a clock-in to a rostered shift, control of unrostered clock-ins beforehand, a live no-show alert and an approval step before payroll are not described.

The distinction is one of timing: Care Centre applies the rules before the shift; Deputy reports exceptions after it, with a biometric kiosk and payroll integrations.

Care Centre shows employees their entitlement in days or hours and takes requests from their phone; once approved, leave updates the rota, timesheet and payroll. Homes can limit how many people in a role are away at once, set across a group and adjusted per home.

Deputy provides leave requests in its app, automated accruals pro-rated when hours change, and absence caps by team or location through Leave Management+. Caps by care role are not described in its published documentation; organisations managing availability by location may find that suitable.

Care Centre includes HR onboarding and compliance within the wider platform: DBS checks, right-to-work documentation, references and training certificates, configured to an organisation's own steps and completed on a new employee's phone. Managers monitor a compliance matrix per home, documents give reminders at a lead time set per document, and policies are version-controlled with acknowledgement records.

Deputy offers HR as an add-on at £2 per user per month: hiring, paperless onboarding, certification expiry tracking, and team feedback. A compliance matrix per home, reminder lead times per document, version-controlled policy acknowledgement and a Regulation 19 personnel file are not described in its published documentation.

For organisations already using a separate HR system, that may suit; Care Centre keeps HR and compliance on the same record as the rota.

Care Centre includes communication and recognition in the same staff app: colleagues are recognised against organisational values, with monthly champions; homes publish news, events, polls and priority messages, including posts requiring acknowledgement; one-to-one and group chat replaces personal messaging services.

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.

Deputy provides Messaging and a News feed on every plan, with video announcements, shared files and policies, and confirmation a post has been seen; Messaging+ at £1.40 adds shift-aware actions and role-based permissions, included on Pro. Employee recognition is not described, based on available information.

Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside resident and family surveys, by QR poster or scheduled email invitation. AI can analyse results for themes and differences between groups of respondents, compared with the previous year and developed into action plans, including a You said · We said · We did format. Short pulse questions run between surveys, at clock-out.

Deputy provides Shift Pulse+ within its HR add-on, letting staff rate a shift afterwards. Anonymous resident and family surveys, and action planning, are not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre also extends into the home: maintenance requests carry photographs, checks run by room or asset with manager sign-off, and an asset register holds fire, gas, electrical, PAT, LOLER and legionella records with expiry dates.

Maintenance, an asset register and statutory compliance records are not described within Deputy's published documentation.

Deputy AI is on all three plans, currently marked introductory free, building rotas from past patterns, finding cover, and editing and approving timesheets by chat or voice. Deputy states that customer data is never used to train AI models.

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

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

• 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 CareChat and CareMaintenance. Staffing numbers do not affect the price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees pays for 60 beds, not 80 users.

Deputy uses a per-user model: on its UK pricing page, Lite is £3.25, Core £4.25 and Pro £6.50 per user per month, with a £20 minimum monthly spend. Auto-scheduling, demand forecasting, micro-scheduling, Wage and Labour Budgets and Biometrics Time Clocking sit on Core; HR is £2, Messaging+ £1.40 and Analytics+ £1, the last two on Pro. No free plan is listed, and paid onboarding is offered on annual plans.

For smaller teams wanting mainly a rota and a time clock, Deputy may have a lower entry price; Care Centre's per-bed model suits the employee-to-bed ratios of residential care.

Care Centre requires no proprietary hardware: staff use their own phones, and standard Android tablets serve as terminals. Configuration, staff-data import and live training are provided without a setup fee, with support from a UK-based team focused on the care sector, by chat and email, without tiers.

Deputy is more self-service, with a free trial of up to 31 days without a card, a help centre and its own training. Self-serve onboarding applies on Lite, a customer success manager on Core and a dedicated one on Pro, with 24/7 live chat on Pro.

The choice is between a supported care-specific implementation and a platform organisations set up themselves.