Care Centre vs Planday

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. Managers and employees therefore move between separate systems less often.

Planday focuses on scheduling and time tracking, supported by a strong staff app: employees view schedules, swap and hand over shifts, take open shifts, share availability, request leave, punch in and out, see what each shift adds to their pay, message colleagues and managers, and read payslips and documents. Further functionality comes through higher plans and integrations with other providers.

For a care home looking primarily for a standalone rota and time-tracking system, that may be everything required. For organisations bringing more of their people management into one care-specific ecosystem, Care Centre takes a broader approach.

Care home rotas account for more than the number of people on a shift: roles, skills, safe staffing, contracted hours, availability, leave and staffing budgets all bear on the plan.

Care Centre plans rotas around care roles such as nurses, senior carers and carers. Contracted hours are tracked against individual staff members so committed hours are used first, and bank and agency workers sit within the same rota. Working Time requirements can be incorporated into rota rules, including individual opt-outs.

Planday provides flexible scheduling for shift-based workforces, and its healthcare page describes qualifications tracked against shifts so that an appropriately qualified professional covers each one. AI-powered auto-scheduling is available on the Pro plan.

Managing a care home group introduces another level of complexity: group-wide standards need to be maintained while individual homes operate according to their own staffing requirements.

Care Centre has been structured around this model. Settings established at company level can be configured for individual homes: role levels, how many people in each role can be away at once, day settings, pay rates and wage visibility, the clock-in radius and terminals, shift claim, swap and drop rules with notice periods, and maintenance leads and approvers. Staffing budgets, additional time and leave limits are held per role and per home; one onboarding template can apply across the group, with a compliance matrix per home.

Employees working across several homes use one staff record and login, and managers responsible for several locations move between homes in the same system.

Planday supports departments and locations under one account, with a configurable organisational structure, custom permissions and user roles on the custom-priced Pro plan. Company-level rules with per-location overrides are not described in its published documentation.

Both platforms provide capable rota planning, but they take different approaches to budgeting.

Care Centre builds staffing budgets into the rota as hours per role, per day, per home, with a live indicator showing how much of each role's allocation has been used. Homes can restrict the rota to that budget: if a shift would take a role beyond its allocated hours, the system can prevent it rather than simply flagging the overspend. Hours from a dropped or cancelled shift return to the budget, and the open shift can be offered to suitable staff, who claim it from the staff app.

Planday provides a quick and well-made scheduler with templates, availability, rules and warnings, qualifications on shifts and open shifts. Its budgeting is based on labour cost against forecast revenue rather than hours allocated to care roles each day; an hours budget by role, and a hard stop once exceeded, are not described in its published documentation.

For organisations monitoring labour cost against revenue, Planday's approach is flexible; Care Centre is structured around allocating and controlling hours by care role.

Both platforms provide tools for recording attendance and preparing staff hours for payroll.

Staff can clock in with a PIN at a shared tablet within the home, with an optional photograph and visitors recorded on the same screen, or from their own phone within a defined radius; clocking in without a rostered shift is a configurable setting. Clocking data feeds the timesheet, which carries the same status colours as the rota, and managers are alerted when a scheduled employee has not clocked in or has missed a clock-out. Additional time is held for approval before being treated as overtime.

Payroll periods can be locked and configured as weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly, monthly or 4-4-5, with data exported as CSV or XLSX, including a Moneysoft-ready format. These functions are included within CareRota.

Planday provides a punch clock in its app with geolocation, so staff clock in only at approved locations, plus clock-in stations for a shared device, rounding rules and manager approval of worked shifts; simple time tracking is included on Starter. Payroll reporting and integrations with named platforms including Xero, Sage, QuickBooks and ADP are available on the Plus plan. A rule for clocking in without a rostered shift, and no-show alerts, are not described in its published documentation.

The distinction is one of approach: Care Centre records attendance against the rostered shift and exports the result; Planday integrates with named payroll platforms.

Both systems allow employees to request leave and managers to control availability.

Employees can see their remaining entitlement in days or hours and request leave 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 the same time, restricting further requests once that limit is reached. Leave rules can be set across a group and adjusted for individual homes.

Planday allows time off to be requested in the app, with leave and absence management on Plus, and its healthcare page describes absences reported through the app. Role-based leave limits are not described in its published documentation.

This is one of the more significant differences between the two platforms.

Care Centre includes HR onboarding and compliance management within the wider platform. Standard onboarding can be reshaped to an organisation's own steps and completed by new employees on their phone, with progress monitored through a compliance matrix per home. Documents with expiry dates generate advance reminders, and policies can be version-controlled with acknowledgement records showing who has read the current version.

Planday provides employee information and document management on the Plus plan, with qualification tracking, and its healthcare page describes an audit-ready record of rotas, time entries and leave. An onboarding flow, document expiry reminders and a compliance matrix are not described in its published documentation.

For organisations already using a separate HR system, this may be suitable. Care Centre is designed for groups that want HR and care compliance connected directly to the rota and employee record.

Care Centre includes internal communication and employee recognition within the same staff app. Teams can recognise colleagues, with monthly champions identified, and homes can publish news, events, polls and priority messages, including posts requiring acknowledgement. AI can assist with drafting them, and one-to-one and group chat offers a workplace alternative to 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.

Planday provides a messenger, group updates, a newsfeed and SMS, which together form a capable communication layer. Employee recognition is not described in its published documentation.

Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside resident and family surveys, distributed by QR poster. Results can be analysed using AI to identify themes, and findings developed into action plans, including a You said · We said · We did format. Homes can also use short pulse questions at clock-out between larger surveys.

Planday does not currently offer comparable survey and action-planning functionality.

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 certificates held with expiry dates against Regulation 12 and Regulation 15 requirements.

Planday does not currently offer this within its scheduling and time-tracking proposition.

Both platforms use AI, but in different parts of the working day. Planday provides AI-powered auto-scheduling on its Pro plan, which builds rotas for managers to review.

Care Centre uses AI selectively within administrative and communication tasks rather than operational decisions: writing recognition messages, creating surveys, analysing survey responses and importing staff information. According to Care Centre, personal information is redacted before relevant import processing and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI model; credits are included in the subscription.

AI is deliberately not used to make decisions about rotas, clocking, payroll or leave, where configured rules remain in control.

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, and the price does not move when bank staff are added.

Planday uses a per-user subscription model. According to its published UK pricing, Starter begins at £2.99 per user per month with a minimum of five users; Plus is £3.99 and adds leave, payroll integrations and document management; Pro is priced on quote, adding the configurable organisational structure and auto-scheduling. A 30-day trial is available.

For smaller teams needing primarily scheduling, Planday may have a lower entry price. Care Centre's per-bed model is designed around the higher employee-to-bed ratios of residential care, where a 60-bed home commonly employs between 70 and 90 people.

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

Care Centre requires no dedicated proprietary hardware: staff use their own phones, and standard Android tablets can be used within homes. It also provides initial configuration of homes and rota rules, staff-data import and live training for managers and employees at no additional setup fee. Support comes from a UK-based team focused on the care sector, through in-app chat and email. Contracts are monthly rolling, with a trial available beforehand.

Planday takes a more self-service approach, with a 30-day trial, help centre and live chat; dedicated phone support and custom account set-up come with Pro.

The choice is between a supported care-specific implementation on every plan and a platform designed for organisations to configure themselves.