Care Centre vs Sona

Sona provides one configurable platform across forecasting, scheduling, HR, payroll, reporting and a staff app, with its learning management system, applicant tracking system and app builder each marked as in beta on its site on 14 September 2026. It describes itself as built for enterprise complexity, and is delivered through a discovery-led engagement with a co-designed configuration and implementation.

That approach suits organisations able to run an implementation project. Care Centre is structured so that a single home or a group can begin from a published price, with configuration and training included.

Care home rotas turn on more than headcount: roles, skills, contracted hours, availability, leave and staffing budgets all bear on the plan.

Care Centre plans around care roles such as nurses, senior carers and carers, so the required skill mix is visible as each shift is placed. Contracted hours are tracked against individual staff members, and Working Time requirements are applied as a rota rule.

Sona provides an auto-scheduling engine, described as evaluating millions of staffing combinations, weighing skills, preferences, compliance rules and budget to propose the schedule, with rostering matched to residents' care plans, skills and qualifications. Care Centre does not currently provide an equivalent care-plan matched rostering feature; it remains on the product roadmap.

The distinction is one of approach: Sona proposes the schedule; Care Centre is built around a manager creating it by care role within defined rules.

Managing a care home group introduces another level of complexity: group-wide standards must hold while individual homes operate to their own requirements.

Care Centre has been structured around this model. Settings established at company level can be configured for individual homes, covering role levels, leave limits, budgets, pay rates, clock-in settings, shift rules, onboarding and compliance. Employees working across homes use one staff record and login, managers move between homes within the same system, and these capabilities are available on every plan.

Sona is strong at estate level: cross-location shift management from a single view, talent shared between locations, and reporting that drills from organisation-wide trends to site-level detail and compares one site with another. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe company-level settings configured for individual sites.

Care Centre's operational views are presented one home at a time, so organisations whose main requirement is estate-wide comparison may find Sona's reporting the stronger fit.

Care Centre builds staffing budgets into the rota using hours per role, per day, per home, and homes can restrict the rota to that budget: a shift taking a role beyond its allocated hours can be prevented rather than simply flagged. Hours from a dropped shift return to the budget, and the resulting open shift can be offered to suitable staff to claim, subject to approval.

Sona applies labour budgets its documentation describes as enforced automatically, with the cost of a scheduling decision shown before it is made. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe an hours budget per role per day, or contracted hours accumulating as the rota is built.

For organisations that primarily want to control staffing cost, Sona provides an automated approach; Care Centre is more specifically structured around care-role hours and budgets together.

Care Centre allows staff to clock in by PIN at a shared tablet within the home, or on their own phone within a defined location, with an optional photograph. Whether an employee may clock in without a rostered shift is a setting — allowed, blocked, or held for approval — and managers are alerted when a shift begins without an attendance record or a clock-out is missed. Additional time is held for approval before overtime, and payroll periods can be weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly, monthly or 4-4-5, exported as CSV or XLSX, including a Moneysoft-ready format.

Sona provides geofenced clock-in and clock-out tied to site locations, with photo verification, and covers sleep-ins and break compliance. Its payroll calculates pay from scheduling and time tracking, including sleep-in, waking-night and on-call rates, flags overtime breaches and provides payslip explanations; no named payroll integrations are listed. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe an in-home terminal, a rule tying a clock-in to a rostered shift, a control for unrostered clock-ins or a no-show alert.

The distinction is one of emphasis: Sona calculates a broader range of care pay rates, while Care Centre places more control over who may clock in and what additional time reaches payroll.

Care Centre allows employees to see their remaining entitlement in days or hours and request leave from their phone; once approved, leave updates the rota, the timesheet and payroll information. Homes can limit how many people within particular roles can be away at the same time, with those rules set across a group and adjusted for individual homes.

Sona provides leave and absence management with rules checking, coverage verification and instant approvals, with entitlement and requests available in the staff app. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe a limit on how many of each role can be away at once within an individual home.

Care Centre includes HR onboarding and compliance management as part of the wider platform. Standard onboarding covers DBS checks, right-to-work documentation, references and training certificates, configurable to an organisation's own requirements and completed by new employees on their phone. Managers monitor progress through a compliance matrix held for each home, documents with expiry dates generate advance reminders, and policies can be version-controlled with acknowledgement records.

Sona provides unified employee records, document storage with automatic alerts before certifications lapse, onboarding workflows, and DBS and training tracking. Right-to-work and DBS tracking sit within its applicant tracking system, which its site marked as in beta on 14 September 2026. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe a compliance matrix held per home, so organisations may wish to confirm which elements are generally available at the time of purchase.

Care Centre includes internal communication and employee recognition within the same staff app. Teams can recognise colleagues and associate recognition with organisational values, with monthly champions recorded, and homes can publish news, events, polls and priority messages, including posts requiring acknowledgement. One-to-one and group chat provides 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.

Sona provides news, messaging, recognition, shift claiming and shift feedback within its employee app. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe recognition tagged to organisational values, monthly champions, or posts requiring acknowledgement.

Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside resident and family surveys, distributed by QR poster or scheduled invitation. AI analysis identifies sentiment across six categories, including differences between leadership and frontline responses, and findings become action plans in a You said · We said · We did format. Short pulse questions can also be asked at clock-out.

Sona provides pulse checks and surveys with AI sentiment analysis and action plans within its learning management system, which its site marked as in beta on 14 September 2026. Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe anonymity, resident or family surveys, or QR-based distribution.

Care Centre also extends beyond people management into the operation of the home. Maintenance requests can be submitted with photographs and 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, in a Regulation 12 and 15 view.

Based on its published documentation, Sona does not describe a maintenance module, which is a further point of difference between the platforms.

Care records sit outside Care Centre's scope. Care Centre has no care-record integrations and no medication management at present, and its rota is planned by care role rather than matched to individual care plans; care-plan-led staffing, sleep-in rates, medication management and care-record integration remain on the product roadmap.

Sona lists Nourish under care planning within its integrations, and its care documentation describes medication management with an audit trail and incident reporting. Organisations requiring these functions today will find them described by Sona.

Care Centre uses AI selectively within administrative and communication tasks rather than operational decisions. It can assist with writing recognition messages, creating surveys, analysing survey responses and importing staff information, with credits included in the subscription price. 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 to make decisions about rotas, clocking, payroll or leave, where configured rules remain in control.

Sona applies AI across workforce decisions, including demand forecasting, auto-scheduling, recommendations for overtime approvals and AI-configured pay rules. Its assistant, Raffy, is described on its site as able to take approved actions directly in Sona.

The distinction is one of principle rather than capability, and is worth establishing early in any evaluation within a regulated setting.

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, at £2 per bed less than the two purchased separately. Staffing numbers therefore do not directly affect the subscription price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees is charged for 60 beds rather than 80 individual users.

Sona does not publish a price. Its pricing page states that “because our product is adaptable, so is our pricing”, and offers a consultation and a custom quote, describing the consultation as where an organisation learns “what implementation looks like, how long it takes, and what it costs”. Implementation therefore forms part of what is quoted, the unit of pricing is not stated and the contract term is not published.

Organisations comparing the two may wish to request the unit of pricing, the implementation fee and the minimum term in writing.

Care Centre requires no dedicated proprietary hardware: staff can use their own phones, while standard Android tablets can be used within homes. Initial configuration, staff-data import and live training for managers and employees are provided without an additional setup fee, and support comes from a UK-based team working only with care homes, without tiers. The contract is monthly rolling with a trial, and the platform is in use in homes including Esmere Gardens, Banbury Heights and Shipston Lodge.

Sona begins with a discovery-led engagement, stating that it adapts both product configuration and implementation approach to an organisation's operating model, followed by technical account managers, business reviews and customer advisory board membership.

The choice is between a supported enterprise implementation shaped around an existing operating model, and a configuration-and-training model included within a published price.