Named comparison
Corella vs ShiftCare, on the facts.
ShiftCare is the best-known rostering and care platform in the Australian market — the category benchmark, with the install base to prove it. It’s the product most providers weighing a switch are coming from, so it’s the comparison worth doing properly. Here it is: Corella and ShiftCare side by side, built from ShiftCare’s own published pricing and documentation rather than a sales deck. Where they’re strong we say so; where we differ we show our working.
Capabilities re-verified August 2026 · pricing as published July 2026
| Capability | CorellaEverything included | ShiftCareAs published, July 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| A system of your own | Included: Your own instance Own database, own subdomain, your branding — isolation is the architecture | Not offered: Shared multi-tenant Per-user seats on common infrastructure — the standard SaaS model |
| Care plans, incidents & funds | Included: In the base product For every provider — no tiers exist to gate them | Partial or gated: Intelligence tier On the $25/user/month tier, per their published pricing (July 2026) |
| Mileage capture | Included: Km + minutes at clock-off Claimed together in the carer app as the shift ends | Partial or gated: Km, before clock-in Advanced Mileage records kilometres before clock-in, on Intelligence and up; their admin guide notes enabling it can't be undone |
| Paid travel time | Included: A labelled line in the export Kilometres and travel minutes are claimed by the carer at clock-off and carry through as their own labelled line in the payroll export | Included: Also captured Their mileage flow captures kilometres, travel minutes and expenses — we think our clock-off claim flow is tidier, but this is not a gap |
| Client budgets | Included: Live category utilisation Support-category allocations with bars that move as shifts deliver | Partial or gated: Funds at the total level Funds tracking carries a total rather than per-category allocations |
| Policy read-and-acknowledge | Included: Built in Publish, require acknowledgement, watch the x-of-y matrix fill | Not offered: Not in their public docs No equivalent we could find in their published documentation — tell us if we've missed it |
| NDIA bulk claiming | Included: 16-column bulk CSV Generated exactly, uploaded by you — we don't claim a direct API we don't have | Included: Bulk claiming, plus direct PRODA submission They document PRODA B2B invoicing as well as bulk claiming — submitting straight through rather than producing a file someone uploads. That is genuinely ahead of us on this row, and it's the honest answer if you ask us |
| Xero | Included: Invoice push, PDF attached Per-tenant connector: invoices with the proof-of-support PDF attached, payment webhook; payroll leaves as CSV | Included: Invoice + timesheet sync Their timesheet sync into Xero is genuinely useful — a real strength |
| Participant / family portal | Included: Included, and the logins are free Every provider gets it, and participant and family logins don't count as billable seats — you pay for staff only | Partial or gated: Paid add-on, per client Their Family Portal is $3 per client per month on top of the subscription (their published pricing, checked July 2026). A provider supporting 100 participants is $300/month for the portal alone |
| AI assistance | Included: Care Signals, client summaries, org brief Included at no extra cost: progress notes triaged into confidence-scored signals — each with the verbatim excerpt it came from, a severity, a triage queue and one click to raise a real incident — plus office-only client summaries, a weekly org brief, dictation, and record-and-summarise for meetings. Assistive only: it never writes into a record, and a human decides. It reads notes, not documents. All of it shipped in July 2026 | Included: Live, with a longer track record Care-note risk flagging and generated client summaries in daily use, with more mileage than ours — that head start is real. It also reads uploaded documents, which ours doesn't. They don't publish which tier it needs |
| SCHADS award compliance | Included: Nine checks on the draft roster Minimum engagement, breaks, broken shifts, daily and weekly overtime, sleepover length and frequency, rest afterwards — on the shift, on the week, and per staff member. It warns, it never blocks, and every threshold is yours to set. Rules and arithmetic, not AI: you can check any of it by hand | Included: Native award interpretation Theirs is built in, not outsourced — their own navigation lists SCHADS Award Interpretation as a ShiftCare feature, and it applies award rules at payroll. What we could not verify from their public documentation is whether it warns on a draft roster before the week is worked, so we don't claim it doesn't — check it with them |
| Filling an open shift | Included: Ranked, and it shows its working Ranks who should work it on availability and declared hours, checks and training currency, skills and the client's language, continuity with that client, suburb, hours left under their cap — and whether the shift would create an award problem. Every candidate lists its reasons for and against, so you can disagree with the ranking | Included: Job board matching They match on skills, location, availability and training, per their published materials |
| Forecasting funding and staffing | Included: Underspend, exhaustion date, demand vs capacity Per-participant burn rate with a projected exhaustion date and a projected UNDERSPEND — the expensive NDIS failure, because unspent funding is support that never happened and a reason the next plan gets cut — plus demand against capacity week by week. Committed work is priced the way the invoice will price it, so the two agree | Not offered: Described as coming Their own AI page says "stay tuned" for predicting staffing and forecasting revenue (checked July 2026). They do show per-shift margin today — that's the row below — but a forward projection of a participant's funding is a different thing |
| Shift margin before it's assigned | Included: Native, included, on unfilled shifts Cost, revenue and margin per shift with a profitable / low-margin / loss-making verdict — computed from the roster by the same pay engine that runs payroll and the same price guide that raises the invoice, so the three agree. Because we own both halves, a shift can be costed before anyone is rostered to it, while it's still free to change. Gross contribution, excluding overheads | Included: Via PayCat, a paid add-on Their PayCat integration shows award-accurate cost, revenue and margin per shift with a profitable / low-margin / loss-making signal, and their page describes it before shifts are filled — a genuinely comparable view. The difference is where it comes from: costing is bought from a third party alongside the subscription, where ours is native and included in the $19 |
| Pricing shape | $19 per staff user/month, all-in AUD ex GST · everything included · $149/month minimum · participant and family portal logins are free | $9 / $15 / $25 per user/month AUD ex GST, tiered, five-staff minimum — as published July 2026 |
| Custom roles & permissions | Partial or gated: Build your own, one area enforced Start from one of four built-in levels and choose area by area how far it reaches, from a fixed 13-area vocabulary. Money and billing is the one area enforced by capability today; the other twelve still follow the built-in level. It does not scope which participants a worker sees | Included: 7 base roles plus per-user overrides Their documented model is wider than ours today — per-user overrides across the product rather than one enforced area. Re-read from their help centre August 2026 |
| Outbound email & SMS | Included: Email notifications; text broadcasts Email notifications by category, plus text BROADCASTS to staff and families, from August 2026 — included in your plan and activated when you go live. No transactional SMS: nothing texts a carer when a shift changes. A broadcast records what the provider accepted, not what was delivered, and nothing in Corella receives a reply | Included: Built in, and longer-established Bulk email, bulk SMS, and advertising an open shift by SMS from inside the product — that last one we do not do |
| Xero timesheet sync | Partial or gated: Invoices + payments sync; payroll is CSV We push invoices with the proof PDF and read payments back; timesheets leave as a CSV import | Included: Timesheet sync A genuinely useful two-way payroll flow if that's how your bookkeeping runs |
| Integration breadth | Partial or gated: Xero, and payroll by CSV One accounting connector done properly — invoices with the proof PDF attached and payments read back — plus NDIA bulk CSV. That is the whole list, and it's the honest answer | Included: Seven categories, plus a public API Their help centre documents accounting (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks), payroll and HR (KeyPay, Employment Hero, Paychex, PayCat), claiming, calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook), HubSpot, Zapier, and a public API with managed keys. If you need to plug into things, they are well ahead here |
| Quotes | Included: Quote, then convert it to the agreement Numbered quotes with NDIS item numbers on each line, a required expiry date, and an accepted quote converts into the funded service agreement with the link back to the quote kept. Added August 2026 — this row was a loss until then | Included: Documented in their help centre Theirs is documented and longer-established; we have not compared the two feature by feature, so treat this as both-have-it rather than a win either way |
| Calendar sync & recurring invoices | Not offered: Neither Shifts recur; invoices don't. And there's no Google, Apple or Outlook calendar sync — rosters live in the carer app | Included: Both Calendar integration across Google, Apple and Outlook, and recurring billing setup |
| See it on your workflows | Book a demo | Bring your ShiftCare pricing page — we’ll go line by line. |
ShiftCare’s capabilities were re-read from their own help centre in August 2026; their pricing is as published in July 2026. Where we couldn’t verify something, the note says so rather than assuming a gap. Products change — tell us if something here is out of date and we’ll fix it within a week. ShiftCare is a trademark of its owner; Corella is not affiliated with ShiftCare.
Where the models differ
Three structural differences, not a hundred small ones.
Whose system is it?
ShiftCare is one shared platform: you buy per-user seats on common infrastructure, alongside every other customer. That's the standard SaaS model, and it scales. Corella is different by architecture: every provider gets their own isolated instance — own database, own subdomain, your branding — so health data never shares a database with another company, and “your system” means exactly that.
Where the safety features live
Both products have care plans, incident management and funds tracking. The difference is where they sit. In ShiftCare's published pricing they belong to the $25/user/month Intelligence tier; in Corella they're the base product, because there are no tiers at all. Our position is simple: the features that keep people safe shouldn't depend on which plan the budget stretched to.
How the price behaves
ShiftCare publishes $9, $15 and $25 per-user tiers (AUD ex GST) with a five-staff minimum. Corella is one number — $19 per staff user per month (AUD ex GST), everything included, with a $149/month account minimum instead of a seat minimum, and no charge for participant or family logins. Headline-versus-headline is misleading in both directions: compare $19-with-everything against the ShiftCare tier that actually includes what you need.
When ShiftCare might fit you better
Fair is fair — there are honest reasons to choose them:
- You want the category’s biggest footprint. ShiftCare puts its install base at 7,000+ care provider businesses — that scale of community and ecosystem is real.
- You value a rapid release cadence. Their release notes show weekly product updates from a large team.
- Xero timesheet sync matters to your payroll flow. Theirs is genuinely useful; Corella pushes invoices and payment status to Xero, and payroll leaves as a CSV rather than a sync.
- You want the AI layer with the longer track record. Both products flag risk in care notes and generate client summaries; theirs has been in daily use for longer and also reads uploaded documents. Corella’s shipped in July 2026. If you’d rather buy the one with more mileage behind it, that’s a fair reason to choose them.
- You need two-way messaging, or to advertise shifts by text. Corella sends email and text notifications as of August 2026, but strictly one-way — nothing in it receives a reply, and it cannot tout an open shift by SMS the way they can.
- You need to plug into a lot of other systems. Their documented integrations span accounting, payroll and HR, claiming, calendar, HubSpot and Zapier, and they publish an API with managed keys. Corella has Xero and a payroll CSV. If your operation depends on connections, they are well ahead of us here.
- You claim through PRODA B2B, or you need recurring invoices. They submit NDIS claims straight through rather than producing a file you upload, and they have recurring invoices and calendar sync. We have none of those three today. (Quoting was a fourth item here until August 2026, when we shipped it.)
If those outweigh owning an isolated instance with nothing gated, ShiftCare is a fair choice — genuinely. And if the juggle creeps back in, this page will still be here.
Compiled from ShiftCare’s public pricing page, help centre and release notes, June–July 2026, with a second help-centre pass in August 2026 that corrected three rows in their favour.
Already on ShiftCare? Switching is our job, not yours.
Migration is part of onboarding, not a project for your admin team: we map your clients, documents and staff records into your own instance and verify them with you, record by record. The checklist below is the same one we’d work through with you — we’d rather you saw the real shape of it than be told it’s effortless.
Fair questions
Straight answers.
Is this comparison current?
Can you migrate us off ShiftCare?
What does ShiftCare gate to its top tier?
Where is ShiftCare genuinely ahead?
What does Corella cost against ShiftCare's tiers?
Put Corella next to your ShiftCare.
A 30-minute walkthrough on your workflows — bring your pricing page and your pain points, and we'll go line by line.