Compare · Shelter service
Vivetra Shelter vs. Gifted Animals, Shelter Suite, AniLog, PATCH, VetRescue, and Cara
The UK and Ireland have a dense field of home-grown rescue and rehoming software — Gifted Animals, Shelter Suite, AniLog, PATCH and VetRescue in the UK, and Cara built specifically for Irish and European shelters — and we are going to open a page that is supposed to sell you Vivetra by saying that directly. If a free tier or a small monthly fee from one of these covers your rescue, it may genuinely be the right answer over us. What Vivetra Shelter offers instead is one animal record from intake through rehoming, running on the same clinical core a full veterinary practice uses, at a flat monthly price with unlimited staff and volunteers and managed hosting included. Whether that trade is worth a flat fee is exactly the decision this page is here to help you make honestly.
$200/mo as your first service — unlimited staff and volunteers, fully managed hosting included in that price, not a footnote. +$50/mo if Shelter is added to an existing Vivetra deployment that already runs another service.
The honest gap, before the table
Here is the question we would ask first if we ran a rescue, so we are answering it before you have to ask: Vivetra Shelter has no built-in syndication to Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, or any UK/Ireland rehoming portal. Several of the platforms on this page are built around their own adopter-facing tooling for exactly this market. That is the sharpest honest gap of any service we offer. It is not buried in a footnote and it is not something you should have to discover partway through a demo — it is the first thing on this page for a reason.
One part of that has changed, and we will state it just as plainly. Vivetra Shelter now ships its own public, no-login adoptable-animals page and donation page, both of which you embed straight into the website your rescue already has. That is not syndication to a rehoming portal — it does not put your animals in front of anyone else’s audience, and we are not going to pretend it does. But if what you wanted was “our animals need to be somewhere the public can reach them without an account,” that part exists now. There is a section on it below.
One more limitation we tell every prospective rescue upfront:
We are a newer, unproven vendor. Several products below have years of track record with real UK and Irish rescues. Vivetra is new. That is a real reason to be cautious, and we would rather say it than have you find it out later.
Pricing and model, side by side
Every competitor figure below is the vendor’s own published pricing or description, quoted as stored in our sourced dataset — not our paraphrase of it — with the source link on each row. Where a vendor publishes no pricing at all, we say exactly that rather than guess a number.
| Product & source (verified August 2, 2026) | What they publish | How it lines up against Vivetra |
|---|---|---|
| Vivetra (Shelter service) pricing |
Flat $200/mo for your first service (unlimited staff and volunteers, managed hosting included); +$50/mo per additional service on the same deployment. Same number at 3 people or 30 — no per-adoption, per-outcome, or per-seat metering. |
Flat monthly fee on the same clinical core a full vet practice uses, plus a public, no-login adoptable-animals page and donation page you embed on your own website. Honest gap: no Petfinder / Adopt-a-Pet / UK rehoming-portal syndication. |
| Gifted Animals source (opens in new tab) |
A cloud-based UK animal rescue and shelter platform that self-describes as "The Complete Animal Rescue & Shelter Management Solution" — an "all-in-one Animal Management Solution to help Rescues and Shelters of any shape or size run more efficiently," covering intake-to-rehoming records, health/medication tracking, volunteering, fundraising and events. No public pricing. |
Cloud-based UK all-in-one rescue/shelter platform. No public pricing, so there is no published figure to weigh against a flat monthly fee. |
| Shelter Suite source (opens in new tab) |
A UK rescue/rehoming CRM ("Streamline Your Rescue. Rehome More Animals.") run by a small family-owned team, offering AI-assisted adopter matching and digital adoption contracts. States "All data is stored securely on UK-based servers with full GDPR compliance." No public pricing. |
UK rescue/rehoming CRM from a small family-owned team, data on UK servers. No public pricing to compare directly. |
| AniLog source (opens in new tab) |
A UK web-based animal welfare management SaaS billed as "a simple monthly fee," self-described as "Designed, built & tailored for the Animal Welfare sector" with the tagline "Setting THE Standard." Integrates microchip registration, pet insurance and postcode lookup. Operated by Innov8ive Software Limited, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. |
UK welfare-sector SaaS billed as "a simple monthly fee," but the actual figure is not published — you would need a quote to compare it to Vivetra's flat rate. |
| PATCH source (opens in new tab) |
A UK "secure, online system for animal organisations involved in rescue, caring and rehoming," covering intake, assessment, rehoming, boarding, case management and donor/supporter tracking with a full audit trail. Operated by Animal Care Network Ltd (a social enterprise) in Heywood, Greater Manchester. No public pricing. |
UK social-enterprise rescue/rehoming system with a full audit trail. No public pricing to compare directly. |
| VetRescue source (opens in new tab) |
A UK "Animal Welfare Management Software for Animal Rescue and Rehoming Centres, Animal Clinics and Hospitals" with clinical records, rehoming/microchip forms, fostering, charity-shop retail inventory and Gift Aid donation recording. Available client-server or local-cloud. Operated by Visual Data Concepts Ltd (UK). No public pricing. |
UK welfare software that also carries clinical records and charity-shop retail; client-server or local-cloud. No public pricing to compare directly. |
| Cara source (opens in new tab) |
An Irish shelter management platform self-described as "built from the ground up for Irish and European shelters," offering an adoption portal, application tracking, e-signature contracts and welfare incident reporting. Public pricing: free tier at EUR0/month (up to 5 animals) and a Pro tier at EUR34.99/month (unlimited animals, white-label portal); "No setup fees. No hidden costs. Cancel any time." |
Ireland-built and the only one here with public pricing: free up to 5 animals, then EUR34.99/mo unlimited. Shown in the currency Cara publishes (EUR), not re-symbolled. |
Cara is the one product here that publishes a price, so it is the only direct like-for-like number on the table. The rest quote no public figure — if you are weighing one of them against Vivetra’s flat rate, ask them for a written quote and compare it directly rather than trusting a number we would have had to invent.
What the public can see without logging in
This is the most concrete, most demonstrable thing on the page, so it gets a section rather than a footnote. Vivetra Shelter ships two public, no-login pages that a staff member switches on from a single screen and that you frame into the website your rescue already runs.
- An embeddable adoptable-animals page. Every animal your team have published as adoptable, with photos, on a page anybody can open — no account, no login, nothing for a visitor to install. Your team control whether it is on at all, which details it is allowed to show, and how many animals it will show at once. It reads the same animal record you already keep, so your listings are never a second thing to remember to update.
- An embeddable donation page. A one-time giving form a supporter uses without an account, switched on from that same screen. No card ever touches your Vivetra deployment — the donor is handed to Stripe’s own hosted checkout page to pay.
- Fee payment and saved cards, inside the adopter portal. Adopters and foster carers already have a portal here — applications, e-signing, follow-up, the foster journal — and they pay their fees in it and keep a card on file for next time.
On payments generally, stated exactly rather than flatteringly: you connect your own Stripe account. Your adopters and donors pay into it, and you keep your own Stripe relationship and your own Stripe rates — we do not put you behind our merchant account or resell you a processor you did not choose. A small platform fee applies on top of Stripe’s own processing rate; ask us and we will tell you what it is before you commit to anything.
Two UK-specific things we will not overclaim. The donation page is one-time giving only — there is no recurring or regular-giving option in it today. And it does not capture a Gift Aid declaration, so if Gift Aid is central to how your rescue funds itself, you would keep collecting those declarations however you do now. And none of this is Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, or UK rehoming-portal syndication: your animals appear on your site, nobody else’s. That limitation stands exactly as stated at the top of the page.
Questions UK and Irish rescues ask before switching
Does Vivetra Shelter sync adoptable animals to any UK or Irish rehoming portal?
No. Vivetra Shelter has no syndication to Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, or any UK/Ireland rehoming portal, and several of the home-grown platforms on this page lean on their own adopter-facing tooling. We would rather state that gap plainly at the top of the page than let it surprise you in a demo. What Vivetra Shelter does have is its own public, no-login adoptable-animals page that you embed on your rescue's existing website — your own audience, without an account, but nobody else's audience, and we are not going to blur the difference.
What are the public pages, exactly, and what do they cost?
Two pages anyone can open without an account, included in the same flat monthly price with no separate add-on fee. The first is an adoptable-animals listing: every animal your team have published as adoptable, with photos, reading straight off the record you already keep. The second is a one-time donation form — one-time only, with no recurring giving and no Gift Aid declaration captured in it today. Both are off until a staff member turns them on, both are configurable from one screen (what may be shown, how many animals appear at once, which of your own website addresses are allowed to frame them), and both are meant to live inside the website your rescue already runs rather than replace it.
The UK and Ireland already have plenty of rescue software — why add another?
You do, and most of it — Gifted Animals, Shelter Suite, AniLog, PATCH, VetRescue — is home-grown for exactly this market, with several quoting no public price at all. Cara is the one that publishes: free up to 5 animals, EUR34.99/mo unlimited. Vivetra Shelter is a flat monthly subscription running the same clinical core a full vet practice uses, applied to shelter intake and medical volume. For a small rescue that a free tier covers, one of these may genuinely be the better answer — and we would rather you decide that clearly than talk you past it.
How do adoption fees and donations actually get paid?
You connect your rescue's own Stripe account. Adopters pay their fees in the adopter portal and can keep a card on file for next time; supporters give through the public donation page without an account. Both hand off to Stripe's own hosted checkout, so no card number ever reaches your Vivetra deployment, and the money settles into your Stripe account — you keep your own Stripe relationship and your own Stripe rates rather than sitting behind a merchant account of ours. A small platform fee applies on top of Stripe's own processing rate; ask us and we will tell you what it is before you commit to anything. Gift Aid is the honest caveat: we do not capture a Gift Aid declaration, so you would keep collecting those however you do now. (All of that is entirely separate from the checkout you would use to pay your own Vivetra subscription.)
Vivetra is new and most of these vendors are UK/Ireland-native — why should I trust it?
Fair question, and the honest answer is that several products here have years of track record with real UK and Irish rescues while Vivetra is a newer vendor. What Vivetra offers instead is fully managed hosting — nobody at your rescue runs a server or restores a backup — on the same shared clinical core as our veterinary-practice service, at one flat price with unlimited staff and volunteers. Whether that trade beats an established local tool is exactly the decision this page is here to help you make honestly.
About this comparison. This is Vivetra’s own comparison of its own product against competitors we selected — it is marketing, not an independent third-party review, and you should weigh it as such.
Every competitor pricing and origin claim above was independently verified as of August 2, 2026 and is shown exactly as stored in our sourced dataset, with each row’s source. Vendors change their pricing, and we can get something wrong. If any figure here is out of date or inaccurate, report an inaccuracy and we will correct the page, or cite the source it came from, within 5 business days.
Competitor prices are shown in the currency each vendor publishes them in (Cara in EUR). Vivetra’s own number is identical in every supported currency — no conversion, ever — so the currency selector in the header only changes the symbol and tax note shown next to Vivetra’s price, never the digits, and never a competitor’s figure.