Shelter comparison — UK & Ireland
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.
Two more limitations we tell every prospective rescue upfront:
No built-in payment processing. Vivetra does not process the adoption fees or donations your rescue collects — there is no payment processing anywhere in the product, so you are never locked into a specific processor, a per-transaction cut on your adopters’ or donors’ money, or a particular Gift Aid workflow. Pair it with whatever you already use. (This is separate from the checkout you would use to pay your own Vivetra subscription.)
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. Honest gap: no Petfinder / Adopt-a-Pet / UK rehoming-portal syndication yet. |
| 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.
Questions UK and Irish rescues ask before switching
Does Vivetra Shelter sync adoptable animals to any UK or Irish rehoming portal?
Not today. Vivetra Shelter has no built-in syndication to Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, or any UK/Ireland rehoming portal. Several of the home-grown platforms on this page lean on their own adopter-facing tooling, and we would rather state the gap plainly at the top of the page than let it surprise you in a demo — it is the clearest limitation between Vivetra Shelter and the rest of the field right now.
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.
Does Vivetra process the adoption fees or donations my rescue collects?
No. Vivetra has no built-in payment processing anywhere in the product — pair it with whatever processor you already use, with no per-transaction cut taken by us on your adopters' or donors' payments, and no Gift Aid workflow lock-in. (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.