Shelter comparison

Vivetra Shelter vs. Shelterluv, PetPoint, ShelterBuddy, Petstablished, Pawlytics, and the rest of the field

Shelter software is one of the most crowded, most affordable corners of this whole market — and we are going to open a page that is supposed to sell you Vivetra by telling you that directly. If you run a small rescue and a free or per-adoption tool covers you, one of the products below may genuinely be the right answer over us. What Vivetra Shelter offers instead is one animal record from intake through adoption, 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 over a free tool 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.

Get Started What the Shelter service does →

The honest gap, before the table

Here is the question we would ask first if we ran a shelter, so we are answering it before you have to ask: the shelter software market is saturated with free or near-free options, and every real competitor in this category syndicates its adoptable animals to Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet. Vivetra Shelter currently does neither. 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.

Pricing and model, side by side

Every competitor figure below is the vendor’s own published pricing or origin, quoted as stored in our sourced dataset — not our paraphrase of it — with the source link and the date we last checked it on each row. Where a vendor publishes no pricing at all, we say exactly that rather than guess a number.

PetPoint and Chameleon — both owned by 24Pet (Pethealth Inc.) — are the quote-based enterprise systems most large municipal shelters and humane societies already know. We have deliberately left them out of the table above rather than give them a row: neither publishes a public price, and inventing one to fill a cell would be exactly the kind of made-up figure this whole page exists to avoid. If you are choosing between Vivetra Shelter and an enterprise 24Pet deployment, ask them for a written quote and compare it to our flat rate directly.

The closest thing to our model in this category

Of every product above, Shelter Manager (also called ASM) is the closest analog to how Vivetra is actually built — GPL open-source, self-hostable, from Sheltermanager Ltd, a company genuinely registered in England and Wales. If you are drawn to the idea of software you host on your own terms rather than a per-adoption or per-seat subscription, that instinct points at Shelter Manager first, and we will say so.

The difference is what you are not doing yourself. Shelter Manager’s self-hosted path means your shelter’s own IT volunteer or contractor runs the server, applies the patches, and restores the backup when something breaks. Vivetra is fully managed for you — we operate the deployment as part of your monthly price, so nobody at your shelter ever touches a server. And where Shelter Manager is a standalone shelter tool, Vivetra Shelter runs on the same shared core as our full veterinary-practice service: the same clinical charting depth a vet clinic uses, applied to shelter intake and medical volume, not a separate lighter-weight system built only for adoption tracking.

Questions shelters ask before switching

Shopping from the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand? See the UK & Ireland comparison or the Australia & New Zealand comparison.