GetMyRoster vs Deputy: Which Is Better for Australian Businesses in 2026?

The Honest Version of This Comparison

This is a comparison published by one of the two vendors, so read it accordingly. What follows is written to be useful rather than flattering, because a comparison that concludes we win on everything is not worth your time and you would be right not to believe it.

Deputy is a good product. It is one of the most established rostering platforms in Australia, it is used by very large operations, and it does several things GetMyRoster does not do at all. If you need those things, buy Deputy. The question worth answering is not which platform is better in the abstract. It is which one matches the business you actually run.

Three things decide it: how many staff you have, how complicated your award situation is, and whether you need to forecast demand.

Side by Side

Pricing reflects publicly listed entry rates as at September 2026 and both vendors change pricing, so confirm before you commit.

What the Price Difference Actually Means

Per-user pricing compounds, which is the part small businesses underestimate. At five staff the difference is rounding. At fifty it is a line item somebody asks about.

One caution on the arithmetic, because comparisons like this are routinely presented misleadingly. GetMyRoster is priced in US dollars and Deputy in Australian dollars. Any saving figure that subtracts one from the other without converting is overstating the gap, and you should be sceptical of it wherever you see it, including on this site. Convert both to the currency you actually pay in, at today's rate, then compare.

The other half of the honest version: you are not buying identical products, so a pure price comparison flatters the cheaper one. Deputy costs more and does more. Whether the extra is worth it depends entirely on whether you will use it, and most small operators will not use demand forecasting, which is the single most expensive capability to build and therefore a large part of what the premium pays for.

A useful test. Write down the three things you most need the software to do. If forecasting or multi-award interpretation is on that list, the price gap is not the relevant consideration. If it is not, you are being asked to pay for engineering you will never open.

Where Each One Genuinely Wins

Choose GetMyRoster if you run under roughly 100 staff and want something live in days rather than a rollout project. If you sit mainly under SCHADS and need penalty rates costed before you publish. If you are in NDIS, aged care or childcare and credential expiry tracking is a compliance control rather than a nice-to-have, which our guides to NDIS rostering and certificate and licence tracking go into properly. If you want to evaluate a platform on a free plan before committing budget. And if per-user cost is a real constraint rather than a preference.

Choose Deputy if you run a large multi-site operation and need to forecast labour against projected revenue. If your staff sit across several unusual awards and you need an interpretation engine rather than configured rates. If you need integrations well beyond Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks, into enterprise HR or workforce analytics. Or if you have internal IT capacity to run a more complex platform properly, which is a real prerequisite rather than a footnote.

Being direct about our own gaps: GetMyRoster has no demand forecasting, no AI roster generation, and its award depth is strongest on SCHADS rather than uniform across every Modern Award. If your requirements land on any of those, Deputy is the better purchase and you should make it.

Switching, and How to Test Both Properly

If you do decide to move, the work is recreating staff, sites and shift templates, then reconnecting payroll. Both platforms integrate with the same three Australian payroll systems, so that connection is not the hard part.

How long it takes depends on headcount, number of sites, and how much history you want to bring across. Anyone quoting you a fixed migration time without asking those questions is guessing. What matters more than speed is sequencing: run one full pay cycle in parallel before you switch off the old system, and reconcile the two at the end. Tedious, and the only reliable way to find out whether penalty rates, broken shifts and allowances are calculating the way you assumed.

For the trial itself, build your real roster rather than a demo one. Your actual staff, your actual sites, and specifically your most awkward recurring shift, the Sunday split, the overnight, the one that always needs manual adjustment. Platforms look interchangeable until you feed them the thing that has been annoying you for two years.

Then test the staff side, because managers choose rostering software and staff decide whether it survives. Install the app, clock in, request a swap, submit leave. A tool nobody opens is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced, because now you believe the data in it.

If you are still scoping the market more broadly, our guide to the best rostering software in Australia compares five platforms, and the Deputy alternatives guide covers the field beyond these two.

The Costs That Do Not Appear on the Pricing Page

Subscription cost is the number everyone compares because it is the easy one. It is rarely the number that decides whether a rostering rollout succeeds.

Time to competence. A platform with more capability takes longer to learn, and that time is paid for in manager hours during the weeks when the roster still has to go out. A simpler tool that a duty manager can run unsupervised after an afternoon has a real advantage that never shows up in a feature matrix. Ask how long until someone other than the person who set it up can build the roster alone.

Who administers it on an ordinary Tuesday. Enterprise-grade platforms assume somebody owns them. In a 40-person business that somebody is usually the operations manager, on top of their actual job. Be honest about whether that person exists before buying something that needs them.

Staff adoption, which is the one that actually kills rollouts. Every feature that depends on workers doing something, submitting availability, accepting open shifts, clocking in, only works at the rate staff engage with it. A platform at 60% staff adoption gives you 60% of the benefit and 100% of the cost, plus a parallel manual process for the rest. Test the employee app before the manager dashboard.

Switching costs later. Whichever you pick, you will be re-entering staff, sites and templates if you move again in three years. Ask both vendors what data you can export and in what format. A vendor who cannot answer that clearly is telling you something.

None of these favour one platform automatically. They favour matching the tool to the operation, which is a less satisfying conclusion than a winner but a more accurate one. A 300-seat multi-site business that buys the cheaper simpler tool will outgrow it and pay to migrate. A 25-person cafe group that buys the forecasting platform will spend two years paying for a module nobody has opened. Both are the same mistake pointed in opposite directions. Our guide to workforce management software in Australia works through the sizing question in more detail.