Carerealm vs Person Centred Software

Pricing: transparent vs sales-led

Carerealm publishes its price: £4 per user per month, with every feature included on every account. A new organisation can sign up, start a 14-day trial without a card, and decide for themselves whether the platform fits. There's no contract length and you can cancel at any time.

Person Centred Software's pricing isn't published on their site at the time of writing — instead, buyers are asked to book a demo and receive a quote. That model works well for large care home groups where bespoke implementation and hardware bundles matter. It's less efficient if you're a smaller supported living provider, a family carer, or a start-up service where you'd rather just try the tool than schedule a sales call.

Person-centred by design, not as a label

Both platforms talk about person-centred care — it would be strange if either didn't. The difference is structural.

PCS originated in residential care homes and the platform still reflects that — terminology, workflows, and modules like digital reception and nursecall messaging assume a building with shared spaces and a staff team running shifts. The Connected Care Platform supports supported living and domiciliary care too, but they're additional contexts on top of the core care-home model.

Carerealm starts the other way around. Each supported person gets their own "area" with their own diary, their own medication record, their own forms and their own permissions. Realms choose the wording that fits their setting — supported person, service user, tenant, client, resident — and the whole platform adapts. The default is "supported person", and that's not an accident.

Scope: broad platform vs focused product

This is the most important honest difference. PCS sells a "Connected Care Platform" with roughly a dozen modules: mCare (care planning), ATLAS eMAR, IQ Care Intelligence (analytics), Wellbeing & Activities, a Resident Experience tool, compliance training, the Depensys staff-dependency tool, digital signage, digital reception, maintenance management, nursecall messaging, and 60+ partner integrations including GP Connect and NHS Assured. They also provide handheld devices on subscription. If you're running a large residential care home or a multi-home group, that breadth genuinely matters.

Carerealm is deliberately narrower. It does daily diaries, eMAR (including controlled drugs register, homely remedies, MCA / Best Interest documentation and covert administration tracking — aligned with NICE QS85), forms and care plan templates, AI tools to speed up writing, audit-grade activity logs, and fine-grained role permissions. We don't make digital signage and we don't sell hardware. (Training records, a course catalogue and a compliance matrix ship in the optional Staff Rota add-on, though we don't host e-learning content.) For a small-to-mid supported living team, family carer, or 1:1 service those things are usually solved elsewhere already.

Where PCS is genuinely ahead

We're not going to pretend otherwise. PCS publicly reports over 8,000 care providers using the platform and over 160,000 residents cared for by teams using it daily. That's a substantial install base. They have a longer track record with CQC inspections at scale, a wider partner ecosystem, established integrations with NHS services, and the operational depth that comes with serving large care home groups for years. If those things are decision criteria for you, that's a reasonable place to land.

Where Carerealm is genuinely ahead

Person-centred is the design point, not a tagline. Pricing is in the open and every feature is on every plan — no upgrade-to-unlock pattern. You can try the platform for 14 days without giving us a card or speaking to anyone. The interface is modern, fast, dark-mode aware, fully responsive on phones and tablets, and built with the supported living workflow in mind from the ground up. Cancel any time, no contract.