Comparison · verified August 2026
Buddy Punch alternatives for care providers
Buddy Punch is time tracking — punches, geofencing, photo verification and PTO — with scheduling built around it, priced per user per month plus a base fee. MedAligna is a healthcare scheduler in which the clock is one half of a single system, and the hours it captures feed the CMS staffing file directly.
From $99/month per location · No sales call · No card to start
At a glance
- Buddy Punch publishes $4.99 per user per month plus a $19 monthly base fee at entry, rising to $6.99 and $12.99 on higher tiers (their pricing page, 2026-08-04).
- MedAligna is $99–$249 per location per month, flat. At thirty people the entry tier is roughly $169 a month against our $99–$249.
- Buddy Punch's strength is punch integrity — geofencing, photo capture, IP rules. That is real and we do not do all of it.
- Its weakness for a care provider is that the schedule is secondary, and in healthcare the roster is where the rules live.
- The hours that leave a clock in a skilled-nursing facility are the hours that go on a federal filing, which is a reason for them not to live in two systems.
What Buddy Punch does well
Punch integrity is its centre of gravity and it is good at it: geofencing, photo capture on punch, IP address restrictions and QR codes. If your actual problem is people clocking in for each other, this is a product built to solve exactly that.
It is straightforward and quick to deploy. There is no long implementation, the pricing is published, and a small business can be running the same week.
PTO accrual and time-off tracking are handled properly rather than as an afterthought, which is more than a lot of scheduling-first products manage.
Where a clock-first product runs out in healthcare
The gap is not the clock. It is everything the roster is supposed to enforce before somebody ever reaches the clock, and what the captured hours are supposed to become afterwards.
The schedule does not enforce anything
In a care setting the roster is where compliance happens: who is licensed, who is excluded, how many are needed on the unit. A schedule built as an adjunct to a time clock has no model for any of it, so a nurse with a lapsed licence is rostered, arrives, and clocks in normally.
Hours stop at payroll
Buddy Punch exports hours for payroll, which is where a general product's job ends. In skilled nursing those same hours are also a quarterly federal submission by employee, by day, by CMS job code — and re-keying a quarter into a separate system is exactly how the numbers stop agreeing.
No census, ratio or HPRD
Hours per resident day needs residents. A time-tracking product has nowhere to record a census and no reason to.
No on-call, no home visits
On-call rotations with escalation, and home-care visits with travel time checked between calls, are scheduling problems rather than clock problems.
Per seat plus a base fee
A per-diem pool costs a seat each, all year, whether they work twice a month or not — and the base fee applies regardless.
Which one is right for you
It comes down to whether your unsolved problem is at the door or on the rota.
Stay with Buddy Punch if…
- Buddy punching is your actual problem and photo or IP verification is what you need.
- You already have a scheduler you are happy with and only want a better clock.
- You have a small team and no clinical rules gating who works.
- You want PTO accrual tracked in the same place as punches and nothing more.
Look at MedAligna if…
- You need the roster to refuse an unlicensed or excluded person before they ever arrive.
- You file CMS PBJ and want it built from the same hours you already captured.
- You hold nurse-to-patient ratios against a census, with acuity.
- You run on-call rotations or home-care visits.
- You would rather have the schedule and the clock be one system than two that have to agree.
MedAligna vs Buddy Punch, row by row
Binary, verifiable facts only. No adjectives; an opinion is not a comparison.
| Capability | MedAligna | Buddy Punch |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | $99–$249 / location / mo | $4.99–$12.99 / user / mo + $19 base |
| Price moves when you hire | No | Yes |
| Self-serve trial, no sales call | Yes | Yes |
| Time clock | Yes | Yes |
| Geofenced clock-in | Yes | Yes |
| Photo verification on punch | No | Yes |
| IP address restrictions | No | Yes |
| PTO accrual tracking | Partial | Yes |
| Shift swaps and open-shift claiming | Yes | Partial |
| Rest-gap and consecutive-day rules | Yes | No |
| Credential expiry blocks the assignment | Yes | No |
| OIG exclusion screening | Yes | No |
| Nurse-to-patient ratios against census | Yes | No |
| Acuity weighting and HPRD | Yes | No |
| CMS Payroll-Based Journal file | Yes | No |
| On-call scheduling and escalation | Yes | No |
| Home-care visits with travel-time checking | Yes | No |
Buddy Punch is a trademark of its owner. MedAligna is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Buddy Punch. Comparison compiled from publicly available documentation and pricing pages, verified July 2026. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
The honest bit
When you should stay on Buddy Punch
If the problem you set out to solve was the clock, it solved it, and swapping to a scheduler because the scheduler is better at scheduling is not automatically a good trade.
- Punch integrity is the problem and photo or IP verification is why you bought it. We do geofencing; we do not do photo capture or IP restrictions.
- You already run a scheduler you like and only wanted the clock replaced.
- Nobody on your team holds a credential that gates what they may work.
- You do not file PBJ or hold ratios.
- You are small enough that per-seat plus the base fee is still the cheaper bill.
We would rather you stayed and told someone we were straight with you than switched and regretted it. This category is small, and reputations travel.
Moving across, if the roster is the real problem
- 01
Import your people
Roster in as a spreadsheet, every row previewed, ignored columns named. Bring employee ids across — they are what the LMS import and the PBJ file match on.
- 02
Close the current pay period where you are
Do not migrate mid-period. Close it, export the hours, and start the new one in one system so nothing has to be reconciled across two.
- 03
Set the timezone, then the geofence
Timezone first because it decides which day a shift falls on. Then set each site's coordinates and leave the radius empty for a fortnight — it records how far away each punch was without refusing anybody, so you can pick a number from real data.
- 04
Load credentials and turn the blocking ones on
This is the part with no equivalent in a time-tracking product, and it is the reason for the move.
Buddy Punch questions, answered
- Is Buddy Punch cheaper than MedAligna?
- For a small team, yes. At their published $4.99 per user per month plus the $19 base fee, ten people is about $69 a month against our $99. At thirty people it is about $169, which sits inside our range, and above that the per-seat line keeps climbing while ours does not.
- Does MedAligna do photo verification on clock-in?
- No. We capture the punch with optional geofencing and record how far from the building it happened, but we do not take a photo or restrict by IP address. If buddy punching is your specific problem, Buddy Punch is better equipped for it and this page says so.
- Can Buddy Punch produce a CMS PBJ file?
- No — it is a time-tracking product and PBJ is a skilled-nursing federal submission with its own job codes and structure. If you file quarterly, having the clock and the filing in one system is usually the deciding factor.
- What is a good Buddy Punch alternative for a care home?
- One where the clock and the roster are the same system, because the hours are the same hours. MedAligna captures punches with geofencing, blocks expired credentials and excluded staff at assignment, holds ratios against census, and builds the quarterly PBJ file from those captured hours rather than a re-keyed copy.
Other comparisons
Decide it for yourself
Drive the real scheduler with no signup, or trial it with your own staff for fourteen days. Nobody will call you either way.