Is Deputy cheaper than MedAligna?

Below about twenty people, usually yes. Deputy publishes $6.50 per user per month on Core, so thirty people is about $195 a month and sixty is about $390. MedAligna is $99–$249 per location and does not move when you hire, so the crossover arrives around twenty to thirty and widens with every per-diem nurse.

Deputy has compliance features. Why is that not enough?

Because they are compliance with wage law rather than clinical law. Break and overtime rules answer what somebody is owed; licensure, exclusion screening and ratios answer what somebody is allowed to do and how many of them a unit needs. Depth in the first does not produce the second.

Can Deputy do nurse-to-patient ratios?

Not against a resident census with acuity weighting, which is what a ratio means in practice. Deputy forecasts demand; a ratio is measured against the people actually in the building, and produces HPRD and the PBJ figures downstream.

What is a good Deputy alternative for a nursing home?

One that treats the CMS filing as a first-class output rather than a report to assemble by hand. MedAligna holds ratios against census with acuity, blocks expired credentials and excluded staff at the point of assignment, and generates the quarterly PBJ file from captured hours — published pricing, 14-day trial, no sales call.

Comparison · verified August 2026

Deputy alternatives for clinics and care providers

Deputy is workforce management for shift-based businesses: scheduling, time and attendance, labour cost control and wage-compliance rules, priced per user per month. MedAligna is scheduling for healthcare, priced per location, where the compliance being enforced is clinical rather than payroll.

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At a glance

Deputy publishes $5 per user per month on Lite, $6.50 on Core and $9 on Pro, with payroll and HR as paid add-ons (their pricing page, 2026-08-04).
MedAligna is $99–$249 per location per month, flat, so the crossover sits around twenty to thirty people on Core.
Deputy's compliance strength is wage law — overtime, breaks, pay rules. That is real and we do not do it as deeply.
Clinical compliance is a different set: licence expiry blocking an assignment, OIG exclusion screening, ratios against census, and the CMS PBJ file.
If your risk is a wage claim, Deputy is built for it. If it is a survey, a lapsed licence or a PBJ submission, it is not.

What Deputy is genuinely good at

Labour cost is the thing it does best. Live cost against schedule, demand-based forecasting and reporting are mature and well built, and a business whose main scheduling problem is spend has a good answer here.

Its wage-compliance engine is serious — break rules, overtime thresholds and pay interpretation, maintained across jurisdictions. That is a hard problem, it is expensive to keep current, and it is genuinely valuable if your exposure is a wage-and-hour claim.

It is also a well-supported product with a large integration surface and published, self-serve pricing, which is not the norm among healthcare-specific vendors.

Where wage compliance and clinical compliance diverge

Deputy's compliance work is about what somebody is OWED. A clinic's is also about what somebody is ALLOWED to do. The second set is not a subset of the first, and no amount of depth in the first produces it.

Nothing stops an unlicensed assignment

A break rule can refuse a shift pattern. No general product refuses a shift because the person's RN licence lapsed last month, because it has no model of a licence that gates work. MedAligna does that check in the database under the same lock that stops two nurses claiming one shift.

No exclusion screening

Scheduling an OIG-excluded individual into federally funded care is a billing problem with a payback attached, and it is not something a wage-compliance engine looks at.

Ratios need a census, not a forecast

Demand forecasting predicts how busy you will be. A nurse-to-patient ratio is measured against how many residents are actually in the building, weighted for acuity, and reported as hours per resident day. Those are different numbers with different consequences.

No CMS Payroll-Based Journal

Hours by employee, by day, by CMS job code, filed quarterly. Deputy exports hours to payroll; it does not produce this file.

Per seat versus per location

A nursing roster carries per-diem and float staff who work occasionally and still need accounts. On a per-user price each is a full seat all year.

Which one is right for you

Both are real compliance products. They are compliant with different things, and the honest split is by which exposure keeps you awake.

Stay with Deputy if…

Your primary problem is labour cost and demand forecasting.
Your compliance exposure is wage-and-hour rather than clinical.
You schedule across clinical and non-clinical operations in one system.
You are under about twenty people, where per-seat is still cheaper.

Look at MedAligna if…

Your staff hold licences and competencies that decide what they may work.
You are a skilled-nursing or long-term-care facility that files PBJ.
You hold nurse-to-patient ratios against a census, with acuity.
You bill federal programmes and need exclusion screening built in.
You run home-care visits and need travel time checked between consecutive calls.

MedAligna vs Deputy, row by row

Binary, verifiable facts only. No adjectives; an opinion is not a comparison.

Capability	MedAligna	Deputy
Published price	$99–$249 / location / mo	$5–$9 / user / mo
Price moves when you hire	No	Yes
Self-serve trial, no sales call	Yes	Yes
Shift swaps and open-shift claiming	Yes	Yes
Time clock	Yes	Yes
Geofenced clock-in	Yes	Yes
Labour cost against schedule	Budget estimate	Yes
Demand forecasting	No	Yes
Wage and break rule interpretation	Partial	Yes
Rest-gap and consecutive-day rules	Yes	Yes
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

Deputy is a trademark of its owner. MedAligna is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Deputy. 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 Deputy

Deputy is not a product anybody should leave lightly, and there is a large set of healthcare organisations for which it remains the better fit.

Labour cost control is your main scheduling problem and it is working.
Your compliance exposure is wage-and-hour, where Deputy's engine is deeper than ours.
You schedule non-clinical staff — reception, cleaning, catering, transport — alongside clinical staff.
You are under about twenty people, where the per-seat price is still the cheaper one.
You have built integrations around it that would cost more to rebuild than the switch would save.

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 clinical rules are now the binding constraint

01
Export your people and import them
Every row previewed before anything is written, with ignored columns named. Bring contracted hours across while you are there.
02
Set each site's timezone before building a schedule
It decides which day a shift falls on. A site in Phoenix and one in New York cannot share a clock.
03
Load credentials and turn the blocking ones on
Licences go in each nurse's own wallet; annual competencies import from your LMS. Then make the ones that matter blocking.
04
Enter a census and set your ratios
This is the part with no equivalent in a general tool, and it is what produces HPRD and the PBJ figures downstream.
05
Run one pay period in parallel
Export hours from both and compare totals before switching payroll over. If they disagree, find out why first.

Deputy questions, answered

Is Deputy cheaper than MedAligna?: Below about twenty people, usually yes. Deputy publishes $6.50 per user per month on Core, so thirty people is about $195 a month and sixty is about $390. MedAligna is $99–$249 per location and does not move when you hire, so the crossover arrives around twenty to thirty and widens with every per-diem nurse.
Deputy has compliance features. Why is that not enough?: Because they are compliance with wage law rather than clinical law. Break and overtime rules answer what somebody is owed; licensure, exclusion screening and ratios answer what somebody is allowed to do and how many of them a unit needs. Depth in the first does not produce the second.
Can Deputy do nurse-to-patient ratios?: Not against a resident census with acuity weighting, which is what a ratio means in practice. Deputy forecasts demand; a ratio is measured against the people actually in the building, and produces HPRD and the PBJ figures downstream.
What is a good Deputy alternative for a nursing home?: One that treats the CMS filing as a first-class output rather than a report to assemble by hand. MedAligna holds ratios against census with acuity, blocks expired credentials and excluded staff at the point of assignment, and generates the quarterly PBJ file from captured hours — published pricing, 14-day trial, no sales call.