Comparison · verified August 2026
Homebase alternatives for healthcare employers
Homebase is scheduling, time tracking, hiring and HR for small businesses, priced per location with unlimited employees. MedAligna is priced the same way and does the same scheduling for healthcare specifically, enforcing credential, ratio and federal-reporting rules a general product has no model for.
From $99/month per location · No sales call · No card to start
At a glance
- Homebase publishes $30, $70 and $120 per location per month, unlimited employees, with lower annual rates (their pricing page, 2026-08-04). There is also a free tier for a single location.
- MedAligna is $99–$249 per location per month. Same shape, overlapping range — this is not a page about price.
- Homebase is broader outside the schedule: hiring, onboarding and HR documents are included.
- MedAligna is deeper inside it: an expired licence blocks the assignment, ratios are held against a census with acuity, and the quarterly CMS PBJ file is generated from captured hours.
- Pick on which side of the schedule your problem sits.
What Homebase does well
Per-location pricing with unlimited employees is the right shape for a business with a long roster of part-timers, and it is the same reasoning behind our own pricing. A clinic with forty casual staff is not penalised for having them.
The hiring and onboarding side is genuinely included rather than an add-on: job posts, applicant tracking, offer and onboarding paperwork. For a practice manager who also does recruitment, that is real work removed.
It is built for small businesses that do not have an HR department, and it shows in the product. Setup is fast and the free single-location tier lets somebody try the whole idea without a decision.
Where a small-business platform stops short of a clinic
The gap is not price and it is not polish. It is that healthcare scheduling is constrained by rules that exist nowhere else, and a product serving restaurants and retail has no reason to model them.
Certifications are stored, not enforced
Storing a licence number and an expiry date is a filing cabinet. The clinical requirement is that the expiry stops the assignment — in MedAligna the block is evaluated in the database under a row lock, so an expired credential cannot be scheduled around, even by two people acting at the same moment.
No OIG exclusion screening
A general HR product does not screen against the federal exclusion list, and an excluded person scheduled into Medicare-funded care is a repayment exposure rather than a rota error.
No census, no ratio, no HPRD
Coverage in a small-business scheduler means the shift has somebody on it. In nursing it means the unit is staffed against the residents actually present, weighted for acuity, and reported as hours per resident day.
No CMS Payroll-Based Journal
The quarterly federal staffing file for skilled nursing. Homebase exports hours to payroll; PBJ is a different file with CMS job codes, and no general product produces it.
No on-call, and no home visits
On-call rotations with escalation, and home-care visits with travel time checked between consecutive calls, are both outside what a shift-based small-business tool models.
Which one is right for you
Two products with the same pricing shape and different centres of gravity. The question is whether your unsolved problem is beside the schedule or inside it.
Stay with Homebase if…
- Hiring and onboarding are as much of your problem as scheduling is.
- You employ no licensed staff, or their credentials never gate the work.
- You are a single location on the free tier and it is doing the job.
- You schedule clinical and non-clinical staff together and want one tool for both.
Look at MedAligna if…
- Your staff hold licences and competencies that gate what they may work.
- You file CMS PBJ, or hold ratios against a census.
- You bill Medicare or Medicaid and want exclusion screening structural rather than remembered.
- You run on-call rotations, or home-care visits with travel between them.
- You want the schedule to refuse what compliance would refuse, at the moment somebody tries.
MedAligna vs Homebase, row by row
Binary, verifiable facts only. No adjectives; an opinion is not a comparison.
| Capability | MedAligna | Homebase |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | $99–$249 / location / mo | $30–$120 / location / mo |
| Unlimited employees per location | Yes | Yes |
| Price moves when you hire | No | No |
| Free tier | No | Single location |
| Shift swaps and open-shift claiming | Yes | Yes |
| Time clock | Yes | Yes |
| Geofenced clock-in | Yes | Yes |
| Hiring and applicant tracking | No | Yes |
| Onboarding paperwork | No | 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 |
Homebase is a trademark of its owner. MedAligna is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Homebase. 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 Homebase
Unusually for a comparison page, price is not the reason to leave and it is not the reason to stay either — the two products overlap. That makes the decision cleaner, and it makes staying a perfectly reasonable outcome.
- You do not employ licensed clinical staff, or nothing about their licences gates scheduling.
- Hiring and onboarding are inside your job, and losing them would cost more than clinical enforcement gains.
- You are one location on the free tier and it works.
- You do not file PBJ, hold ratios, or bill federal programmes.
- Your team is trained on it. Adoption is the expensive part of any change and you have already spent it.
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
- 01
Export the roster and import it
Same columns going out as coming in, previewed before anything is written. Add contracted hours while you are in the spreadsheet.
- 02
Set each location's timezone first
It decides which day a shift falls on, and it cannot be changed once shifts exist without moving them.
- 03
Put credentials in and make them blocking
Licences into each person's wallet, competencies imported from your LMS. Until a requirement is marked blocking it only warns.
- 04
Keep hiring where it is
We do not do applicant tracking and are not going to pretend a migration includes it. Plenty of clinics run a hiring tool alongside a scheduler.
Homebase questions, answered
- Is MedAligna more expensive than Homebase?
- At the entry tiers yes — Homebase publishes $30 per location per month against our $99 — but both are per location with unlimited employees, so the gap does not widen as you hire. Their top tier is $120 per location, inside our range. This is a comparison about capability rather than cost.
- Does Homebase track certifications?
- It can store documents and dates. What a clinic needs is enforcement: an expired licence refusing the assignment rather than appearing on a report. That check runs in our database at the moment somebody is assigned or claims a shift.
- Does MedAligna do hiring and onboarding?
- No. Homebase includes applicant tracking and onboarding paperwork and we do not, which is a genuine reason to stay if that is part of your problem. We do the schedule, the clock, the credentials and the federal reporting.
- What is a good Homebase alternative for a medical practice?
- One where the clinical rules are enforced rather than recorded: MedAligna blocks expired credentials and OIG-excluded staff at assignment, holds ratios against census with acuity, and produces the quarterly CMS PBJ file — at $99–$249 per location per month with the same unlimited-employee shape you already have.
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.