Shift It vs My Shift Planner - Shift Scheduling vs Pay Compliance
My Shift Planner has 400,000 users and a clean calendar. Shift It adds award-based pay calculation, spreadsheet import, and multi-job support for Australian and UK shift workers.
My Shift Planner is one of the most-installed shift calendar apps in the world. If you’ve looked at any roundup of shift work apps, it’s probably in the top two or three. With over 400,000 users, its reputation is built on being a solid, uncomplicated shift calendar. That’s worth understanding, because it explains both where it excels and where it runs out of road.
What My Shift Planner does well
The core experience is clean. You can enter shifts quickly, set up repeating rotation patterns, colour-code shift types, and view your schedule in a clear calendar layout. It’s been polished over many iterations and the interface reflects that. For pure scheduling — logging when you work and seeing it at a glance — it does the job without friction.
The user base is also genuinely reassuring for some people. 400,000 users means the app is stable, actively maintained, and has survived the kinds of edge cases that kill smaller apps.
Where they differ: the pay side
My Shift Planner includes a basic earnings tracker. You enter your hourly rate, it calculates your pay for the period. That works for simple, flat-rate jobs. It does not work for most Australian or UK shift workers.
If your job has penalty rates — and most shift work does — your pay isn’t just hours times rate. A Sunday shift might be 200% of your ordinary rate. A night shift that crosses midnight triggers two different rates at the boundary. A public holiday on top of a weekend applies a combined loading. None of this is handled by a flat-rate calculator.
Shift It’s Pay Check is built specifically for this. It applies your award or enterprise agreement to your exact shift times, splits each shift at rate-change boundaries automatically, and compares your calculated earnings against your actual payslip. You know what you should have been paid before the payslip arrives.
Multiple jobs
My Shift Planner is designed around a single job. If you work across two employers — a common situation for nurses, community workers, and casual staff — the single-job model becomes a problem. You can work around it with colour coding, but your pay calculations, if you use them, don’t separate correctly.
Shift It supports multiple jobs natively. Each job has its own award, pay rate, colour, and separate pay calculation. Your Coming Up view and your weekly earnings both handle two or more jobs correctly without workarounds.
Roster import
Most shift workers receive their roster as a spreadsheet. Manual entry is the main bottleneck for people evaluating these apps — if your employer publishes an Excel file every fortnight, typing each shift by hand gets old fast.
Shift It imports directly from spreadsheets. The free tier allows two imports per month. Pro is unlimited. The Roster Wizard also auto-generates repeating patterns, so if your cycle is set you may not need to import at all.
My Shift Planner requires manual shift entry. Rotation templates help for regular patterns, but there’s no file import.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Shift It | My Shift Planner |
|---|---|---|
| Shift calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Rotation patterns | Yes (Roster Wizard) | Yes |
| Colour-coded shifts | Yes | Yes |
| Spreadsheet import | Yes (2/month free, Pro unlimited) | No |
| Multiple jobs | Yes | No (workaround only) |
| Award-based pay calculation | Yes (Pro) | No |
| Penalty rate handling | Yes (Pro) | No |
| Payslip comparison | Yes (Pro) | No |
| Live Pay counter | Yes (Pro) | No |
| Home screen widgets | Yes | Yes |
| Critical Alerts (breaks DND) | Yes | No |
| iOS and Android | Yes | Yes |
| On-device privacy (no account) | Yes | Account optional |
Who should use which?
My Shift Planner is a good fit if you work a single job with a flat hourly rate and you just want a clean calendar. The user base is large, the app is stable, and it does what it says on the tin.
If you’re under an award, work multiple jobs, receive a spreadsheet roster, or have ever wondered whether your payslip is actually correct, Shift It is built for that situation. The 400,000 users using My Shift Planner are mostly scheduling. The shift workers using Shift It are scheduling and tracking what they’re owed.
Underpayment in shift work is common and usually systematic — the same classification error, the same missed loading, repeating every fortnight. The workers who catch it are the ones with a record that exists independently of their employer’s payroll system. Pay Check is that record.
Know what you're owed.
Shift It checks your pay against your award automatically. Start free — upgrade when it catches its first mistake.