Shift It vs Shifter (Work Shift Calendar) - Beyond the Basics
Shifter is a clean, reliable shift calendar. Shift It adds award-based pay calculation, spreadsheet import, and payslip comparison for Australian and UK shift workers.
Shifter (Work Shift Calendar) consistently appears near the top of every shift app list alongside Supershift and My Shift Planner. If you’ve searched for a shift calendar app, you’ve seen it. It’s a clean, focused shift calendar with a solid track record. That’s a fair description — and it’s also the whole description. Understanding what Shifter is and isn’t helps you choose correctly.
What Shifter is built for
Shifter is a scheduling tool. You enter your shifts, set up rotation patterns, view your calendar, and optionally track a basic earnings figure based on an hourly rate. The interface is straightforward and the app does what it says. It has a large user base and has been around long enough to be reliable.
If your only requirement is a calendar for your shifts, Shifter works.
The problem most shift workers eventually hit
A shift calendar answers one question: when am I working?
Most shift workers also need to know: am I being paid correctly? These are different questions, and the second one is significantly harder. Your pay isn’t just hours times an hourly rate. Depending on your award or enterprise agreement, a Sunday shift might be double time. A shift that starts Saturday night and ends Sunday morning splits across two penalty rates at midnight. A public holiday on top of a weekend triggers a combined loading. An evening shift in hospitality triggers a different loading again from 7 pm.
Shifter’s earnings tracker handles none of this. It multiplies your hours by a rate you enter. That’s a useful rough figure. It is not a pay check.
How Shift It approaches the same problem
Shift It starts from the same place — a shift calendar — and adds a pay compliance layer on top. Pay Check calculates your earnings based on your specific award or enterprise agreement: penalty rate boundaries, loading stacking, overtime thresholds, on-call and recall provisions where relevant. It splits each shift at every rate-change boundary automatically, so a midnight crossover produces the correct rate for each half without you doing anything.
The output isn’t just a pay figure. It’s a breakdown you can compare against your actual payslip. If your employer short-paid a public holiday or applied the wrong Sunday rate, you can see it line by line. That’s the difference between a calendar with an earnings counter and an app that genuinely tracks whether you’re being paid correctly.
Roster import
Both apps support manual shift entry and rotation patterns. Shift It additionally imports directly from spreadsheets — which matters if your employer publishes a roster as an Excel or CSV file. Free users get two imports per month. Pro is unlimited. If you spend time manually entering your shifts each fortnight, this alone can be the deciding factor.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Shift It | Shifter |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Limited |
| 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 |
| iOS and Android | Yes | Yes |
| No-account privacy | Yes | Varies by feature |
Who should use which?
Shifter is a reasonable choice if you work a flat-rate job, don’t have spreadsheet rosters to import, and you just want a clean calendar. It’s one of three apps that consistently top the generic “best shift calendar” search results for good reason: it’s polished and it does the scheduling job well.
The question is whether scheduling is all you need. For most Australian and UK shift workers, the answer is no — penalty rates, loadings, and award complexity mean your payslip needs to be checked, not trusted. If that’s your situation, Shifter gives you half the picture. Pay Check gives you the other half.
The shift workers who consistently catch underpayments aren’t auditing payslips manually after the fact. They’re the ones whose shift record and expected pay figure already exist before the payslip arrives. That’s what Shift It is built to do.
Know what you're owed.
Shift It checks your pay against your award automatically. Start free — upgrade when it catches its first mistake.