Time To Pet Alternatives 2026: Time To Pet vs Pet Sitter Plus vs Bizzly

Time To Pet Alternatives: What to Know First

Time To Pet is the best-known pet care platform on the market, used by pet sitting, dog walking, daycare, boarding and mobile grooming businesses, and it says it is trusted by over 4,000 of them. Clients request services through a portal, you schedule and assign visits, walkers complete them in a staff app with GPS and time tracking, and the system handles invoicing and card payments. It reviews extremely well: on its Capterra UK profile, checked in July 2026, it carried 4.9 out of 5 across 272 reviews. Scores move, so check the profile yourself.

So the honest starting point for a page like this is that Time To Pet is not a bad product people are fleeing. Businesses look elsewhere for two specific reasons: the per-staff pricing model gets expensive as a team grows, and the platform runs your operation without selling it - the website is a $15 a month add-on, and recurring revenue is invoiced rather than sold as a subscription a client signs up to. This guide compares Time To Pet with Pet Sitter Plus, the closest like-for-like alternative and the one that publishes UK prices in pounds, and with Bizzly, which comes at the problem from the website and subscription-billing end rather than the field operations end.

Why Pet Businesses Look for Time To Pet Alternatives

The price scales with your headcount

The Team plan, as of July 2026, is $40 a month plus $16 for every active staff member, where an active staff member is anyone with at least one assigned or completed event in the billing period, and office managers and admins always count whether or not they walk a dog. Three walkers is $88 a month. Five is $120. Ten is $200, and that is before the $10 texting add-on, the $15 website add-on and card processing. Per-seat pricing is a perfectly defensible model - more walkers usually does mean more value from the software - but it means the software bill grows in step with the exact thing you are trying to grow, and the seasonal round that brings in extra walkers over Christmas pays for them.

Invoicing after the fact is not the same as a subscription

Most established pet care software is built around the traditional cycle: schedule the visits, complete them, invoice at the end of the period, chase what has not been paid. Time To Pet automates that cycle well - templates schedule and invoice your regulars on their billing frequency - but it is still a cycle that ends in an invoice. Its Packages feature does let clients pre-pay for a bundle of ten walks, and Time To Pet's own knowledge base is candid that packages cannot renew automatically and must be added manually each month if you are using them for a flat monthly rate. If the model you want is the one in our subscription dog walking guide - a client picks a plan, pays for it up front on a card, and gets exactly the walks they bought - that is a different shape of software.

Your website is still a separate job

Time To Pet Websites is a real product and a reasonable one: an AI assistant builds a mobile-ready templated pet care site in minutes, you swap the logo, colours, photos and copy, and the forms and Client Portal booking links plug back into your account. It is $15 a month on top of your plan, and it is a template you customise rather than pages you lay out. For a solo walker that may be exactly right. For a business trying to rank for “dog walker in Chorlton” against three competitors and a marketplace, a template with editable copy is a starting position rather than a finish line - which is why plenty of pet businesses still pay for Wix, Squarespace or a developer alongside their booking software.

Dollars, and the small frictions of a US-first product

Time To Pet works in the UK and Time To Pet Payments is listed as available here, but the product is priced and built US-first: you are billed in dollars, so your software cost moves with the exchange rate and your card issuer may add a foreign transaction fee. Public reviews also flag a steep learning curve, visit reports that cannot be customised per client, awkward boarding and overnight scheduling, and a mobile app better for completing visits than editing anything. None of that is fatal. All of it is why people look around.

What to Look for in a Time To Pet Alternative

Work out the twelve-month cost at the headcount you plan to have

Model it properly: monthly platform fee, plus per-user fees at the team size you expect in two years, plus add-ons, plus card processing at your expected monthly takings. A solo walker on Lite at $25 and a four-walker business on Team at $104 are not the same purchase. Pet Sitter Plus at £24 plus £13 per active user reaches £76 a month for four staff. Bizzly is £29 or £49 for the whole business whether that is one walker or nine. Whichever way you go, the number that matters is the one at your future size, not your current one.

Decide whether you are buying a round manager or a revenue engine

These are two genuinely different products that both call themselves pet care software. A round manager schedules visits, dispatches walkers, tracks them on a map, records what happened and bills for it - that is Time To Pet and Pet Sitter Plus, and they are good at it. A revenue engine sells the service: a website that ranks, plans a client can buy at eleven at night without speaking to you, prepaid packs, automatic collection before the work happens, and booking access that switches off when the payment fails. Very few products do both ends well. Be clear about which end is currently costing you money.

Ask whether booking knows what the client has paid for

This is the question nobody asks and everybody regrets. If billing and booking are separate systems, someone has to notice that the Thursday walk client is two invoices behind, and someone has to remember that the ten-walk pack ran out in March. Payment-gated quotas tie the calendar to the plan: a client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, an expired pack stops booking by itself, and a failed payment blocks new bookings automatically. Ask each vendor to show you what happens on screen when a client with no remaining credit tries to book.

Take GPS and safeguarding seriously if you employ people

If you have walkers out alone with other people's keys and other people's dogs, GPS check-in and check-out is not a gimmick - it is your evidence the visit happened, your protection in a dispute, and increasingly what owners expect to see. Time To Pet and Pet Sitter Plus both do this properly, including full-route tracking on walks and alerts when a check-in is late or a check-out happens too far from where it should be. Bizzly does not do it at all. If GPS is a requirement, it decides the shortlist on its own.

Check how money reaches you and how easily you can leave

Time To Pet Payments is powered by Stripe with published rates of 2.9% plus $0.30 for cards and 1.3% plus $0.30 for ACH. Pet Sitter Plus integrates with your own Stripe account. Bizzly also runs on your own Stripe account, so the methods your clients see are the ones you enable in Stripe - cards and wallets by default, and Bacs Direct Debit if you are a UK business and switch it on there. Before signing, ask three more things: what the contract length is, whether you can export your full client, pet and payment history yourself, and what happens to in-flight recurring schedules if you leave mid-month. Plan the exit as well as the entry - stored card tokens generally cannot be moved between platforms, so a switch means clients re-entering payment details, which is a communications exercise rather than a technical one.

Feature Comparison

Pricing Comparison

Platform Reviews

Time To Pet

Best for: Established pet sitting and dog walking businesses with a team in the field, who need GPS-verified visits, polished client-facing visit reports and the most mature product in the category - and who can absorb per-staff pricing.

Time To Pet is the reference implementation of pet care software. The client portal handles requests, profiles, invoices and payments; the scheduling engine handles recurring templates, packages and multi-day boarding; the staff app gives walkers everything they need on the doorstep, with GPS recorded at check-in and check-out by default and full-event tracking available for walks and hikes. Visit report cards with photos and videos are the feature owners actually notice, and they are genuinely good. Team plans add staff permissions, time off and pay reports, there is a QuickBooks integration, and Time To Pet Payments is built on Stripe with transparent published rates. Reviewers are consistently positive - 4.9 out of 5 across 272 reviews on its Capterra UK profile in July 2026 - and the thing they praise most, alongside the feature depth, is a support team drawn from pet care itself.

The criticisms are consistent too, and mostly the price of that depth: a steep learning curve, packages and templates that reviewers describe as clunky to set up for irregular schedules, visit reports that cannot be customised per client, awkward boarding and overnight scheduling, limited flexibility around holiday weeks, and a mobile app that is better for completing visits than editing anything. Add the per-staff pricing, dollar billing for UK businesses, and a website that costs extra, and you have a product that is excellent at running the round and deliberately not trying to be your marketing.

• Pricing: Lite $25, Solo $50, Team $40 + $16 per active staff member, Facility $79, plus $10 texting and $15 websites add-ons and 2.9% + $0.30 card processing. USD. Figures as of July 2026 - confirm directly.
• Strengths: GPS and time tracking, excellent staff and client apps, visit reports with photos and videos, deep scheduling including boarding, QuickBooks, transparent payment rates, outstanding support reputation
• Limitations: Per-staff pricing, USD billing, website is a paid add-on, packages do not renew automatically, learning curve, visit reports not customisable per client

Pet Sitter Plus

Best for: UK pet sitting and dog walking businesses that want the same class of field operations software as Time To Pet, priced in pounds, with every feature on every tier.

Pet Sitter Plus is the closest like-for-like alternative and the one UK operators shortlist most often, largely because it publishes a UK price list. The feature set is broad: recurring service scheduling with drag-and-drop calendars, a client and pet database with fully customisable fields, a client portal with three-way messaging and instant visit reports, bulk invoicing that sends invoices for repeat services in a single action, Stripe card processing with stored-card automatic payments, a mobile staff module, and QuickBooks Online integration. Its GPS reporting is a highlight - an interactive map showing where each sitter checked in and out, with notifications for late check-ins, unusually short services and check-in or check-out locations too far apart to be plausible. That is a supervision tool, not just a receipt. On its Capterra UK profile in July 2026 it carried 4.8 out of 5 across 140 reviews.

The important structural point is that the full software suite is included on every plan - there is no feature ladder, only a headcount ladder - and the UK list ran a 50% first-year discount as of July 2026 alongside a permanent Affiliate rate in exchange for displaying a Pet Sitter Plus link on your website. The criticisms in public reviews are a learning curve, a tedious service setup with no bulk editing, help documentation that could be more intuitive, invoices that cannot be edited once created, and the per-user cost becoming uncomfortable for small teams - one reviewer described a team of seven as very pricey. We could not find a website builder in its public materials, even as a paid add-on, so budget for a site elsewhere.

• Pricing: Solo £30/month, Team £24 + £13 per active user (2-25 staff), Enterprise £349/month, with Affiliate rates of £24 / £20 + £11 / £295 and a 50% first-year discount advertised. 30-day free trial, no card. GBP price list published. Figures as of July 2026.
• Strengths: UK pricing in pounds, every feature on every plan, strong map-based GPS reporting with exception alerts, deep customisation of client and pet records, bulk invoicing, QuickBooks, well reviewed support
• Limitations: Per-user pricing, no website builder found in its public materials, invoices cannot be edited after creation, no bulk editing of services during setup, English only, learning curve

Bizzly

Best for: Pet businesses whose growth problem is selling recurring walks rather than dispatching them - and who want the website, the subscription billing and the booking calendar to be one product on one flat fee.

Bizzly starts from a different premise. It begins with a fully flexible drag-and-drop website editor, included on every plan, and puts booking, billing and CRM inside the same product rather than behind a portal link. The editor ships twenty-six components - among them the booking calendar, the timetable, plans, a store and cart, testimonials, forms and the entire customer portal as a drop-in block. You style per element, right down to a raw CSS inspector, on top of a global theme in your own colours; you build multiple pages with per-page SEO and a search-result preview; you can snapshot a page version before you experiment, pull images from a built-in library with stock photography, or have the AI draft and refine a page for you. It is a desktop tool and there is no custom-code injection, but the public site is yours page by page - which is the difference between ranking for “dog walker in Didsbury” and hoping the template does.

The billing model is the second differentiator, and for a recurring-walks business it is the important one. Bizzly runs subscription billing and pack or season billing side by side: monthly plans carrying booking quotas, prepaid session packs with an expiry, one-off seasonal and holiday packs that pro-rate automatically for mid-period joiners and can be sold whole or day by day, and season subscriptions that bill natively through Stripe and auto-roll clients into the next season with the cancellation policy you choose - billing period end, a notice period, or the end of the season. Capacity is held while a client is in checkout, so a popular pack cannot oversell. In practice that means a four-walks-a-week monthly plan, a ten-walk flexible pack and a school-holiday daycare block can all sell from one calendar, and the client buys them without a phone call. Our subscription dog walking guide and the pet care startup guide both walk through how to price the tiers.

The third differentiator is that billing and booking are the same system, which makes booking quotas payment-gated. A client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover; an expired pack stops booking by itself; and a lapsed payment automatically blocks new bookings rather than becoming somebody's Monday morning job. Booking rules are set per plan - how far ahead clients can book, the cutoff before a visit, and the notice required to cancel.

The fourth is the WhatsApp AI assistant, on Standard and above with 500 messages a month on Standard and 2,000 on Pro. It books and cancels visits, searches availability including recurring slots, suggests alternatives when a slot is full, joins and checks waitlists, answers account, subscription and invoice questions, raises support tickets and answers business questions from a knowledge base you write - around the clock, with clients verified by one-time passcode. For a business whose enquiries arrive at half past nine at night from someone who has just been offered a new job with an office commute, that is a commercial feature rather than a convenience.

The day-to-day is covered too: client profiles holding pets under one payer, custom profile fields on Standard and above, registration forms for vet, medical, consent and emergency details, per-session registers with Present, Late and Absent marking and a note against each mark, printable register sheets and a filterable roster - with register access as its own staff permission so a walker can mark a round without seeing billing. Then FIFO waitlists on Standard and above that auto-offer a freed slot with a time-limited claim link, free trial visits as a per-service toggle, staff bookings on behalf of a client, automated confirmations and 24-hour email reminders with SMS on Standard and above, failed-payment dunning, credit-expiry warnings, review requests by SMS magic link published straight to your testimonials, custom staff roles with a read and write permission matrix, HubSpot CRM, calendars synced with Google Calendar, a Pro merch store for leads and treats, and a client portal covering pause and resume, plan changes, cancellation with a live refund quote, credits, purchase history and GDPR data export. Pricing is flat and published - Base £19, Standard £29, Pro £49 - with no platform or transaction fee taken by Bizzly, a 14-day free trial with no card, and billing in your own currency wherever you operate.

The gaps are real and worth stating plainly. Bizzly has no GPS staff tracking - the single biggest reason a multi-walker business should choose Time To Pet or Pet Sitter Plus instead. There are no native mobile apps; it is a responsive web app. There are no visit report cards with photos sent to the owner after each walk, and no per-pet progress journal - a note saved against each attendance mark, plus custom profile fields for standing information, is as far as it goes. There is no payroll or pay reporting, no mileage tracking, no key management module, no route optimisation, no postcode-restricted booking and no QuickBooks integration. Clients reschedule by cancelling and rebooking from the portal within the cancellation window - the credit returns automatically and they pick a new slot - rather than moving a booking in one action, and staff can additionally move a booking or a whole session for them. Multi-pet discounts are delivered by Stripe discount code rather than detected automatically at checkout.

• Pricing: Base £19, Standard £29, Pro £49/month, flat for the whole business. No platform or transaction fee taken by Bizzly. 14-day free trial, no card. Multi-currency.
• Strengths: Fully flexible website editor on every plan, subscription plus pack and season billing side by side, payment-gated booking quotas, WhatsApp AI assistant, registers and waitlists and trial visits included, review publishing and SEO tools, flat price at any team size
• Limitations: No GPS staff tracking, no native mobile apps, no photo visit reports, no pay reports or payroll, no key management or route optimisation, no QuickBooks integration, no automatic multi-pet discount detection, clients reschedule by cancelling and rebooking rather than with a one-click move

How to Choose

Stay with Time To Pet (or choose it) if:

• You have walkers in the field and need GPS-verified check-in and check-out, with full-route tracking on walks
• Photo and video visit reports are part of what your clients are paying for
• You run boarding, daycare or overnights alongside walks and need deep scheduling
• Native staff and client apps matter to how your day works
• You want staff permissions, time off management and pay reports in the same system
• Your team is small enough, or your margins good enough, that per-staff pricing is comfortable

Choose Pet Sitter Plus if:

• You are a UK business and want to be billed in pounds, at a published price
• You want map-based GPS supervision with alerts for late or implausible check-ins
• You would rather every feature was on every tier than climb a feature ladder
• You want a long free trial - 30 days, no card - to test it against a real week of work
• Deep customisation of client, pet and visit report fields matters to you

Choose Bizzly if:

• Your growth problem is selling recurring walks, not dispatching them
• You want your website and your booking system to be one product, with a fully flexible editor rather than a template
• You want clients to buy a monthly plan or a prepaid pack themselves, up front, without an invoice cycle
• You want booking access tied automatically to what each client has actually paid for
• You plan to grow a team and do not want the software bill to grow with the headcount
• You want enquiries, availability checks, bookings and cancellations handled over WhatsApp by an AI assistant
• You operate outside the UK or want to bill in your own currency

Look wider if:

None of these three is universal. Precise Petcare and Scout are worth a look for small rounds watching every pound, PetExec and Gingr are stronger if your business is mostly a boarding or daycare facility, and larger multi-site operations should be asking enterprise vendors hard questions about data ownership and exit terms. If your business is mixed - say walks alongside grooming appointments - our service business software comparison covers the wider field, and the cat sitting subscription guide covers the visit-based version of the same billing model.

Summary

Time To Pet is the strongest field operations product in pet care and the reviews reflect it. If you have walkers out on the round and you need GPS-verified visits, photo report cards, boarding scheduling, staff permissions and pay reports, it is genuinely hard to replace and the per-staff pricing may be a fair price for what it does. It is a less comfortable fit if you are growing a team fast, if being billed in dollars is an irritation, or if what you actually needed was a website and a way to sell subscriptions rather than another invoice run. Pet Sitter Plus answers the first two of those directly: the same class of product, priced in pounds, with every feature on every tier and a 30-day trial to prove it.

Bizzly answers the third. It does not track your walkers on a map, it has no native apps and it will not send an owner a photo of their spaniel mid-walk - if those decide it, decide it there and stop reading. What it does is make the website, the subscription billing and the booking calendar one product: clients buy a monthly walking plan or a prepaid pack themselves and pay up front, seasons roll into the next one on their own, booking access is gated by what has actually been paid for, a WhatsApp AI assistant handles the ten-at-night enquiries, and the bill stays at £29 or £49 a month whether you have one walker or nine. Whichever way you lean, get the all-in monthly number in writing - plan fee, per-user fees, add-ons and card processing - and compare twelve months at the size you intend to be, not the size you are today. The full plan breakdown is on our pricing page.