OurTab vs shift calendar apps
Knowing you're both off on Wednesday is the start of the question, not the answer.
Every household app assumes you work nine to five
Family organisers are built around a shared calendar with appointments on it. Chore apps share jobs out evenly across the week. Meal planners assume somebody's home at six. If one of you works rotating shifts, none of that quite fits, and the household ends up doing the translation in its head.
Shift calendar apps exist because of exactly that gap, and they're good at it. Supershift handles the real rotation patterns — four on four off, Panama, Continental, DuPont, whatever your employer has invented — and can share the result with your partner. Pair Cale is built specifically for couples syncing two rotas. My Shift Planner does the same job.
Their own users keep asking for this
Read the reviews of the best of them and the same request comes up: the ability to compare your schedule with someone else's inside the app. People who already have a rota app that works are still asking for the one thing it won't do — show them, plainly, when two people are off together.
They answer when. Nothing answers so what
Once both rotas are on the screen, you can see you're both off on Wednesday. That's genuinely useful, and it's where these apps stop — because a calendar has nowhere to put the consequences.
The consequences are the actual work. Wednesday is when the big job gets done, when it's worth cooking something that takes an hour, when the shop should land. Thursday one of you is on a late, so dinner needs to be something that keeps, and the bins can't be that person's job.
What OurTab does with the same shifts
- It leads with the overlap. The first line of the app is the next evening you're both actually home — not two rotas to compare yourself.
- Chores follow the rota. Jobs are shared out by who's home, spaced across the week, and never land on someone working till 2am.
- Cooking follows it too. The meal plan knows which nights are shared and which are fend-for-yourself, and suggests cooking ahead on the evenings you've got.
- Unclaimed jobs suggest an owner based on who's free that day, rather than whoever notices first.
- Build your pattern once. Four on four off, a rolling rota, anything that comes back around — tap the days you work, set which day the cycle starts, and every date from then on fills itself in. Any single day can still be overridden by tapping it.
- Or photograph the rota sheet and the month fills itself in — including sheets that roll across two months.
We'd rather say "can't tell" than guess
Where OurTab has no record, it says so. A half shift records six hours but not which six, so that evening is unknown, not free. A person with nothing entered is named as unknown rather than assumed available. "Free" here honestly means "not at work" — it can't know about your mum's birthday, because OurTab has no events calendar at all.
Where a shift calendar app is the better pick
OurTab handles a repeating pattern and lets you override any day, but it stops well short of a dedicated rota app. There are no named rotation templates, no custom shift names or colours, no swaps, no overtime or pay estimates, no alarms, and no export into your phone's calendar. If the rota itself is what you need, take one of these — OurTab's shift handling exists to serve the household around it, and if you don't want the shopping, cooking and money half then it's a lot of app for one line of information. Plenty of households run both.
Details as at August 2026 — Supershift is the most fully-featured of them if the rota is all you need.