CareOptix vs CHARMS (Social Care Network)

Where each company comes from

CHARMS is built by Social Care Network Solutions Ltd (SCN). Per its G-Cloud 14 listing on the UK Government's Digital Marketplace, it's one of the broadest case-management platforms in UK social care — covering, on the children's side, front-door referral services, child protection, family hubs, care orders, Regional Adoption Agencies, prospective adopter assessment, adoption support, digital letterbox contact, fostering (recruitment, assessment, panel, payments), residential care, semi-independence, care leavers and supported living; and on the adults' side, shared lives, residential care, supported employment, Connect to Work, Individual Placement and Support (IPS), and day and domiciliary care. The company cites around 200 agencies and over 20,000 daily active users. That breadth is CHARMS' defining characteristic: rather than a platform built specifically for one part of the sector, it's designed as a single suite that can support an agency running several service types — a fostering agency that also runs residential provision or adult shared lives, for example — under one system. CareOptix is narrower by design. It's built specifically for children's residential homes rather than as a multi-service suite spanning children's and adults' social care, which means less configuration to work through if residential care is the whole of what your organisation does, but no built-in support for fostering, adoption, adult social care or Connect to Work caseloads if you run those alongside your homes.

What CHARMS (Social Care Network) includes

• –Adopter and foster carer recruitment, training, assessment, panel and approval workflows, through to placement
• –Front-door referral service handling court processes, care orders and social worker caseloads
• –Family finding and matching by ethnicity, gender, age, postcode and other matching considerations
• –Digital Letterbox (Keeping In Touch) contact management between adopters and birth families
• –Case management and reporting for Connect to Work and Individual Placement and Support (IPS) programmes
• –Regulatory reporting mapped to Ofsted, CIW, TUSLA, the Care Inspectorate, ASGLB, CQC and BASE — spanning England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland
• –Direct system access for young people, service users, foster families, adopters, care workers and family members, each scoped to their role
• –Real-time recording and verification of case notes and supervisions
• –Secure APIs for integration with other systems, including tailored per-customer endpoints and a sandbox environment
• –Web-based access designed for mobile use, with no separate app to install
• –A dedicated database and website URL per customer, on load-balanced, mirrored infrastructure
• –Free unlimited UK-based phone support, a maximum 2-hour response time, and a free named account manager
• –Free onsite or remote training, delivered in groups of up to four and tailored to each user's role
• –A contractual commitment to a full, free data export — including a database backup and all attached documents — at the end of the contract

CareOptix's approach

CareOptix covers the residential-care core of that list — care plans, incident and safeguarding forms, staff records including DBS and training expiry, rotas, vehicle compliance and cross-home reporting — but doesn't attempt to be a multi-service suite across children's and adults' social care. There's no fostering, adoption, adult social care or Connect to Work module, because CareOptix is built around the assumption that residential care is the whole job, not one caseload type among many. That narrower scope is deliberate: it means less setup and configuration overhead if homes are all you run, at the cost of not being useful if you also need to manage fostering, adoption or adult-services caseloads in the same system. Some of what CHARMS includes is genuinely hard to compare directly — Regulation 44 inspection tracking, Bradford Factor sickness monitoring, and regulator reporting spanning England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland are specific, useful features CareOptix doesn't currently replicate, and worth asking CareOptix about directly if you rely on them today.

How the pricing works

CHARMS' G-Cloud 14 listing confirms a flat £110/month (excl. VAT) per concurrent licence, with a minimum of one licence, and a free trial with all features included. Licences are shared — as one person logs out, another can use the same seat — so the cost scales with how many people need to be in the system at the same moment, not your total headcount. Implementation, training and data import are included free of charge. CareOptix instead charges one annual licence per organisation, covering up to 10 homes and unlimited staff with no concurrent-seat counting required and no self-serve trial — evaluation is via a live demonstration instead.

CareOptix is billed in euro. {competitor.name} prices are shown in pounds, as published by them. Exchange rates move, so compare the pricing models rather than reading the two columns as like-for-like totals.

Security & compliance

CHARMS' own G-Cloud 14 filing is explicit about what it does and doesn't hold: no ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 28000, CSA STAR or PCI certification, but it does hold both Cyber Essentials and the more rigorous Cyber Essentials Plus, renewed annually. Its infrastructure runs from two geographically separate data centres either side of Manchester, mirrored in real time with automatic failover, with all data held in the UK. Documented security practice includes TLS 1.2+ in transit, encryption of physical media at rest, explicit data sanitisation on deletion, annual external penetration testing, per-release vulnerability scanning, a web application firewall, and alignment with the OWASP Top 10. Staff are vetted to BS7858:2019 and cleared to the government's Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Two-factor authentication and single sign-on are both available, and audit logs — user activity, supplier activity and system logs — are retained for at least 12 months.

CareOptix is built around UK GDPR principles — encryption in transit, role-based access control and regular review of access permissions — with your organisation as data controller and CareOptix acting as processor under a data processing agreement, as set out in our Privacy Policy. CareOptix does not currently hold ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus certification, doesn't yet publish penetration-testing frequency or data-centre failover detail, and doesn't currently offer two-factor authentication or single sign-on. If any of that — formal certification, documented failover, MFA — is a hard requirement for your organisation or a commissioning local authority, that's a genuine gap worth raising directly before you decide.

Support & implementation

CHARMS' G-Cloud listing sets out an unusually detailed support and onboarding commitment: unlimited phone support at no extra charge, calls answered directly by a UK-based team with no menu system, a maximum 2-hour response time, and a free named account manager. Implementation follows a formal business-analysis process, with onsite or remote training delivered free of charge in small groups of up to four people, tailored to each person's role — including 'CHARMS Champions', staff given extra training to cascade-train new starters internally. On exit, the contract commits to a full, free copy of your data in any common format, including a complete database backup and a ZIP of all attached documents, with support understanding the database structure if you migrate elsewhere. Training, data import and exit support are all stated as free of charge throughout.

CareOptix includes email support at no extra cost for as long as your licence is active, and onboarding runs through a structured four-step rollout — kick-off, discovery, configuration, and training and deployment — walked through with your team before go-live. What CareOptix doesn't currently publish is a guaranteed support response time, a named account manager, or a formal contractual commitment to free data export at the end of a contract — the FAQ confirms you can export your records at any time while your account is active, but there's no published exit-data guarantee to match CHARMS' explicit commitment. If a documented SLA or a guaranteed export process is something your organisation needs in writing, ask directly before you commit either way.

Which is right for you

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