Field notes › Comparisons
Mustr vs RosterElf for growing crews
RosterElf does something admirable: simple rostering, priced simply, that small Australian businesses can set up themselves. If you run a venue or a small services team, it might be all you need, and at its price you should probably try it before anything bigger.
What RosterElf does well
Published ex-GST pricing from $6 per employee per month on annual billing for rostering and time-and-attendance, $7 for the full suite with HR, with low minimums and a free trial. Award interpretation, payroll exports to Xero and MYOB, shift swaps, GPS clock-ins. Straightforward, fairly priced, easy to adopt.
Where labour hire strains it
- Compliance sits in the HR module. Certificate and compliance tracking live on the HR side of the product, with rostering on the other. The pricing page doesn't describe rostering that blocks on an expired certificate, and there's no per-client-site requirements model.
- No client portal. Your clients can't log in to watch their site's roster or raise requests. In labour hire, that visibility is half the service.
- Per-seat economics. Fair at small scale, but a churning casual pool keeps the seat count, and the admin around it, moving.
How Mustr is different
Mustr models the thing RosterElf doesn't try to: client sites with requirements, roles with tickets, and a booking check that blocks failures before they're on a roster. Client portals and worker portals are included, the price is flat per bracket with GST included, and setup is done for you rather than by you.
The pricing maths
No contest at the small end: RosterElf's full suite for 30 staff is about $231 a month with GST on annual billing, against Mustr's $660 plan for up to 30 users. If simple rostering is the whole job, RosterElf wins that comparison and we'd say so. At 200 users the full suite is about $1,540 a month with GST, level with Mustr's Crew bracket price, and by then the jobs the two products do have diverged completely.
Which should you pick?
Venue or small team, no client sites, tickets are occasional: RosterElf. Crews placed on other companies' sites, where compliance is the sale: bring a roster to a Mustr demo.
Competitor details and prices in this article come from the vendors’ own published pages as at July 2026, quoted ex GST unless noted, and may have changed since. Check their sites for current figures. Mustr prices include GST.