11pets vs CatMD: Tracker or Health Intelligence?

Two apps frequently surface when cat owners search for pet-health tools: 11pets and CatMD. They get compared a lot. They shouldn't.

They do completely different things. One organises pet records (vaccines, vet visits, weights logged manually). The other interprets your cat's behaviour, body language, mood, and health patterns. Most cat owners actually need both. This post is the honest comparison so you know which is which — and what the gap between them really is.

What 11pets does well

11pets is a multi-pet organiser. It's been around since 2014, predates the AI wave, and has earned its place by being a clean, reliable place to keep records for one or many pets. The core surface:

• Vaccination tracking — record dates, set reminders, share with vets
• Vet visits and medications — log appointments, prescription schedules
• Weight + grooming + appointment calendar — manual entry for owner-tracked values
• Multi-pet support — designed for households with multiple animals (dogs, cats, even chickens and rabbits)
• Cross-platform — iOS, Android, and web sync
• Subscription — Pro tier with cloud sync + sharing

If you have three cats, a dog, and a rabbit, and you need a single place to keep their vaccination history, vet appointments, medication schedules, and weight logs across the household — 11pets is genuinely useful. It does what it claims to do. It's the digital equivalent of a really good pet binder.

What 11pets doesn't do: interpret what your cat is feeling, score her behaviour, read her body language, write her diary, detect health-pattern drift, or generate any AI-derived signal. It's by design — 11pets isn't an AI product. It's organisation.

What CatMD does

CatMD is cat-specific (not multi-species) and built around interpretation, not organisation. The features:

• Triage Scan — describe a symptom, get an urgency tier in 60 seconds. Backed by a curated feline-medicine knowledge base.
• Body Language Reader — 6-second video → AI reads tail, ears, eyes, posture, motion, vocalisations. Returns labelled-line interpretation. (See how body-language reader apps work.)
• Meow Translator — multimodal audio + body language + per-cat memory interpretation of vocalisations.
• Health Rhythm — longitudinal trend view across mood, weight, water, litter, pain-face score. Catches slow drifts the daily eye misses.
• Pain Check (Feline Grimace Scale) — face photo → clinical-grade pain score using the FGS framework.
• Cat-voice diary + chat — your cat writes a daily diary in her own voice, references your home's named people and pets, and replies to you in chat.
• Personality (Feline Five) — peer-reviewed personality framework, 9 archetypes, free interactive test.
• Cat Studio — AI-generated themed artwork (48 variants across 6 themes, rotating weekly).

What CatMD doesn't do: multi-pet record-keeping, manual vet-visit logging for multi-species households, web-based access (Android-only currently), shared family logins.

You can manually track weight, water, and litter in CatMD's check-in card. But it's not the primary surface — the focus is interpretation and pattern-detection, not paperwork.

Side-by-side: when to use which

The honest answer: most owners need both

This isn't a competitive review where one app "wins." 11pets and CatMD answer different questions.

• If you have ONE specific question — "where's my cat's last vaccination record?" or "when's her next appointment?" — that's an 11pets question. It's an organisation question. (For urgent triage questions like toxic-plant ingestion, urinary obstruction, or unexplained weight loss — that's medical, not paperwork.)
• If you have a different question — "is something off with my cat?" or "what is she saying right now?" or "is the pattern this week different from last month?" — that's a CatMD question. It's an interpretation question.

The owner who's most underserved by the current category is the one who's only using one or the other. 11pets-only owners have great records and no interpretive layer. CatMD-only owners have great interpretation and weak record-keeping. The honest answer is that the cat lives in both worlds — paper and signal.

What we'd build in 11pets (if we ran it)

The gap on 11pets isn't records — it's that the records don't generate insight. A 5-year vaccination history doesn't tell the owner anything about whether the cat is feeling OK today. A weight chart from manual entry doesn't auto-flag a 5% drift over 3 months. Records are inert without interpretation.

If we were the 11pets team, we'd add lightweight pattern detection on the existing data — automatic alerts when weight drifts >5% in 3 months, calendar-aware reminders that flag overdue checkups based on age-cohort norms, and (longer term) an AI-driven "anything worth looking at?" summary view. That's the missing layer.

What we'd build in CatMD (if we ran it differently)

The gap on CatMD is the opposite — strong interpretive surfaces, weaker organisation. We've got vaccinations, medications, and appointments in the Triage tab, but they're not the lead. They should be more prominent and more feature-complete for owners who want a "single source of truth" view of their cat's medical history.

Realistic plan: tighten the vaccination + medication + appointment surfaces in Q3, add iOS support so multi-platform households can use it, and stay focused on cat-only (we'd rather be the best cat app than a mediocre everything-pet app).

The category framing

Think of it this way:

• 11pets is your pet's filing cabinet. Where the paperwork lives. Reliable, organised, multi-pet, multi-platform. Has earned its place.
• CatMD is your cat's MD. The interpretive layer. What your cat is feeling, saying, drifting toward. AI-native. Cat-only by design.

You probably need both. They're not competitors. They're different shelves in the same cat-care toolkit. The pricing supports keeping both — 11pets has a free tier + $4.99/mo Pro; CatMD is free with a 14-day Pro trial then $9.99/mo or $79.99/yr.

If you can only have one, the choice depends on what you're trying to solve. Vet paperwork problem → 11pets. Understanding-your-cat problem → CatMD.

Try CatMD free on Google Play. 14-day Pro trial, no card. See if the interpretation layer adds something your filing cabinet doesn't.

The verdict: 11pets organises. CatMD interprets. Most cat owners need both.