Agateway Alternative 2026: TVD Notifications for Sheep and Goats

Identitas AG discontinued the operation and sale of Agateway on 31 July 2026. This affects both the «agateway» smartphone app and the Agrident (Allflex) readers with preinstalled TVD standard tasks. Identitas cites a lack of economic viability as the reason. (Identitas AG announcement)

If you are looking for an Agateway alternative, the right choice depends on what you need: TVD notifications only, cattle breeding, or complete herd management for sheep and goats. This guide compares the options, explains the switch, and shows what happens to your Agrident or Allflex reader.

Which Agateway alternative fits your farm?

If you only want to submit TVD notifications free of charge, agate.ch is the natural choice. If you keep sheep or goats and want to connect notifications with health, breeding, and inspection records, you can import your TVD inventory and try Herdy free for 7 days.

What exactly was discontinued

The statutory two-year warranty still applies to readers already purchased. Support for defective devices in the APR250, APR450, APR650, AWR250, and AWR300 series is available provided the purchase date is not before 31 July 2024. Extended support requests are no longer accepted.

What this means for your farm

There is no need to rush – but there is something to do. Your time frame depends on your situation:

• Your subscription is still running: you can keep using Agateway normally until it expires, with support. It cannot be renewed after that. Use the remaining time to switch calmly.
• Your subscription expires soon: from August 2026 there are no more renewals. From that point you need another route for your TVD notifications.
• You bought a reader: the device is yours and keeps working. What falls away is the app connection and – depending on the purchase date – support.

Important: your notification obligation is unchanged. Births within 30 days, arrivals and departures within 3 working days – that applies regardless of which tool you use.

The alternatives in detail

1. Back to agate.ch

The official portal remains available and is free of charge. All notifications can be recorded there. The drawback is well known: login, navigation, forms, typing ear tag numbers by hand – and on a phone in the barn it is tedious. For farms with few animals and few notifications per year it is still a legitimate solution.

2. SmartCow or Barto

SmartCow is aimed at cattle farms with a breeding focus. Barto is a broad, modular farm manager focused on cattle and arable farming. For sheep and goats the choice narrows considerably. See our comparison of Swiss herd management apps for the features and use cases.

3. Herdy

Herdy is built for sheep, goat, and cattle keepers and submits directly to the TVD interface – without going through the portal. What Herdy can do today and where its limits lie is set out in the next two sections. Without embellishment, so you can judge whether it fits your farm.

What Herdy can do today

TVD notifications directly from the app

• Birth, departure, death, and slaughter for sheep, goats, and cattle; arrivals for sheep and cattle
• Submission directly to the TVD interface, not via the portal
• Import your livestock inventory from the TVD and keep it in sync – your animals come from the official source rather than being retyped
• Sync your ear tag stock from the TVD and assign tags to individual animals
• Overview of open, submitted, and overdue notifications; if one is rejected, Herdy shows the actual reason from the TVD, not just an error code

Alpine summering

• Record and report drive-up and drive-down for sheep, goats, and cattle
• Create the accompanying document (Begleitdokument) for sheep and goats

Everything that comes after the notification

• TAMV treatment journal, withdrawal periods, medications, deworming
• RAUS / exercise log
• Breeding: heats, matings, births, pedigree, weights
• Health and care: BCS, FAMACHA, shearing, notes
• Feeding: purchases, ration plans, export for inspections
• Reports and movement history

In everyday use

• Bluetooth ear tag reader: scanned numbers land straight in the form
• Multiple people per farm with graded permissions
• Runs in the browser on phone, tablet, and PC – no installation, no app store dependency
• Four languages: German, French, Italian, English

The real difference from a pure notification tool: one animal event satisfies several obligations at once. You record a treatment once – and you have kept the treatment journal, stored the withdrawal period, and assembled the data for the inspection.

What Herdy cannot (yet) do

So there are no surprises:

• Offline capture is not live yet. Herdy currently requires an internet connection. If you valued Agateway precisely for offline capture in the barn or on the alp, you should know this. Offline capture with later submission is about to ship – if you are waiting for it, get in touch and we will let you know as soon as it is live.
• Arrival notifications for goats cannot currently be submitted by anyone through the TVD interface – the TVD has deactivated this notification in the current interface version. That one notification still has to go through agate.ch. Herdy flags this in the form.
• Pigs can be managed fully in Herdy, but TVD movement notifications for pigs are not yet enabled.
• Herdy is a paid product. There is a 7-day trial without a credit card, then a subscription. If all you want is to submit notifications and nothing else, agate.ch is the more honest recommendation – and it is free.

Can I keep using my Agrident or Allflex reader?

Possibly. Herdy recognises scans from Bluetooth readers that send the number they read as keyboard input (HID mode) – the number then appears directly in the form, exactly as with a barcode scanner. Whether your Agrident device supports this mode is stated in its manual. If you are unsure: write to us with your model and we will look into it together.

What falls away in any case are the preinstalled TVD standard tasks on the device. The notification logic then runs in the app, no longer on the reader.

Switching in four steps

1. Check your subscription expiry date in the Agateway app. That is your actual time horizon.
2. Finish any open notifications while the familiar tool still works. Do not leave anything half-submitted.
3. Trial an alternative in parallel. With Herdy you connect your farm via the Agate login and import your inventory directly from the TVD – no retyping.
4. Switch before your subscription expires, not after. A calm changeover is easier than one under time pressure.

Conclusion

The discontinuation of Agateway is frustrating for everyone who had got used to it – all the more so because it was one of the few tools that took sheep and goats seriously. The good news: your data lives in the TVD, not in the app. When you switch to a connected solution, you do not have to re-enter your inventory by hand.

If you have to change anyway, it is worth asking whether it should stay at plain notification – or whether the treatment journal, RAUS documentation, and breeding data belong in the same system from the start.

Import your TVD inventory and try Herdy free for 7 days →