This article investigates the public provider of home-care services in Swedish municipalities with user choice. Since the introduction of the Act on Systems of Choice (LOV) in 2009, older citizens have been able to choose their providers for home-care services. Accordingly, in many municipalities, a mix of public and private home-care providers has emerged. We analyse the public provider’s course of action in this competition. We assume that it may be categorized as either ‘convergence’ or ‘divergence’ in relation to the idea of a private firm. ‘Convergence’ means that the public provider attempts to imitate the private firm, while ‘divergence’ refers to efforts to distinguish itself from the private firm. We conducted an empirical study of the public provider of home-care services in six Swedish municipalities considering the following aspects of its operations: organization, designation and graphic design, profiling of services, and marketing. The main materials used consist of in-depth interviews with municipal politicians and officers as well as unit managers for the public provider. The results provide support primarily for the scenario of ‘divergence’ since there is limited evidence of the public provider imitating the idea of the private firm. Hence, the dominant picture leans towards ‘divergence’, but to some extent, a course of action in terms of ‘convergence’ is also apparent. Based on the result we discuss how public providers react to the context of marketization and the challenge to key values in public administration.