A Jobber Alternative for Companies Whose Bill Rises Every Time They Put Somebody in a Truck

Jobber is the one built for the small contractor who wants to be working in it the same afternoon, and it prints every rate on the page. Housecall Pro sits in much the same place and competes with it head on. ServiceTitan is the enterprise answer, aimed at large trades operations and quoted rather than published. Simpro leans toward contractors doing project work with materials, stages and longer jobs. All four will get a job onto a calendar and an invoice out of the door. None of them decides how your work should be shaped, and none of them notices the month your price book stops matching what the work actually costs.

No, and it does not pretend otherwise. What it has instead is a fourteen day trial on the Grow tier with no credit card required, which is a genuinely fair way to run one. If the trial lapses before you enter billing details nothing is deleted; you enter them later and carry on where you left off. After that the cheapest way in is Core at forty nine dollars a month, or twenty nine if you prepay a year, and Core covers exactly one user.

Because in field service that definition is the bill. Jobber counts a user as anyone who accesses the account at the office or in the field to view or manage the schedule, which means a technician who only ever looks at the jobs assigned to him is a paid user in exactly the way the owner is. In most business software that distinction barely matters, because the people using it are the people in the building. Here the people using it are the people in the trucks, and there are usually a good deal more of them than there are desks. Work your number out from the field headcount rather than the office one, because the field headcount is what the invoice gets built from.

Whether the sixteen logins on your invoice are all being worked by real people. Whether your price book still reflects what materials and labor actually cost you this year. Whether the jobs you win most easily are the ones you make any money on. Whether the customer who could not reschedule through the portal gave up or rang a competitor instead. None of that is a feature you can buy on any plan of anything. It is a job somebody has to hold.

Frequently you should not, and we tell people so. Where somebody in the office already owns the configuration, can say how many logins you hold and why each one exists, and gets called when a technician cannot close a job, hiring us duplicates work that is already being done. The call worth making is the one after that person resigns.

At around fifteen users, and unusually for a page like this we can show the arithmetic instead of asking you to take it on trust. Jobber Plus at fifteen users is six hundred and ninety nine dollars a month and we are seven hundred, so at that size the two are within a dollar of one another. Below it they are cheaper and often dramatically so, because one person on Core is forty nine dollars against our seven hundred, and no argument about configuration closes a gap that size. Above it every further user is twenty nine dollars on their side and nothing on ours, so twenty five users comes to nine hundred and eighty nine against our unchanged seven hundred. Two caveats. Prepaying a year lowers their figures. And the two numbers are not the same kind of thing anyway, because theirs is software and ours is somebody configuring and running it, and you buy the Zoho FSM license separately.

On everybody who opens it. Jobber defines a user as anyone who accesses the account at the office or in the field, so a dispatcher, an office manager and a technician who only ever reads his own jobs all count identically. Your customers need nothing to receive a quote or pay an invoice, so they are never counted. What it means in practice is that the meter tracks the size of your crew rather than the size of your office, which is the reverse of how most business software behaves and the single thing most likely to catch out a growing contractor. What the definition does not tell you is how much configuring the thing will need, and that is the number that decides how much of somebody’s week goes into running it.

For a small contractor, taken purely as software you buy and start using, very probably yes, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is quicker to start, better looking, built specifically for the trades, and it will have you quoting by the afternoon. Zoho FSM asks a good deal more of you before it gives anything back. Where it wins is not the first week but the second year, and only for a business already running on Zoho, because the estimate, the job, the parts and the invoice all sit in the system your office already works in, and because what you pay stops tracking how many people you employ.

That is the main reason to pick it. FSM writes into CRM and Books, so an estimate raised against a customer, the appointment that follows it, the parts used on the job and the invoice that closes it all land on records your office already has open, with nothing rekeyed and nothing reconciled on a Friday afternoon. One honest caveat: Jobber syncs cleanly to QuickBooks Online and to Xero, so if your accounts live in one of those and nothing else you own is Zoho, this argument is a good deal weaker and you should weigh it accordingly.

We design the work order types and the service catalog, build the price book against what the work actually costs you, set up the dispatch board and the scheduling rules, provision technicians and decide what each of them may see, configure the mobile app and what has to be captured before a job is allowed to close, build the estimate and invoice flow, set up the customer portal, and wire the whole thing into CRM and Books. The figure covers the organization and it does not move when you hire somebody.

You do, and that is deliberate. The subscription is bought in your name and stays there. If you stop working with us you keep the account, the customer records, every work order and every invoice ever raised in it, and there is no migration to do. Zoho Assist is the single exception across everything we sell, and that is because we carry the license on that one.

Yes, and there is usually one step that surprises people. Customers, quotes and invoice history move across without much drama. The part that does not is the price book, because carrying it over exactly as it stands brings with it every rate that stopped being right two years ago. We would rather rebuild it from what the work actually costs you, which takes longer and is most of the value in the exercise. Recurring jobs and their schedules need the same treatment. Migrating a bad configuration faithfully is not a migration worth paying for.

No. Seven hundred a month, month to month, thirty days’ notice. Jobber sells three billing shapes and it is worth reading which one you are agreeing to. Monthly with no commitment can be canceled whenever you like. Monthly on a one year commitment still has to be paid out in full if you cancel halfway through. An annual prepayment is not refundable at all. The discount for committing is real, and so is the commitment. Compare what you are agreeing to as well as what you are paying.

Then buy Jobber and spend the difference on something that shows. Core is forty nine dollars a month, or twenty nine prepaid annually, and for one person quoting and invoicing their own work it is a genuinely good answer. There is no configuration worth managing because there is one person and it is you, and there is no price book drift because you price every job yourself. This page is written for the contractor who has grown past that point, where nobody can quite say why the invoice reads what it reads. If that is not you yet, we are the wrong call and we would rather say so now than in month three.

It happens. Once you are holding stock across several vans and a warehouse, buying materials against purchase orders, running jobs that invoice in stages, or paying subcontractors on the same work you are billing a customer for, Zoho FSM is the wrong shape and we will say so before you get there rather than afterward.