ServiceM8 vs Jobber, from a UK point of view

Short answer. ServiceM8, for almost any UK trade business, and the reason is duller than a feature list. Jobber does not publish a UK price. Its pricing page is in US dollars, its UK web address redirects to the American one, and its own terms of service say it makes no representation that the service is appropriate or available for use outside the United States and Canada.

Jobber is a good product and there is a section further down where it beats ServiceM8 on something I cannot match. But most of the pages comparing these two were written for an American reader, and the things that decide it for a plumber in Hull are not on them.

Where I stand, because it should change how you read this. I set up ServiceM8 for a living and I am certified and listed by them. I do not resell licences, so your subscription costs the same whoever you spoke to. ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in, so I am not a neutral party and you should know that before you believe a word of the verdict.

Is Jobber sold in the UK?

Partly. It has British customers and some of its features name the UK specifically. What it does not have is a British shopfront, and I checked that three ways rather than taking anyone's word for it.

The UK address is not a page. Type getjobber.com/uk/pricing and you get a 301 redirect to the American pricing page. Type getjobber.com/uk on its own and you get a 404. There is no UK content behind it either: their sitemap index lists thirteen files holding 1,546 pages between them, and not one of those URLs contains uk, gb, united-kingdom, britain or england. The entire local file is four pages, three for Austin, Texas and one for Edmonton, Alberta.

The prices are in dollars and they say so. There is not one pound sign on Jobber's pricing page. There are eighty-seven dollar signs and a footnote reading "All prices in USD. Subscription plan prices exclude sales tax where applicable." The phone number on it is a US toll free line.

None of that is a scandal. Jobber is a Canadian company selling mostly into North America and has never claimed otherwise. It does mean the question "which is cheaper" has no clean answer, which I will come back to. I found a similar story when I looked at Simpro, except Simpro at least has a Reading office and a UK sales line. Jobber publishes neither.

What Jobber's own contract says about selling to Britain

This is the bit nobody reads and it is the most useful paragraph in this article. From Jobber's terms of service, word for word:

"we make no representation that the Service is appropriate or available for use outside of the United States and Canada."

Read that as what it is. Not a ban, and not a warning that the software stops working at Dover. It is a company declining to promise that its product fits your country, and plenty of software carries a clause like it.

The rest of the document is consistent. If you are outside the US, your contract is governed by the laws of Alberta and the federal laws of Canada, and disputes go to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts in Edmonton. The company you are contracting with is Octopusapp Inc., in Edmonton. The phrase "United Kingdom" appears nowhere in the terms. Neither does GBP.

Weigh that honestly rather than dramatically. If you are a one van operation and the software works, you will never touch any of it. If you are signing a twelve month commitment for a team of eight, you are agreeing that any serious argument happens 4,000 miles away under somebody else's law. No comparison page I found mentions it.

The prices, in the two currencies they actually come in

I am not going to convert Jobber's prices into pounds. What you would actually pay depends on the rate the day you are billed and on what your card charges for a non-sterling transaction, and I cannot source either. Every page that prints a tidy pounds figure for Jobber has guessed at one, and a guessed price is the thing this blog exists to stop. So here are both ladders in the currency each vendor publishes them in.

Those exclude VAT. ServiceM8 issues reverse charge invoices so you account for it to HMRC yourself, which most registered businesses then reclaim. I have broken the whole ladder down, card fees included, in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK.

Jobber prices by how many users are included and by how long you tie yourself in. Three columns, same plan.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Four things about that table that the headline price hides.

• Core is one user and only one user. The $29 in Jobber's own page title is Core, prepaid for a year, for a single person. There is no five seat Core.
• Extra people are $29 a month each once you pass the number included in your tier.
• The cheap column has a lock on it. Prepaid annual is non-refundable if you cancel. The middle column is a twelve month minimum term, and cancelling in month three means paying for the remaining nine anyway. Only the dearest column lets you walk.
• Plus does not exist below five users, and above fifteen every plan stops printing a number and says contact sales.

One charges you for people. The other charges you for work

Strip out the currency problem and this is the argument I made about ServiceM8 against Tradify, only sharper, because Jobber charges for seats in blocks and then per head on top.

Take six of you doing 120 jobs a month, an ordinary two van outfit with somebody in the office. On ServiceM8 that is Growing at £59, and it is £59 whether six people log in or sixteen. On Jobber's middle tier you need the five user block at $199, plus $29 for your sixth. Take on an apprentice and give your bookkeeper a login and ServiceM8 does not move, while Jobber adds another $58 for two people who create no extra work between them.

Now flip it, because the honest version goes both ways. Two of you doing 400 jobs a month is a different story: ServiceM8 pushes you to Premium at £119 on volume alone, while Jobber would leave you on a five seat tier with no ceiling. If you are a small team running very high volumes of small jobs, the per seat model genuinely wins, and that is worth sorting out before you buy rather than after.

Three things that are thinner on this side of the Atlantic

These come off Jobber's own feature table, which is more candid about geography than the marketing is.

Automatic payments are not available here. Charging a saved card automatically for recurring work is marked "Available in the US and Canada". Two way texting and card processing both do list the UK, so this is a specific gap rather than a general one, and it is a bad one if you run service contracts and wanted the money to collect itself.

The card rates are published in cents. 2.9% plus 30 cents online and 2.7% plus 30 cents for tap to pay, with the UK named as supported but no pounds and pence version anywhere on the page. Get it in writing before you sign. ServiceM8 publishes its UK rates in pounds, from 1.7% plus 20p, and card fees are often a bigger line on the bill than the subscription.

Support is an American phone number. No UK office, number or hours published, and the help centre offers English and Spanish. Plenty of firms run fine on email support. If you pictured ringing somebody at half seven on a Tuesday, check it first.

Where Jobber is genuinely better, including one that costs me money

I would not trust this page without this section, and the first item is the one I least enjoy writing.

It will move your job history. ServiceM8 will not

Jobber's switching page says their onboarding specialists move your clients, jobs and open invoices, in what they give as three to five business days, with most teams fully live within ten.

ServiceM8 has no equivalent. Clients, contacts and price list all come across, and assets too if you use asset management. Your past jobs do not. There is no bulk import for job history in ServiceM8 at all, so the honest plan is a clean cutover date and keeping the old system readable for a year. If three years of job records have to be searchable in the new system on day one, that is a real argument for Jobber and I am not going to talk you out of it.

Onboarding and training are in the price

Jobber includes live onboarding sessions for owners, dispatchers and field staff at no extra charge. I charge £650 for a setup and £800 with video training on top, so you can see the problem with me writing this paragraph.

The distinction, then you decide. Vendor onboarding teaches you to drive the software, and it is genuinely useful and genuinely free. What it does not do is sit with how your business quotes, build your templates and certificates round that, work out which automations fire and when, get your data in, and hand the thing back already shaped like your week. If you have the evenings spare and you like fiddling, take the free help and keep your money. That is a real option.

No job ceiling, ever

Every Jobber plan is unlimited jobs. ServiceM8 runs on a monthly allowance and it is stricter than people assume: go over and you work as normal for another seven days, then you are prompted to upgrade. On Starter, Growing and Premium you cannot buy a few extra jobs at all, because only Premium Plus publishes a per job price, at 15p. Picking the right tier at the start matters more here, which is one of the things I sort out during a setup.

A website, a pipeline and marketing in the same box

Jobber builds you a website on every plan. A sales pipeline is $49 a month on top, the marketing suite $99, the AI receptionist $29. ServiceM8 does none of it natively, so this is a win only if you would actually use it.

Xero, probably

Jobber's feature table says it syncs with QuickBooks Online and Xero. The FAQ further down the same page says QuickBooks Online and stops there. I cannot settle that from the outside, so if your books are on Xero get it confirmed before you pay. Neither product touches Sage. ServiceM8's Xero link is the better documented of the two and I have pulled it apart in what actually syncs between ServiceM8 and Xero.

The £1,000 that only exists on one side

ServiceM8 runs an official Setup and Training Rebate and nothing like it exists at Jobber. If a partner who is both certified and listed in ServiceM8's Partner Directory does your setup, ServiceM8 credits you 100% of what you paid that partner, up to £1,000. I am both, which is what makes an invoice from me qualify.

So the £800 setup and training package is not £800 spent. It is £800 back, as credit against your subscription at half your plan price each month until it runs out. On Growing at £59 that covers £29.50 a month, so the credit lasts roughly 27 months. On Premium at £119 it is £59.50 a month, about 13 months.

Three conditions catch people. You claim within 60 days of both subscribing and the earliest invoice date, so do the setup around the subscription rather than months before it. It is account credit and not cash, which ServiceM8 says plainly. And it does not stack: an approved claim replaces any other discount you had running. The full rules, and the one mistake that voids it before you start, are here.

What Jobber's comparison page says about ServiceM8

Jobber publishes its own Jobber versus ServiceM8 page, as every vendor in this category does. It is fairer than most: it tells you to choose ServiceM8 for job volume pricing with unlimited users, and for asset management, forms, certificates and CarPlay. Credit where it is due.

Two things on it are worth knowing before you use it to decide.

It prints ServiceM8's American prices. Their table has ServiceM8 at $0, $29, $79 and $349. Those are not made up. I checked ServiceM8's US pricing page the same day and they match it exactly. They are simply the wrong country's numbers, shown to everybody who lands on the page. A UK buyer pays £0, £25, £59, £119 and £269. It also leaves the Premium plan out of the ladder altogether, which is the tier most firms of five or more actually land on.

It says the ServiceM8 Android app is Lite. True when their page was dated in August. It stopped being true on 21 September 2026, when ServiceM8 rewrote its Android pages to say the app now has almost all the same functionality as the iPhone one. I read the Google Play listing again on 12 October and Lite is not in the description any more. It survives only in old reviews and ServiceM8's replies to them, so an Android buyer can still find the old story. The whole saga, and the four things that really are still iPhone only, is in does ServiceM8 work on Android.

Tired of checking everybody else's numbers? That is more or less my job, except on your account instead of on a comparison page. Here is what a setup costs.

So which one

That right hand column is short, and the first line on it is the serious one. Job history is the single thing ServiceM8 cannot do for you, and if it is a hard requirement then no amount of rebate maths fixes it.

If you want to test both properly

Both give you 14 days free with no card, though Jobber's trial puts you on their Grow plan, so you are testing a tier you may not end up buying.

Do not spend that fortnight clicking around demo data. Put three real jobs through each one, start to finish, on your own phone: quote it, book it, do it, invoice it, take the money. You will know by the end of the first week, for reasons that have nothing to do with what either of us has written. Then be realistic about the cutover. People give up in week two because they moved across badly and ran both systems for a month, not because the software was wrong.