ServiceM8 vs Joblogic, and the line between them

Short answer. If maintenance contracts, SLA tracking, stock and purchase orders are the actual work, Joblogic is the right product and ServiceM8 will not get you there. For everything else a UK trade business does, ServiceM8 costs a fraction of it and you can walk away any month you like. They price in opposite directions: Joblogic from £49 per user per month billed annually, ServiceM8 at £0 to £269 a month by job count with unlimited users.

This one is a fair fight, which the last comparison I wrote was not. Joblogic is British. Birmingham, trading as Tracer Management Systems Limited, company number 03611671 at Companies House, incorporated in August 1998. No redirect to an American pricing page, no dollars, no terms of service written for Alberta. If you have read what I found when I checked Jobber, this is the opposite story.

Where I stand, because it should change how you read the rest. 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 talk to, but ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in. I have never built a Joblogic account, and everything below about their product comes from their own published pages rather than from use.

What each one costs today

ServiceM8 publishes a full ladder. Flat price, unlimited users on every paid plan, and the meter is how many jobs you create in a month.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Joblogic publishes one price and then stops. Standard is from £49 per user per month, billed annually, and their page works the example out for you: a five user team is £245 a month. Premium says "Pricing on request". Enterprise says "Custom pricing". Their pricing page does not mention VAT anywhere, and they are a UK company, so get it confirmed whether that £49 carries VAT on top before you compare the two numbers.

The word "user" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and to their credit they define it themselves: "A user is anyone who logs into Joblogic. That includes office staff (schedulers, finance, admin), field engineers using the mobile app, and managers." Your bookkeeper counts. Your wife doing the diary on a Monday counts.

One charges for seats. The other charges for work

That is the whole argument, and it decides more than any feature list will. Here is where the crossover actually lands, using their published Standard price against ServiceM8's ladder.

• Two of you, up to 150 jobs a month. Joblogic £98, ServiceM8 Growing £59.
• Five of you, up to 500 jobs. Joblogic £245 by their own example, ServiceM8 Premium £119. That gap is £1,512 a year.
• Six of you, up to 1,500 jobs. Joblogic £294, ServiceM8 Premium Plus £269, and ServiceM8 is the only one of the two that has stopped charging you for people.

Now the other direction, because it goes both ways and the pages that pretend otherwise are selling something. A sole trader doing more than fifty jobs a month is cheaper on Joblogic. One licence is £49 and ServiceM8 pushes you onto Growing at £59 the moment you pass the Starter allowance. Two people doing four hundred jobs a month: Joblogic £98, ServiceM8 Premium £119. If you are a small team turning over a lot of small visits, per seat genuinely wins, and that is worth working out before you buy rather than in month three.

Job count is the thing people underestimate. A quote that never turns into work still used a job credit, so sixty quotes and forty callouts is a hundred, not forty. I have pulled the whole ladder apart, card fees included, in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK.

Where Joblogic wins, and it is not close

Four things, and I am not going to soften any of them.

Contracts and planned maintenance are the product. PPM contracts, route scheduling and engineer tracking are plan features on their Premium tier. SFG20 sits in their marketplace among seventy odd other modules, and they describe F-Gas as native and built with REFCOM. In ServiceM8 the nearest native thing is a recurring job, which re-creates and schedules itself but knows nothing about a contract, a service level or an annual visit plan. If you are bidding for FM work and the tender asks for SLA evidence, that is a product question and not a setup question.

Purchase orders do not exist in ServiceM8. Their own help centre says so: "ServiceM8 does not have built-in functionality to create and send purchase orders to suppliers." Joblogic has purchase orders with invoice matching on Premium, goods received notes and approval limits on Enterprise.

Stock, properly. ServiceM8 has no inventory system of its own. No van stock, no supplier ordering, no reorder levels. What it has is stock level visibility mirrored from a connected Xero, QuickBooks Online or MYOB account, and the number only moves once an invoice containing a tracked item has been approved and synced. For a firm that buys in bulk and fits from the van, that is not stock control and I would not sell it as such. Joblogic has stock management, which they describe as locations, replenishment and purchase order matching, on their Enterprise tier.

Sage. ServiceM8's help centre is blunt about it: "ServiceM8 does not have an integration with Sage." It is Xero, QuickBooks Online and MYOB, and in the UK that means Xero or QuickBooks. Joblogic lists Sage, KashFlow and FreeAgent alongside those two. If your accountant has you on Sage and will not move, that single line decides this comparison and nothing else in it matters. Same conclusion I reached about Simpro, for the same reason.

Two smaller ones while I am being fair. Joblogic includes job costing in its cheapest plan, where ServiceM8 gates it at Premium, £119. And forms come with Standard, where ServiceM8 wants Growing at £59 before you can build your own and charges separately for anything off its Form Store. I counted that store this morning: 212 forms, 211 of them priced, every price in US dollars on the UK page, from 99 cents to $399.

Three things on their comparison page worth checking

Joblogic publishes its own Joblogic versus ServiceM8 page, and it is one of the better ones in this category. It concedes that ServiceM8's entry pricing is hard to beat, that the iOS app is polished, that the asset QR workflow is clever, and that ServiceM8 is month to month with no contract trap. Credit where it is due, because most vendor comparison pages concede nothing.

Three claims on it did not survive a morning of checking.

It gets their own price wrong. The page says "Published pricing from £45 per licence per month". Their pricing page, same website, same day, says £49 per user per month billed annually. The comparison is stamped June 2026, so it has drifted by £4 and lost the annual billing condition on the way. Read the pricing page, not the comparison.

It still calls the ServiceM8 Android app Lite. That was true once. ServiceM8 rewrote those pages in September and their UK pricing page now contains the word "Lite" zero times and the word "recommend" zero times, while its Android answer reads "In terms of functionality, ServiceM8's Android app is almost identical to the ServiceM8 iOS app." A handful of genuinely iPhone only features remain and I have listed them in does ServiceM8 work on Android. A cut down app for your Android half is no longer one of the reasons to leave.

It says ServiceM8 has no stock control at any tier. Half right, and the half that is wrong is checkable in one search. ServiceM8's help centre answers that question with a yes, then explains the limit: "ServiceM8's inventory management solution works with a connected accounting package, where you can track stock levels." Visibility from your accounts, not a stock system. Joblogic's version of the point stands up. Their wording does not.

One of theirs that does stand up, by the way. They say ServiceM8 has no facilities management or mechanical and electrical pages, and they are right. ServiceM8's industry list today is electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cleaning, locksmith, pool service, pest control, lawn care, fire safety, appliance repair. Residential and light commercial trades. If you contract to multi site clients, you are not the customer that page was written for.

Planned maintenance in ServiceM8, without buying a platform

This is the bit that decides it for a lot of firms, so here is the honest version of the cheap route.

There is a ServiceM8 approved add-on called PPM Service Contracts, built by Simpli-Fi Cloud, a UK outfit. One plan, £17.99 a month, with a thirty day trial and no card to start. It does contracts, maintenance schedules, one click job generation into ServiceM8, asset tracking, certificate expiry reminders and a customer portal. That money goes to Simpli-Fi and not to ServiceM8 or to me.

So the realistic contract stack is ServiceM8 Growing at £59 plus the add-on at £17.99, which is £76.99 a month for unlimited users with no annual commitment. Joblogic's equivalent is Premium, which does not publish a price, on top of a Standard tier that is already £245 a month for five people.

Joblogic's answer to that is reasonable and you should weigh it: two products means two bills, two support relationships and a sync between them, where theirs is one system. If a client audit lands and the paperwork has to come out of one place, that argument has weight. If you run thirty service contracts and you want the visits generating themselves, £77 a month does the job.

Cheaper still, and almost nobody knows it: ServiceM8 reminders only cost you a job credit at the moment you turn one into a job. Set the annual boiler service as a reminder rather than a recurring job and it sits there costing nothing until the work is real. That is worth more than most of the feature list and it is the sort of thing I set up as standard.

The length of the rope

ServiceM8's pricing page puts it in one line: "There are no lock-ins with ServiceM8's pricing. You can upgrade and downgrade between plans at any time." You pay by the month. A bad quarter, you drop a tier.

Joblogic's headline price is billed annually, and their own FAQ goes further: "Most of our customers commit to 24 or 36 months because that's where the operational and commercial value really compounds." They will structure twelve months if it suits you better. They are upfront about it, and for a contractor with a three year client agreement a three year software term is not frightening. For a four van firm that might be six vans or two by next spring, it is a different sort of decision.

Setup fees work the same way. Joblogic's FAQ says onboarding is tailored and "In some instances there will be a fee that goes with that", with smaller customers likely able to self serve for nothing. Honest, and unpriced. You find out on the call.

The £1,000 that only exists on one side

ServiceM8 runs a Setup and Training Rebate. Joblogic has no equivalent. 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, capped at £1,000. I am both, which is what makes an invoice from me qualify.

So the £800 setup and training package is not £800 gone. It is £800 back as account credit, applied at half your plan price every month until it runs out. On Growing at £59 that is £29.50 a month, so roughly 27 months of half price subscription. On Premium at £119 it is £59.50 a month for about 13 months.

Three things catch people. You claim within 60 days of both subscribing and the earliest invoice date, so the setup wants to happen around the subscription and not months before it. It is credit against your bill, not cash. And it does not stack with anything else: an approved claim replaces any discount you were running. The full rules, and the mistake that voids it before you start, are here.

So which one

That right hand column is not a consolation prize. It is a different business, and a firm that genuinely sits in it will be badly served by the cheaper answer. What I would not do is sign a three year term for a contracts platform when nine tenths of the work is reactive.

One asymmetry before you decide, and it only runs one way. Joblogic says it will migrate your customers, jobs, history and assets out of ServiceM8. ServiceM8 has no bulk import for job history at all, so coming back the other way means your clients and your price list arrive and three years of job records do not. I checked ServiceM8's entire help centre for an import route and there is one for clients, materials, assets, supplier quotes and photos, and none for jobs. The detail is in what comes across when you switch, and it is the single most expensive thing to find out late.

How to test both without wasting a fortnight

ServiceM8 gives you 14 days with no card. Joblogic's Standard plan has a free trial with no card either, though Premium and Enterprise are a demo call, so the tier that actually does contracts is not something you can quietly try on a Sunday.

Do not spend the trial clicking around demo data. Put three real jobs through each one on your own phone, start to finish: quote it, book it, do it, invoice it, take the money. Then price the whole stack instead of the sticker. Count every person who would need a login, count the jobs you created last month including the quotes that went nowhere, and add whatever each vendor charges for the thing you are really buying it for. Once both numbers are written down the answer is usually obvious, and getting the ServiceM8 side built properly costs less than a month of the wrong decision.