ServiceM8 vs Simpro, and how to tell which one you are

Short answer. ServiceM8 publishes its UK prices and lets you start this afternoon: £0 to £269 a month, flat, unlimited users, 14 day trial, no card. Simpro publishes no price at all. You request a quote, you pay a separate setup fee on top, and their own site says to plan for around 60 days before you go live. That gap is not an accident. They are built for different sized businesses.

Where I stand, because it changes 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 talked to, but ServiceM8 pays partners a share on clients they bring in. I am not neutral. Simpro gets a section of genuine wins further down, including one that takes my fee off the table.

What each one costs

Here is the ServiceM8 ladder, straight off their UK page. Every paid plan has unlimited logins, and their own FAQ puts it in four words: "we don't charge per user".

Those exclude VAT. ServiceM8 issues reverse charge invoices so you account for it to HMRC, which most registered businesses reclaim. Fuller breakdown, including the card fees that often beat the subscription, in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK.

Now the Simpro column. I cannot give you one.

I looked properly, not just at the homepage. Their UK pricing address redirects to one global pricing page, and their sitemap carries 943 pages without a UK price list among them. That page shows a single base plan, what is in it, and a button reading "Request Pricing". No figure appears anywhere on it. Then this, from their own FAQ: "Yes, there's an initial setup fee to cover onboarding, training, and data migration."

So the real comparison is not £59 against some number. It is a published price against a quote.

Why Simpro will not print a number

It would be cheap to treat that as something to hide. Usually it is not. Quote based pricing is what happens when the product is genuinely different for every buyer. Simpro's own framing is "whether you have five or 200 staff", and no price card works at both ends of that. Their add ons are priced separately too, so a firm buying digital forms, fleet tracking and takeoffs is buying a different product from the firm buying none.

What it costs you is time. You cannot sit at the kitchen table on a Sunday and work out whether you can afford it. Demo, then proposal, then a number, and by then you have a fortnight invested and walking away feels harder. Know you are in that process before you start it.

Two things follow from the model. There is no free trial: Simpro offer a guided demo with one of their consultants instead, and for the size of firm they sell to that is a reasonable call. And on timing, their own training page says "it's wise to plan for around 60 days".

ServiceM8 is 14 days, every feature on, no card, signed up in about a minute. If you want it built properly rather than poked at, that is the bit I do, and it is measured in days.

The five to 200 line is the whole comparison

Simpro say five to 200 staff. ServiceM8's free plan is one user and 30 jobs a month. Two firms describing different customers. Which is yours?

You quote, attend, fix, invoice, get paid. A few vans, maybe somebody in the office, materials off the merchant's shelf that morning. Nobody is running a stock take. ServiceM8's shape.

You run jobs lasting months, in phases, with retentions and variations. Stock in a unit, purchase orders, supplier catalogue prices to compare, and people whose full time work is the paperwork. Simpro's shape, and asking ServiceM8 to do it ends badly no matter who sets it up.

Most UK trade businesses reading this are the first. A fair few think they are the second because they would like to be. Expensive way to choose software.

The one that genuinely decides it: stock

Simpro has a real inventory system. Stock levels, purchase orders that update stock on receipt, supplier catalogues that sync in, price comparison across the merchants you use, minimum stock alerts, stock takes. In the base plan, not an add on. For a firm with a unit and a van stock policy that is the reason you buy the software.

ServiceM8 does not have one. Precision matters here, because the usual line about this is now wrong and you will catch anybody who repeats it. ServiceM8 has no inventory system of its own: no purchase orders, no van stock, no supplier ordering. What it has is stock level visibility, mirrored from a connected Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online account, and the count only moves when an invoice containing a tracked item is approved and synced. ServiceM8's own FAQ answers "does it track stock levels" with a yes, and that yes is doing a lot of work.

If someone tells you ServiceM8 does stock, ask the follow up: can I raise a purchase order to my wholesaler in it. The answer is no. If that matters, this comparison is already over and you should be booking Simpro's demo.

Where ServiceM8 is the better buy

Users are free, and that never stops mattering

Every paid plan has unlimited logins. Take on an apprentice, put your bookkeeper on it, give whoever answers the phone a proper view, and the bill does not move. Your tier is set by jobs created, not people employed. Simpro price by team size, which quietly charges you for growing, and that arithmetic is worked out in full in the ServiceM8 and Tradify comparison.

You can try it tonight

Fourteen days, all features, no card, no sales call. Put three real jobs through it this week and you will know. A demo shows you a tidy account run by somebody who uses it daily. Yours is neither until it is built round how you actually work.

Certificates and forms on site, from £59

From Growing up you build your own forms and certificates, so an electrician produces an EICR at the board and a gas engineer generates the record before leaving. Asset management is on the same plan, which is what you want if you service the same boilers, alarms or extraction year after year. Starting on Starter at £25 and finding that out in week three is the classic wrong turn.

Card payments in the van

Take the money on the doorstep instead of chasing it for six weeks. One caveat I will not bury: that works on the iPhone app, not on Android, which gets a cut down app called ServiceM8 Lite. The full picture is in does ServiceM8 work on Android, and it is worth ten minutes before you buy either product.

And then there is £1,000 that only exists on one side

ServiceM8 runs an official Setup and Training Rebate. If your setup is done by a partner who is both certified and listed in their Partner Directory, ServiceM8 credits your account 100% of what you paid that partner, capped at £1,000. I am certified and I am listed, which is what makes an invoice from me qualify.

Real numbers, not the headline. The £800 setup and training package comes back as £800 of credit, applied at half your plan price each month until it runs out. On Growing at £59 that is £29.50 a month, so roughly 27 months at half price. Setup alone at £650 comes back as £650, about 22 months.

Simpro has no equivalent. Their setup fee is a cost, paid to them, at a price they will quote you. Mine is a cost ServiceM8 pays back.

Two rules people trip over. It does not stack: an approved claim replaces any active discount, so never take a code and the rebate together. And you must subscribe through the ServiceM8 dashboard, because subscribing inside the iPhone app voids it. The full terms and the sixty day window are here.

Where Simpro is genuinely better

Not a courtesy section. Recognise yourself in two of these and go and book their demo.

Stock, purchase orders and supplier catalogues

Covered above, worth repeating because it is decisive. ServiceM8 cannot do it and no amount of setup work makes it able to.

It syncs with Sage

Simpro's pricing page lists QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and MYOB. ServiceM8's UK add ons list Xero, QuickBooks Online and MYOB, and never mention Sage. If your books are on Sage and your accountant is not moving them, that is close to a decision on its own.

Projects, not just job cards

Multi phase work, stage billing, retentions, contractor management, takeoffs off a drawing. ServiceM8 is built around the job card. Once your work stops fitting on one, you are fighting it.

There are Simpro people in the UK, on a phone

An office in Reading, a UK sales line, and support running 24 hours a day, six days a week. ServiceM8's support is email and chat, 24/7 on paid plans and self serve on the free one. Good chat support is genuinely good. It is still not a phone.

Their implementation includes the training

Here is the one that costs me. Simpro assign you a consultant who maps your workflows, imports your supplier catalogues, sets up your rates and trains your team, on site if you want them on site. Same shape as what I sell, delivered by the vendor. Not free, and quoted rather than published, but buy Simpro and you are not also hiring me. Better you hear that here than feel it later.

What Simpro says about ServiceM8, and what is fair in it

Simpro publish a comparison page about ServiceM8, as nearly every vendor in this category does. Here is my honest sort of it.

Fair. They point at ServiceM8's job caps, and those are real. On Starter, Growing and Premium you cannot buy extra jobs at all: only Premium Plus publishes a per job price, at 15p. Go over and you get another seven days working normally, then a prompt to upgrade, so picking the right tier at the start matters more than people expect. They also point at reduced Android functionality, which is true and which I have written two thousand words about myself.

Not something I can check. Their table says ServiceM8 "slows as teams grow". Neither of us can measure that and they have published nothing to support it, so treat it as marketing until somebody shows you a number. Same for the rows marked "limited" on a page whose job is to sell the other product.

Rather spend an hour on this than a fortnight? Tell me what your week actually looks like and I will tell you straight which of these two you are. Or just look at what a setup costs.

So which one

That right hand list is not padding. If two of those describe you, book the demo, because ServiceM8 will not grow into that job.

If none of them do, this is easier than the internet makes it look. One of these costs £59 a month with unlimited users and you can be running jobs through it before the weekend. The other wants sixty days and a quote.

If you are moving off something else

Into ServiceM8, clients, contacts and your price list come across, either by connecting Xero, QuickBooks Online or MYOB or by importing a spreadsheet. Assets come across too if you use asset management, though you still have to physically label each one on site afterwards, which is real work and wants planning rather than discovering. Historical jobs do not. There is no bulk import for past jobs, so keep the old system readable for a year and pick a clean cutover date.

People abandon a system in week two for one reason, and it is almost never the software. They moved across halfway, kept a foot in the old one, and got the benefit of neither. Avoidable, in a couple of days of somebody's attention, and it is the job I do for a fixed price.