ServiceM8 vs Tradify, compared honestly

Short answer. These two price themselves in opposite directions. Tradify charges you per user and gives you unlimited jobs. ServiceM8 charges a flat fee based on jobs and gives you unlimited users. For most UK trade businesses that difference lands in ServiceM8's favour, and it gets more one sided the moment you take somebody on.

Everything else people argue about is smaller than that.

I should say where I stand, because it matters when you are reading a comparison. I set up ServiceM8 for a living and I am certified and listed by them. I do not resell licences: you buy your subscription direct, at the same price whichever of us you talked to. But ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in, so I am not a neutral party here and you should read this page knowing it.

What I can tell you is that my fee is the same whatever plan you end up on, so I have no reason to talk you into a bigger one, and I will show you plainly where Tradify is the better buy.

What each one actually costs in the UK

This turned out to be harder to answer than it should be. I went through the pages that currently rank for this comparison and most of them print prices that are simply wrong: one has ServiceM8 at £9 to £89 a month, another invents a £199 tier, a big review site lists ServiceM8 as costing US$0.00. ServiceM8's own comparison page carries Tradify prices it last updated in September 2024.

So here are both ladders, straight off the vendors' own UK pages. If you only care about the ServiceM8 side, I have broken that down further in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK, including the card fees that end up bigger than the subscription.

Two things before you compare those columns.

ServiceM8's UK prices exclude VAT. Their own FAQ says so, and explains that you get reverse charge invoices to account for VAT to HMRC yourself, which most registered businesses then reclaim. Tradify's UK pricing page makes no VAT statement at all, in either direction. I asked myself whether to guess and decided not to. Treat the two columns as roughly comparable and check your own first invoice.

Tradify Lite is not really the tier to compare on. At £34 it leaves out timesheets, job photos and files, compliance certificates, custom branding, and job costing. For most trade businesses that is not a working system, it is a quoting tool. Pro at £37 is the honest like-for-like, and Tradify flags it as their most popular anyway. I have used £37 in the sums below.

The sum that actually decides it

ServiceM8's bill goes up when you do more jobs. Tradify's bill goes up when you hire more people. That is the whole thing. Once you see it that way the answer falls out.

So: find the row for your monthly job count, then look at how many people need a login.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Some real shapes, so you can find yourself:

• Sole trader, 25 jobs a month. ServiceM8 Free costs you nothing. Tradify costs £34. Over a year that is £408 for something you can have for free while you find your feet.
• Two of you, 45 jobs a month. ServiceM8 Starter £25 against Tradify at £74 for two seats. ServiceM8 saves you £588 a year.
• Three of you, 140 jobs a month. ServiceM8 Growing £59 against Tradify at £111. ServiceM8 saves £624 a year.
• Five of you, 480 jobs a month. ServiceM8 Premium £119 against Tradify at £185. ServiceM8 saves £792 a year.
• Ten of you, 480 jobs a month. ServiceM8 is still £119, because users are free. Tradify is £370. That is £3,012 a year.

Per user pricing quietly taxes you for growing

This is the bit that does not show up when you are comparing two numbers on a Tuesday afternoon, and it is the single biggest reason I end up recommending ServiceM8.

On a per user product, every good thing that happens to your business costs you more money. You take on an apprentice, that is another £37 a month. You finally get somebody in the office to answer the phone and chase invoices, another £37. You want your bookkeeper to have a look in rather than emailing her exports, another £37. None of those people are creating more jobs. They are just people who need to see the system.

ServiceM8 does not care. Every paid plan has unlimited users, and their own FAQ says it plainly: "No, we don't charge per user." A ten van firm pays the same £119 as a four van firm on the same job volume.

Play it forward five years. If you go from two people to eight, Tradify goes from £74 to £296 a month while your job count might not have moved much at all. ServiceM8 in that same period might move you one tier. One model charges you for the business you are building. The other charges you for the work you are doing.

That is not a trick of the pricing page, it is the shape of the two products, and it is worth thinking about before you pick the one that is £3 cheaper this month.

Where ServiceM8 is genuinely better

There is a real free plan, and it is not a demo

ServiceM8 Free gives one user 30 jobs a month at no cost, with the essential features in. You also earn extra job credits every time you take a card payment through it, with no limit on how many you can earn back. Tradify has no answer to this at all, and it means a sole trader can start properly rather than starting a countdown.

Asset management, if you maintain things rather than just install them

If you service the same boilers, alarms, extraction or air conditioning units year after year, ServiceM8 tracks each unit as an asset with its own history, and it will bulk import them from a spreadsheet. That sits on the Growing plan at £59. For planned maintenance work this is the feature that changes how the business runs, and it is the sort of thing that wants setting up correctly the first time rather than being bolted on after a year of loose job records.

Certificates and forms built round your paperwork

From Growing upward you can build your own forms and certificates, so an electrician can produce an EICR on site and a gas engineer can generate a record in the app rather than filling in a pad and typing it up at nine at night. There are also 250 plus ready made forms in their store, buyable on any plan including the free one.

The card machine in your pocket

ServiceM8 takes card payments in the app on site, which for a lot of trades is the difference between getting paid on the day and chasing an invoice for six weeks.

And then there is the £1,000

This one is not a feature, it is money, and it only exists on the ServiceM8 side.

The rebate changes the arithmetic completely

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

So take the £800 setup and training package. That is not £800 spent. That is £800 back, as credit against your ServiceM8 bill at half your plan price until it runs out. On the Growing plan at £59 a month, half is £29.50, so £800 of credit covers you for roughly 27 months at half price.

Run that against the comparison you were making. Two years of ServiceM8 Growing at half price is about £708 of subscription. Two years of Tradify Pro for three people is £2,664, at full price, with no rebate on the other side because Tradify does not have one.

One thing to be straight about: the rebate does not stack with anything else. ServiceM8's terms say an approved claim replaces any active discount you have. So do not let anybody sell you a discount code and the rebate together, because you will only ever get one of them, and the rebate is almost always the bigger number. The full rules, and the one mistake that voids it before you start, are here.

Where Tradify is genuinely better

I would not trust this page if it did not have this section, so here it is, and these are real. I checked each one against something other than Tradify's own marketing.

It syncs with Sage

Tradify connects to Xero, Sage and QuickBooks Online, on every plan including the cheapest. ServiceM8's own UK add-ons page lists Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB, and does not mention Sage anywhere. If your books are on Sage and your accountant is not moving, that is close to a decision on its own. It is the one point in this comparison where I would tell you to stop reading and go and look at Tradify.

It has written down what it does about CIS and reverse charge VAT

Tradify publishes help articles on Construction Industry Scheme handling and on domestic reverse charge VAT. ServiceM8 publishes nothing equivalent that I can find. Be careful how much weight you put on this though: Tradify does it through the accounting integration, so you have to switch CIS on in Xero or Sage first, and the fields are then locked inside Tradify. It is a routing job rather than a feature, and if you are running CIS you are running it in your accounts package either way.

Setup, training and a phone helpline come free

This one is awkward for me, so let me put it plainly. Tradify gives you a person during your trial to help you get started, and a free UK phone line afterwards.

Here is the honest distinction, and then you can decide. A vendor helpline answers "how do I do this in the software". It is genuinely useful and it is genuinely free. What it does not do is sit down with how your business actually runs, build your quote templates and job forms around it, work out which automations should fire and when, get your existing data across, and then train your team on the version that has just been built for them. Those are different jobs, and only one of them is a thing you can buy and have finished in a few days.

If all you need is somebody to answer questions while you build it yourself in the evenings, take their free help and keep your money. That is a real option and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

You can never hit a job ceiling

Tradify says unlimited jobs, quotes and invoices on every plan and means it. With ServiceM8 you are working against a monthly job allowance, and this is stricter than people assume. Go over it and ServiceM8 lets you carry on as normal for another seven days. If your billing month happens to reset inside that window your credits reset and nothing happens. If it does not, you get prompted to upgrade.

Note what that means: on Starter, Growing and Premium you cannot simply buy a few extra jobs. Only Premium Plus publishes a per job overage price, at 15p. On the plans below it, the answer to a busy month is the next tier up. Picking the right tier at the start matters more here than it does on Tradify, which is one of the things I sort out during a setup.

The Android problem, answered properly

This is the single most searched question about ServiceM8 in the UK and I have not found one page that answers it straight. So here it is, including the parts that do not help my case.

ServiceM8's full app is for iPhone and iPad only. On Android you get a cut-down app called ServiceM8 Lite. ServiceM8 are open about this in their own documentation and even recommend buying iPhones for field staff.

An Android user can see the jobs allocated to them, create and schedule jobs, add notes and photos, complete checklists and forms, add materials, generate and send a PDF quote or invoice, navigate to site and clock on and off. That covers a lot of an engineer's day.

What they cannot do is the part that catches people out:

• Take a card payment on site. This is the big one. Your engineer finishes, the customer wants to pay, and the Android app cannot take it.
• See anybody else's schedule. They see their own jobs and nothing else, which makes covering for each other awkward.
• Use asset management, proposals or deposits.
• Scan documents or barcodes, mark up photos, or use the measuring tools.
• Message other staff inside the app.

ServiceM8 describe Lite as being for technicians and subcontractors who do not need the full feature set. Read that as: it is not built for anyone running the business.

So the practical rule, and it is less bleak than the list looks. If you are the owner and you are on Android, think hard, because you are the one who needs the full picture. If your engineers are on Android but you are on an iPhone, it is workable and plenty of firms run exactly that way, as long as you accept that those engineers cannot take card payments in the field. If your whole team is on Android and there is no route to changing that, look at Tradify instead. It publishes no iOS and Android split of the kind ServiceM8 documents, though I would still install it on a real Android handset during the free trial and test your five must-haves before you commit.

Five things the comparison sites get wrong

I checked the pages currently ranking for this search against the vendors' own documentation. These are the errors I could prove, with the correct figure. I am flagging the claim, not having a go at anyone.

• "ServiceM8 charges per completed job, so busy months cost more." Three separate ranking pages say this. It is a flat monthly plan with a job allowance. Go over and you keep working for another seven days, and only the top plan publishes a per job price at all.
• "ServiceM8 costs £9 to £89 a month." It is £0 to £269.
• "ServiceM8 has no offline mode." Offline access is a listed feature on ServiceM8's own UK pricing page, described there as using the app without internet connectivity and syncing when you are back in range.
• Tradify at £29 a month. Tradify's UK page says £34, £37 and £44.
• ServiceM8 priced at US$0.00 a month on one of the big review directories, which is what happens when a global template meets a UK reader.

One more, which is not an error so much as a trap. tradify.com is not Tradify. It currently serves a website builder placeholder. The real product site is tradifyhq.com. Worth knowing before you type a card number into something.

Getting tired of checking other people's numbers? That is roughly the job I do, except on your account instead of on a comparison page. Here is what a setup costs.

So which one

That right hand list is short on purpose. It is not me being unfair, it is what the numbers do. Three of those four are specific circumstances rather than preferences, and if none of them describe you then the money, the growth curve and the rebate all point the same way.

If you are still genuinely torn, do not read another comparison. Both give you a 14 day free trial with every feature switched on and neither asks for a card. Put three real jobs through each of them, on your own phone, and you will know inside a week.

What nobody tells you about switching

Whichever way you go, the reason people give up in week two is almost never the software. It is that they moved across badly, got halfway, and ended up running the old system and the new one at the same time.

With ServiceM8 specifically, here is what does and does not come with you. Your clients and contacts come across, either by connecting Xero, QuickBooks Online or MYOB, or by importing a spreadsheet. Your price list comes across the same way. Your assets come across if you use asset management, though you still have to physically label each one on site afterwards, which is real work and should be planned rather than discovered.

Your job history does not come across. ServiceM8 documents importing clients and materials, and there is no bulk import for past jobs. Plan to keep your old system readable for a year, and pick a clean cutover date rather than trying to run both properly.

Everyone selling you either product will tell you migration is easy. What they mean is that the import buttons work. The bit that decides whether you are still using it at Christmas is whether the thing was built round how you quote, how you schedule and how you invoice, and that is a couple of days of work by somebody who has done it before.