Tradify vs ServiceM8 2026: Per-User vs Per-Job Pricing for UK Trades

Tradify vs ServiceM8: The Two Job Apps UK Trades Actually Shortlist

If you are a plumber, electrician, heating engineer or builder in the UK looking for job management software, these two come up again and again. They do the same work: take an enquiry, turn it into a quote, schedule it, record what happened on site, invoice it, push it into your accounts. Both price in pounds, both sync with Xero, both have a large and loyal base of British tradespeople.

The interesting difference is not the feature list. It is the meter. Tradify charges per user, every month, forever. ServiceM8 charges by how many jobs you create and lets you add as many users as you like. That single choice decides which one is cheaper for you, and it is not close in either direction once your shape is clear. The second difference is device: ServiceM8 reserves its full app for iPhone and iPad, and its Android app is a deliberately limited companion.

This page compares them honestly first, because that is the decision most people came here to make. Then it covers the gap they both share — neither is built to sell a service contract or a prepaid plan, and neither gives you a real website — and where Bizzly fits. All pricing checked as of July 2026; verify on the vendor sites, as tiers change.

Per User vs Per Job: The Decision Underneath

Tradify publishes three UK tiers as of July 2026: Lite at around £34 per user per month, Pro at around £37 and Plus at around £44, all excluding VAT. The price is the same whether that user closes two jobs a month or two hundred, so growth costs money in a straight line — a second van is another £37, an apprentice another £37, the office admin who raises the invoices another £37.

ServiceM8 flips it. Paid plans carry unlimited users and you pay for job volume: around £25 a month for 50 jobs, £59 for 150, £119 for 500 and £269 for 1,500 or more, again excluding VAT, with a genuinely usable free tier at 30 jobs a month for a single user. Adding your fifth engineer costs nothing. A busy March does.

At a Glance

Tradify

Built for: UK and Commonwealth trades businesses of roughly one to ten people who want quoting, scheduling and invoicing that works out of the box.

Tradify's reputation is earned on simplicity. The workflow from enquiry to quote to job to invoice is short, the mobile apps work fully on both iOS and Android, and the accounting sync to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks lands the numbers where your accountant expects them. The UK details matter too: Pro and Plus include gas safety and electrical compliance certificates, so a Gas Safe engineer or electrician can issue the paperwork from the same app that ran the job. Pro is the tier most firms settle on — recurring jobs, job photos and files, progress invoicing, costing and bill tracking, timesheets and subcontractor scheduling all live there. Plus adds SmartRead for bills and SmartWrite, purchase orders, bulk invoicing, kit bundles and fuller reporting.

Where Tradify is weaker

The per-user bill is the obvious one. A four-person team on Pro is around £148 a month before VAT and add-ons, and there is no cheaper seat for the person in the office who only raises invoices. Beyond price, the criticisms are consistent: no real CRM depth, weak inventory and parts tracking, limited custom fields for firms with unusual job workflows, and reporting that does not always slice the way an owner wants. Users have also reported needing a connection to enter data, with offline entry a long-standing request.

The compliance claim needs care too. Tradify's own help centre states it has no native reverse-VAT or CIS tax options and that CIS invoices require a Xero or Sage Business Cloud connection. If you are a subcontractor under CIS, that is a dependency to plan for rather than a box ticked.

• Pricing: ~£34 to £44 per user per month, ex VAT. Instant Website ~£10/month, SMS ~10p each. 14-day free trial.
• Best for: Sole traders and small teams with high job volume per person, especially anyone who needs compliance certificates and Android parity

ServiceM8

Built for: Field service businesses running teams of engineers, particularly plumbing, electrical and HVAC — and, in practice, businesses standardised on iPhones.

ServiceM8 is Australian-built with a strong UK following, and the iOS app is genuinely excellent: fast, dense with detail, and able to work offline on site and sync when signal returns, which matters in a plant room or a loft. The unlimited-user model is a structural advantage for anyone with a crew, and the free tier at 30 jobs a month for one user is an unusually generous way in.

Feature depth arrives by tier rather than by seat. Starter adds progress invoicing and supplier invoice importing; Growing brings asset management, electronic forms, proposals, bundles and the inbox; Premium unlocks job costing, markup billing and the knowledge base. Online booking forms are included on paid plans — ServiceM8 hosts them and gives you an embed snippet, so a request from your site or a link lands in the calendar.

Where ServiceM8 is weaker

The Android situation is the headline. ServiceM8 Lite, the Android companion app, is scoped to field technicians, subcontractors and temporary staff: see your assigned jobs, view key details, receive updates, complete core tasks. ServiceM8 states that Android users do not get the features needed for management roles or the advanced capabilities exclusive to the iOS app. If half your engineers are on Samsungs, you are either buying iPhones or accepting a two-tier team.

The other recurring complaints in public reviews are cost creep as job volume rises, storage charges, dependence on connectivity for parts of the workflow, and limited lead attribution — the booking form reportedly supports only a Google Analytics tag, which frustrates anyone running Google Ads. Billing and support experiences cut both ways in reviews; read recent ones rather than an old roundup.

• Pricing: Free (1 user, 30 jobs), then ~£25, ~£59, ~£119 and ~£269 a month by job volume, unlimited users, ex VAT. 14-day trial.
• Best for: Teams of three or more on iPhones, doing larger jobs where volume stays moderate

What Each One Actually Costs

Tradify

ServiceM8

Two worked examples make the divergence obvious. A sole-trader electrician doing around 120 small jobs a month pays roughly £37 on Tradify Pro but would need ServiceM8 Growing at around £59 to cover the volume. Flip it: a five-person heating firm doing 100 jobs a month pays around £185 on Tradify Pro against around £59 on ServiceM8 Growing, with all five users included. Over £1,500 a year, on identical work.

Bizzly

The Gap Both Platforms Share

Tradify and ServiceM8 are both, at heart, job apps. Money follows work done: quote, schedule, complete, invoice, chase. That model has run the trades for decades and both tools execute it well.

It fits badly when the money arrives first. Landlord retainers, annual boiler cover, priority-response memberships, prepaid blocks of maintenance visits — in all of these the customer buys an entitlement and then draws service against it. ServiceM8 gets closest with its Recurring Jobs add-on and card auto-pay, but the documented limit is precise and telling: if you want to sell a plan where the customer simply pays every month and no job card is created, the native feature does not model it, and there is no bulk way to enrol fifty existing customers at once. That gap is why a separate service-plan product exists in the ServiceM8 ecosystem at all. Tradify has recurring jobs on Pro and service reminders on Plus, which handle “return in twelve months”, not “charge £18 a month indefinitely”.

The second shared gap is the shopfront. Tradify's Instant Website is a one-page template built from your business data for around £10 a month; ServiceM8's Website and Email add-on auto-generates a small site with a front page, about section, gallery and six colour themes. Both are fine placeholders. Neither is a site you can shape into a marketing asset with plan pages, pricing tables, area landing pages and a checkout — which is exactly what selling contracts requires.

Where Bizzly Fits: The Third Path

Bizzly is not a job management system and this page will not pretend otherwise. It is a platform for service businesses that sell access — plans, packs, memberships, prepaid bookings — from a website they own, at £19, £29 or £49 a month flat with no per-user charge, no per-booking fee and no commission.

1. A real website, not a template with your logo on it

Every plan, including the £19 one, includes a fully flexible drag-and-drop editor: multi-page with per-page SEO, global theme and custom colours, per-element styling down to a raw CSS inspector, page version snapshots, a media library with stock photos, and AI page create and refine. There are 26 components you drop straight in — the booking calendar, the timetable, your plans, a store with cart, testimonials, forms and the entire customer portal. Add per-area landing pages, a schema editor, llms.txt and IndexNow and it is a marketing site rather than a business card. Pro adds a custom domain and branded email domain. The editor itself is desktop-only, and there is no custom code injection.

2. Subscription, pack and term billing side by side

This is the part neither competitor models. Monthly plans carry booking quotas — two visits a month, four call-outs a quarter. Session packs sell a block of visits with an expiry date. One-off term packs cover a defined period, and a customer joining mid-term pays a pro-rated price automatically. Season subscriptions roll members into the next season without re-selling, billing natively through Stripe, with the cancellation policy you choose: end of billing period, a notice period, or end of season. Capacity is held while a customer is at the checkout, so a limited block cannot oversell. For a heating engineer selling 200 annual cover plans, or a gardener selling a spring-to-autumn maintenance season, that is the product.

3. Billing and booking are one system

Payment-gated quotas mean a customer can only book what their active plan, pack or credits actually cover, and a lapsed payment blocks new bookings automatically — no chasing, no awkward call, no unpaid visits slipping through. Each plan carries its own rules: how far ahead people can book, the cutoff before a slot, the cancellation notice. Customers reschedule by cancelling and rebooking from the portal inside the cancellation window, with the credit returning automatically so they can pick a new slot. Staff can also book on a customer's behalf, move a booking, or drag a whole session to a new time.

4. A WhatsApp AI assistant included in the plan

Standard includes 500 WhatsApp messages a month, Pro 2,000. The assistant books and cancels appointments, searches availability including recurring slots, suggests alternatives, handles waitlist joins and claims, answers account, subscription and invoice questions, raises support tickets and answers business FAQs from a knowledge base you write — around the clock, with OTP-verified customer authentication. When the phone rings while you are under a sink, something that books next month's service visit at 9pm without you beats most rows on a feature table.

Around that sit the operational pieces: a customer portal for pause and resume, plan changes, policy-driven cancellation with live refund quotes, receipts and purchase history; automated confirmations, 24-hour email and SMS reminders, failed-payment dunning and credit-expiry warnings; review requests by SMS magic link published straight to your own testimonials; custom staff roles with a read/write permission matrix; bookings synced with Google Calendar; HubSpot CRM; and Stripe Connect, so money lands in your own account in your own currency.

What Bizzly does not do

Plainly, because it matters here more than on most comparisons. No quoting or estimating. No job costing, markup billing, purchase orders, kit bundles or timesheets. No dispatch board and no GPS tracking of engineers. No accounting sync to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks, and no CIS or domestic reverse-charge invoicing. No gas safety or electrical compliance certificates. No parts and stock control for van inventory (the store handles products you sell online, not materials on a job). No postcode or service-area restriction on who can book. No native mobile apps — it is a responsive web app — and therefore no offline job cards in a plant room. No mileage tracking and no payroll.

If that list describes your working day, Tradify or ServiceM8 is the correct answer and Bizzly is not a replacement for it. If your working day is selling and servicing contracts, it is the other way round.

Which One to Pick

Choose Tradify if:

• You are a sole trader or small team with high job volume per person
• Your engineers are on Android, or on a mix of devices
• You need gas safety or electrical compliance certificates issued from the job
• You want a predictable bill that scales with headcount rather than a busy month
• Xero or Sage is already running your books and CIS

Choose ServiceM8 if:

• You have three or more people and per-seat pricing is getting painful
• Your team is standardised on iPhones and iPads
• Jobs are larger and fewer, so a volume-based bill works in your favour
• Offline access on site is a genuine daily requirement
• You want to start free and prove the workflow before paying anything

Choose Bizzly if:

• Your revenue is cover plans, retainers, memberships or prepaid visit packs
• Customers pay before the work, and payment should control what they can book
• You need a real website with plan pages and a checkout, not a one-page template
• You want a flat bill that does not move when you hire or have a busy month
• You are willing to keep quoting and invoicing elsewhere, or you do not quote at all

Verdict

Between the two, the honest answer is arithmetic rather than opinion. Tradify wins for high job volume per person, Android parity and UK compliance paperwork. ServiceM8 wins for teams, for anyone already on iPhones, and for larger jobs where volume stays moderate — and its free tier makes it nearly risk-free to test. Work out your jobs per head, check which phones your engineers carry, and the choice usually makes itself.

What neither will do is turn reactive call-outs into recurring revenue. They bill for work completed, because that is what they were built to do. If the plan is 200 households on annual cover, a portfolio of landlords on monthly retainers, or prepaid maintenance blocks sold from your own site, that is a different product: plans and packs with pro-rated joining, payment-gated booking, a portal that handles pauses and cancellations without a phone call, and a website you can actually sell from — £19 to £49 a month, no per-user charge. Just go in knowing there is no quoting, no job costing and no dispatch in it.

For a wider view of the category, read Bizzly vs Jobber, the Jobber pricing breakdown and the best software for service businesses. If you are still setting up, the guide to starting a trades business covers qualifications, pricing and getting paid. See how Bizzly handles the sector on the trades industry page, or current plans on the pricing page.