Comparison · from someone who sells none of them
Type it into Google and the completions are “reddit” and “cost per user.” So this page starts with why you are searching, because the most common reason has an answer that is not a different product. Then the list, by shop size, with what each one’s pricing shape is. Then what a migration actually costs in hours, so nobody finds out in month two.
No affiliate links. No email required. Vendor facts from their own pricing pages, checked 18 September 2026; where a vendor publishes no price, it says so.
01
Nobody searches for an alternative to something that is working. In the shops I have sat in, it is one of these three, and the right answer is different for each.
01
The most common one. Somebody bought The Works, or the Pro add-ons, during a good year. Two years on, the dispatcher runs the board, the techs use the estimate screen, the office uses invoicing, and the rest, the marketing attribution, the memberships engine, the reporting suite, the pricebook tooling, has never been switched on. The bill is for all of it. The search is for someone to say the bill is the problem, and it may not be.
02
ServiceTitan is priced per technician and, by every report, sold on a contract, and the quote you were given is not the quote you will be given. A renewal is the one moment a migration can be timed without paying for two systems, so the search is really “what would it take to be somewhere else by that date.” That is a fair question and it has a dry answer, below.
03
You never bought it. A salesperson called, the demo was very good, and the price was the price of a truck. You want to know what the four-truck version of that demo is called. The answer is short, and it is the last section.
02
It is not a feeling. When a shop on ServiceTitan says this, the fifth turns out to be a short list of screens, and the four-fifths is a short list too. Put yours against these.
Notice that the fifth is exactly what every mid-market tool does. And notice that the four-fifths is not broken software; it is software nobody was given the hours to set up. Both of those facts point the same way, and it is not automatically at the door.
03
There are three moves, and the list of alternatives is only relevant to the third.
Configure is for the shop whose fifth works and whose four-fifths was never set up. If the memberships are renewed from a spreadsheet, that is forty hours of setup, not a new product. If every job is attributed to “other,” that is the campaigns being tagged. The arithmetic is the setup hours against twelve months of the fee. Sometimes the fee wins. Often, for a shop above ten trucks, the setup does, because the alternative is losing what works to save what was never used.
Cut is for the shop that will never use the four-fifths and does not want to. At the renewal, drop to the package that covers the fifth, and drop the Pro products. This is the move most people searching this page actually want and do not know they can ask for. It costs one uncomfortable call with the account manager and it keeps the dispatcher’s board.
Move is for the shop under ten trucks paying the price of a truck for the fifth, the shop whose renewal number went up past what the fifth is worth, and the shop that was never on it. For those, the list. And for those, the migration section after it, because the list is the easy part.
Which of the three you are is not obvious from inside the shop, because the person who bought it and the person who runs it are usually different people with different answers. Tracing one job through the shop and counting the screens it actually touches settles it in a day. That is the first thing an AI Audit does, and the blueprint says which of the three moves in writing.
04
Not ten logos. The ones I would actually put in front of a shop, grouped by the size of shop each fits, with the shape of its pricing rather than a number that will be wrong by spring. Every one of them does the fifth. The differences are the price book, the seats, the phones, and the books.
Jobber
The cheapest way to get a clean quote-to-invoice chain in front of a customer, and the customer-facing side is the tidiest in the category. Outgrown when you need a flat-rate book presented on site.
Housecall Pro, on the entry plan
Only if you already know you will be on a price book within a year and would rather not switch twice.
Housecall Pro
The most direct answer to “the four-truck version of the ServiceTitan demo.” The price book, the options presentation, and the maintenance agreements are all there. The comparison with Jobber is its own page.
Service Fusion
The odd shape out, and worth knowing for that reason: if you have many office users and part-time techs, a flat price with unlimited seats is cheaper than any per-seat product. Less polished on the customer side; check the mobile app with a tech before deciding.
Workiz
Strong on the phone side for shops where the lead source is the call. Get the quote in writing with the seat count you will actually have in twelve months, because that is where it moves.
FieldEdge
The one to look at if the reason you are leaving ServiceTitan is the books. Most of the category syncs one way, field tool to QuickBooks; FieldEdge is built around the accounting being the system of record. It is not the modern interface. It is the accountant’s choice.
BuildOps
If your work is commercial, with POs, multi-visit projects and a service department, the residential tools above will fight you and ServiceTitan is probably right. BuildOps is the alternative in that lane, not in the residential one.
Not on the list, deliberately: the tools that do one link of the chain (quoting apps, invoicing apps, a phone system with a CRM bolted on). They are not alternatives to ServiceTitan; they are alternatives to the fifth of it you use, minus the dispatch board. And QuickBooks alone, which is a real answer for a two-person shop and is covered on the Jobber vs Housecall Pro page.
05
The vendor you are moving to will say “we handle the migration.” They handle the customer list. The rest is yours, and it is why the month-two regret threads exist.
The big one. It does not export in a form the next tool imports cleanly, and half of it is stale anyway. Count the live items and multiply by two minutes each: a 1,200-item book is forty hours before the first quote goes out. Most shops use this as the moment to cut it to the 300 items that sell.
Customers export and import as a CSV in an afternoon. Equipment records, the serials and install dates behind the maintenance agreements, usually do not map, and get re-keyed for the active agreements only.
Does not move. Export it, PDF the invoices, keep the old login until the contract actually ends, and accept that “what did we do at the Hendersons in 2023” is a search of an archive from now on.
Re-entered by hand, one per active agreement, with the next visit date. This is the one that gets missed and costs a renewal.
Items, tax codes, classes, deposit accounts, all mapped again in the new tool. A morning with the bookkeeper. Skip it and the first month’s sync lands everything in “uncategorised.”
If the tracking numbers belong to the vendor, port them out before you cancel, or the number on your trucks goes dead. This has a lead time. Start it first.
A month of everyone hating the new app, and a fortnight where the office runs both. Budget the second system’s fee for one overlapping month and do not let anyone talk you out of the overlap.
Add it up before you sign the new contract, in hours, with names beside each line, and put it against the renewal saving. If the saving is smaller than a month of the office’s time, you are in the cut column, not the move column. The calculator does the multiplication →
06
A page called “alternatives” owes you this section. It is the right answer for a shop with a dispatcher, a call centre with more than one seat, a sales manager who reads the attribution, a memberships base that is renewed from the system, and someone whose job includes the reports. That shop is usually fifteen trucks and up, and for it the four-fifths is the product. The mid-market tools will feel like a step down in a year, and the migration back costs everything in the section above, twice.
If that is you and the bill still hurts, the answer is the cut column: the package that covers what you run, the Pro products you actually use, and a setup day for the ones you are paying for and not using. Not the door.
Which column you are in is what the AI Audit settles: one job traced through the shop, the screens it touches counted with the people who touch them, and a written blueprint that says configure, cut, or move, with the hours beside each. A fixed fee, $5,000, sized by headcount. If the recoverable savings do not cover it, you do not pay, and you keep the blueprint.
07
It does not publish a price. Its own pricing page shows three packages, Starter, Essentials and The Works, priced per technician, with the Pro products (marketing, phones, pricebook, dispatch, fleet, scheduling) sold on top. Third-party reports as of 18 September 2026 put the per-technician figure in the low hundreds of dollars a month, with an onboarding fee in the thousands and a contract of at least a year. Treat those as reports, not a quote, and get your own in writing with the technician count you will have next year.
Under ten trucks, rarely. The things it does that the mid-market tools do not, marketing attribution, a memberships engine, configurable payroll, deep reporting, need a person to run them, and a shop that size does not have that person. What a small shop uses it for, dispatch, estimates, invoicing, is what Housecall Pro and Service Fusion do at a fraction of the price. It becomes worth it when there is a dispatcher, a call centre and a sales manager, and someone whose job is the reports.
For a residential HVAC shop of three to ten trucks on a flat-rate book, Housecall Pro; the price book, the options presentation and the maintenance agreements are built in. For a shop with many office seats and part-time techs, Service Fusion, because the seats are unlimited. For a shop where the accounting is the system of record and QuickBooks Desktop is staying, FieldEdge. For commercial mechanical work, BuildOps, or stay on ServiceTitan.
That is the completion Google shows because the searcher wants a peer, not a vendor. Read the threads with one question in mind: how many trucks does the person complaining run? A twenty-truck shop leaving over the reporting and a three-truck shop leaving over the bill are not the same complaint, and the alternative that is right for one is wrong for the other. The threads are useful for the migration horror stories, which are real, and which the section above is written to prevent.
Read yours for two dates: the term end and the notice window before it. Most software contracts renew automatically unless notice is given inside that window, and the migration has to be timed to the term end, not started the week after the renewal lands. If you are mid-term, the honest arithmetic is the remaining months of fee against the cost of running two systems, and it usually says configure what you have until the window opens.
If you are using a fifth of it and the fifth works, the fastest saving is to drop the packages and Pro products you do not use at the renewal, not to migrate. If the fifth does not work either, the problem is not the software. Finding out which of those you are is a mapping exercise, and it is what the AI Audit does: one job traced through the shop, the re-types counted with the people who do them, a written blueprint that says configure, cut, or move. A fixed fee, $5,000, sized by headcount, not owed if the savings do not cover it.