How We Score Software

The four criteria

Ease of use measures time from signup to a sent quote. Price/value measures the real cost at your crew size, including seats and gated tiers. Field features measures what the trade actually needs. Support and integrations measures the depth of the accounting sync and whether a human answers.

Ease of use

How long it takes an owner with no training to get from signing up to sending a real quote — and whether the crew will actually open the mobile app rather than going back to a paper job sheet. A product that needs a paid implementation consultant loses points here even if it is excellent afterwards, because most of the businesses we write for do not have one.

Price/value for a small crew

What it costs a one-to-fifteen person operation in practice. Not the headline number: the number after extra seats, after the tier that unlocks the feature you actually need, and after anything sold separately.

Published pricing counts toward this score. A vendor that will not tell you what it costs without a sales call is imposing a real cost on a small buyer comparing options on a Sunday evening, and we score that honestly rather than treating it as a footnote. That is why FieldEdge sits at 5, PestPac and AccuLynx at 4.

Field-specific features

Dispatch, the mobile app, on-site invoicing, price book, service agreements, and whatever the trade in question actually needs — aerial measurement for roofing, chemical records for pest control, maintenance plans for HVAC.

General-purpose CRMs score low here by design. Pipedrive and HubSpot were never built to dispatch a truck, and we mark that plainly rather than inflating it to make a comparison look even.

Support and integrations

QuickBooks, payments, and whether there is a human to call. We ask specifically whether an accounting sync is two-way, whether it covers QuickBooks Desktop or only Online, and whether invoices carry line by line or as a single total — three very different things that all get advertised as “integrates with QuickBooks”.

What follows from scoring this way

Three consequences, all deliberate. The most capable product does not always win, because price and ease of use are scored for a small crew. Scores are issued once per product and never re-issued per industry. And we do not score anything we could not examine at the source.

The most capable product does not always win. ServiceTitan earns the only perfect field-features score we have awarded and still finishes fifth in our main comparison, because price and ease of use are scored for a small crew and ServiceTitan is not built for one. If you run forty technicians, weight those two differently and it wins. We say so on the page.

Scores are issued once per product, not once per industry. Jobber scores 8.8 on our field service comparison, and it scores 8.8 on the roofing page too. What changes between pages is which criterion matters most for that trade and a plain-language “fit” note — not the number. Two different scores for the same product on the same site would make both meaningless.

We do not score what we cannot examine. JobNimbus is a well-known roofing CRM whose site returned an access error to every request we made. It appears in the roofing comparison with no score and an explanation, because pretending it does not exist would be worse and inventing a score would be worse still.

How prices are checked

Every price on this site is read off the vendor’s own pricing page, with the date printed beside it. We never reuse a figure without re-checking, and we never repeat numbers from third-party roundups as though we had verified them. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so and leave it blank.

Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so explicitly and leave the price blank. Third-party estimates exist for most of them; we have chosen not to reproduce those, because a number with an invented provenance is worse than no number.

Two details we always separate out, because both are routinely blurred in the market:

• Annual versus month-to-month. The advertised price is usually the annual rate. Housecall Pro’s widely quoted $59 is $79 if you pay monthly — 34% more than the number in the advert.
• What a seat really costs. Headline prices are usually for one user. Jobber’s extra seats are $29/mo; Housecall Pro’s are $100/mo on the Essentials tier, which is more than an entire Basic subscription.

Independence

No vendor has paid for placement, for a score, or for a mention, and there are no affiliate links on this site at the time of writing. Every outbound link goes to the vendor’s own page. If that changes we will say so on every page it affects, and the scores will not move.

If that changes we will say so on every page it affects, before the first paragraph, and the scores will not move. The four criteria and the arithmetic behind them are the entire product here; the day they bend for a commission is the day the site is worth nothing.

Corrections

Pricing in this category changes often. Where we find that a figure has moved, we update the page and the verification date together. Where we get something wrong, we correct it in place rather than quietly deleting it.

See the four criteria applied in full in our comparison of the 7 best field service management platforms, or in the trade-specific breakdowns for HVAC, roofing, pest control and cleaning.