Jobber, Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan for a trade business.

The short answer

Pick by the size of your office as much as the number of vans:

• Jobber suits an owner who still quotes, with a crew or two. Plans are sold by the number of users, the middle plans add quote follow-ups and two-way texting, and its API lets a business connect its own tools.
• Housecall Pro suits the same firms. Its entry plan already includes online booking and review requests, and its top plan, MAX, adds the open API, Zapier and recurring service plans.
• ServiceTitan suits a contractor with call-takers and a dispatcher, memberships and enough jobs to use its reporting. It is priced per technician after a demo, and much of its marketing and booking sits in paid Pro products.

Our view: for two to five vans, run free trials of Jobber and Housecall Pro side by side with real jobs. Look at ServiceTitan when the phones need an office team of their own. If you are still deciding whether you need software like this at all, start with spreadsheet or CRM.

Plans and features change, so everything below comes from each vendor's own pages in October 2026, without prices. Check them again before you sign.

What to compare

Feature lists are long, and all three cover the basics: client records, quotes, scheduling, invoices, payments and a mobile app for the field. For a small trade firm the differences that matter show up in five places:

• Online booking: can customers book a visit from your website or Google, and does it respect your areas and travel time?
• Quote follow-ups: does the software chase a quote that has had no answer, on which plan?
• Review requests: does it ask every finished customer for a review, and can you reply from one place?
• Two-way texting: can customers reply to reminders and on-my-way messages, and who reads the replies?
• Connections: can your website form, a chatbot or a missed-call text-back create a request or a job in it, through an API or Zapier, on the plan you can afford?

The last one rarely appears in vendor comparisons, and it decides whether an enquiry arrives as a job card or as an email someone has to retype.

How each one charges

The way each vendor counts what you pay for matters more than the headline figure:

• Jobber counts users: anyone who logs in at the office or in the field to see or manage the schedule. Core includes one user. Connect and Grow come in tiers of one, five, ten or fifteen users, Plus starts at five, and extra users cost a monthly fee each. You can pay monthly with no commitment, monthly with a one-year commitment or a year in advance, and subscriptions renew automatically.
• Housecall Pro counts users too. Basic includes one, Essentials five and MAX eight, with a monthly fee for each extra user listed under MAX. It says it does not require long-term contracts.
• ServiceTitan prices per technician, across three packages called Starter, Essentials and The Works, with prices on request. Its Pro products, such as Scheduling Pro and Marketing Pro, are upgrades on top.

All three charge card processing fees on payments you take through them, and add-ons such as an AI receptionist, a sales pipeline or a phone system are priced separately.

Work it through for your own firm. Four vans with one technician each, an office manager and the owner who quotes makes six people who log in. In Jobber, compare a five-user tier plus one extra user with the ten-user tier. In Housecall Pro, Essentials includes five users, so ask what a sixth costs on that plan before you assume MAX. With ServiceTitan, the quote follows the four technicians, so ask whether office users cost extra.

Online booking from your website and Google

• Jobber includes online booking on every plan. You choose which services can be booked, with descriptions, estimated prices and durations, whose calendars are open and when, how much notice and travel time to allow and how far you will drive. The customer gets an email confirmation and you get a notification.
• Housecall Pro includes online booking from Basic up. It shows bookable times based on your team's schedule, service area and job length, lets customers book and pay from your website or a link, and connects to Reserve with Google so customers can book from Search and Maps.
• ServiceTitan's Scheduling Pro, a paid Pro product, books jobs online against live availability, following the job types, zones and capacity rules your office already uses. It can take payments and memberships at booking and connects to your Google Business Profile through Reserve with Google. ServiceTitan also offers a Web Scheduler or Chat to Text widget for your website.

Online booking works best for planned work: a boiler service, an air conditioning tune-up, a gutter clean. Keep emergencies on the phone. A burst pipe needs a person, and a booking form that offers next Tuesday tells the customer to ring someone else. On your website, put booking for planned work next to an emergency number that stays on screen, as our home services page describes.

Test the whole route on a phone, from your Google profile and from your website, before you switch it on.

Quote follow-ups

In a trade business, more work is lost to quotes nobody chased than to quotes that were too high. All three can help, on different plans:

• Jobber follows up automatically by email or text when a client has not responded to a quote, from the Connect plan up, along with invoice follow-ups. Its Pipeline add-on, included in Plus, shows every request and quote in one view.
• Housecall Pro's Pipeline add-on sends automated texts and emails at each stage for leads, estimates and jobs, with your own wording. MAX includes a sales proposal tool for options side by side.
• ServiceTitan lists automated emails, direct mail and review requests under Marketing Pro. Ask which product covers estimate follow-ups for your package before you rely on it.

Whichever you use, write the follow-up yourself and send one, maybe two. A short question reads better than a sales push. How to follow up on a quote has wording to copy, and enquiry follow-up covers enquiries that never reached the quote stage.

Review requests

• Jobber sends automatic review requests after every job as part of its Marketing Suite, a paid add-on included in Plus, and drafts replies for you to approve. Quotes can show your reviews when the Reviews feature is added.
• Housecall Pro includes review management from Basic: automated requests after every job or payment, a follow-up to customers who have not responded, and one dashboard to read and reply to Google and Facebook reviews.
• ServiceTitan's Marketing Pro handles reputation: review requests, listings across many sites, reviews matched to the technician who did the job and replies from one feed.

Ask every finished customer the same way, rather than only the ones you expect to be happy, and send the request from a number or address someone reads, because some customers reply with a problem. The rules are in how to ask for Google reviews without breaking the rules.

Two-way texting with customers

• Jobber sends automated reminders and on-my-way texts from Connect, and adds two-way text messaging, with conversations kept in one place, on Grow and Plus. Two-way texting is available in the US, Canada and the UK.
• Housecall Pro sends on-my-way texts from a custom messaging number, and customers can reply in real time. Its Voice add-on is a business phone system for calls and texts, with customer details attached.
• ServiceTitan sends and receives texts: customers can confirm or reschedule an appointment, or ask a question, by text, and reminders can include the technician's bio.

Two things apply to every tool in the US. Business texting from software needs carrier registration, covered in A2P 10DLC registration, and marketing texts need the customer's consent. Ask each vendor who handles the registration on your plan and what happens to texts sent before it is approved.

Connecting your website, a chatbot or text-back

This decides whether a request from your website, a chatbot or a missed-call text arrives as a job card or as an email someone retypes:

• Jobber has a public GraphQL API with webhooks. A company admin authorises each app, and its developer documentation allows private integrations built for a specific account, with Jobber's review needed only once an app connects to more than five paying accounts. It also lists an App Marketplace and a Zapier integration. The pages we read did not tie API access to a plan, so confirm it for yours.
• Housecall Pro lists open API access, and access to Zapier, on MAX only. On Basic and Essentials you rely on its built-in integrations, which it says include QuickBooks, Google and Thumbtack among others.
• ServiceTitan allows two routes: certified apps from its Marketplace, which have passed its review, and apps your own company builds, hosts and maintains with your own app keys, which need The Works or Enterprise Plus. It does not allow tunnelling, where an outside company uses app keys you created. An outside developer connects through a certified app, not through your keys.

So a booking chatbot on your website or a text-back service can usually create a request in Jobber, in Housecall Pro only on MAX, and in ServiceTitan through a certified partner or ServiceTitan's own Scheduling Pro and Chat to Text.

When we connect a form, a chatbot or a text-back service to job software, we check what your plan and the tool's API allow before promising anything, and if a connection is not possible or fails, the request reaches an inbox in the same format with an alert. See automation for how that is built.

Who each one is built for

Jobber and Housecall Pro are built around an owner or a small office running the day from a phone. Both have a mobile app in English and Spanish for the field team, though Jobber's Spanish app is not available to account owners and administrators.

ServiceTitan's packages are built around a dispatch board, call booking, a pricebook, mobile estimates, payroll, commission tracking, memberships and reporting. ServiceTitan says its per-technician pricing fits a business of any size, and its tools assume someone in the office answers calls and dispatches. A two-van firm where the owner answers the phone from a ladder pays for an office it does not have yet.

If you mostly do maintenance agreements, look closely at recurring work: Housecall Pro lists recurring service plans on MAX, and ServiceTitan lists customisable memberships in its packages. With Jobber, check how its recurring jobs and automatic payments fit your contracts before you move them.

Moving in, and moving out later

Before you sign, find out how your data gets in and how it gets out:

• Ask what the vendor imports for you, such as clients, properties and open jobs, and on which plan. Jobber lists data import among its onboarding options, and Housecall Pro gives MAX customers a dedicated onboarding specialist.
• During the trial, export your clients, jobs and invoices and open the files. If the export misses notes or job history, you know what leaving would cost you.
• Read the term. Jobber's annual plan is paid up front and not refunded if you cancel during the year, and its one-year monthly plan keeps billing until the term ends. Ask ServiceTitan about contract length and onboarding before the demo ends.
• Put the account in the business's name, with at least two admins, and keep the card processing account in the business's name too.

Run a trial with real jobs

A demo shows the software at its best. A trial with last month's work shows how it fits yours:

• Enter ten real jobs from last month, including one that went wrong, such as a cancelled visit or a quote that needed two revisions.
• Count everyone who would log in, and price the plan for a year at next year's headcount.
• Book yourself online from a phone as a new customer would, from your website and from Google.
• Send a test quote to your own phone and leave it unanswered, to see when the follow-up arrives and what it says.
• Text the business number from your phone and reply to a reminder, to see where the reply lands.
• Ask in writing whether your plan includes the API or Zapier, and what a website form or a chatbot could create in it.

Pick the one your office manager and your busiest technician both find easier. They are the people who will use it every day.