What a small team actually pays
At the checked entry prices, Tradify Lite is £34 for one user, £102 for three and £170 for five each month. ServiceM8 Starter is £25 a month for unlimited users, but its 50-job monthly allowance must fit your workload. At 150 jobs the checked Growing plan is £59; the saving changes as job count grows. These examples compare advertised subscriptions before extras. ServiceM8 states prices exclude VAT; Tradify’s tax treatment is not confirmed by our checked evidence. Do not treat the two figures as a final like-for-like invoice.
Where Tradify is worth considering
The documented Lite plan brings quoting, scheduling and invoicing together with Xero, Sage and QuickBooks Online integrations. That makes it a useful trial candidate if your main problem is moving information from an estimate into a booked job and the accounts. Repeat jobs and compliance certificates start at Pro, so the £34 headline is not the cost of every workflow. Price the plan that covers your actual work before comparing it with ServiceM8.
Where ServiceM8 is worth considering
ServiceM8’s free plan lets one person manage up to 30 jobs a month; paid plans remove the single-user restriction. Online booking and accounting integrations are documented, and forms need closer plan checks: using purchased forms and creating custom forms are different entitlements. The flexible job-volume model can suit a crew sharing a diary, but count the monthly jobs you actually create rather than just completed invoices.
Phone support and paperwork can decide it
Do not choose from an old Apple-only description of ServiceM8. Current supplier material describes broad Android support, but that does not establish that every advanced task behaves identically on your team’s devices. Test the exact phones, offline tasks and certificate templates you need. A checklist or custom PDF is not automatically the statutory certificate your trade requires. Give these checks more weight than a long list of feature ticks.
Run the same job through both trials
Both suppliers advertise fourteen-day trials. Create one customer, build the same labour-and-materials quote, accept it, schedule the job, record completion and raise the invoice. Then inspect the accounting export. Try a reschedule and a price change, and ask an engineer to do the phone steps. Note where data must be retyped and which tasks require a higher plan. Choose on the total cost and the workflow you can complete reliably, not the cheapest headline alone.