Quoting Software for Contractors: An Honest Comparison

Choosing quoting software as a contractor feels like choosing a ute — everyone’s got an opinion, the comparison specs don’t tell the full story, and you won’t really know if it fits until you’ve lived with it for six months.

This guide covers the main options honestly. No affiliate links, no “best overall” badges. Just what each tool is actually good at, where it falls short, and what kind of business it suits. Because the right answer depends entirely on your situation.

Jobber

Best for: Residential service businesses doing 10-50 jobs per week. Think HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest control, cleaning.

Quoting features: Professional-looking quotes with line items, optional add-ons, and online approval. Customers can approve and pay from their phone. Built-in follow-up reminders so quotes don’t go cold.

What’s good: Jobber is polished and genuinely easy to use. Your team can be quoting on it within a day. The client hub — where customers view, approve, and pay — is one of the best in the market. CRM, scheduling, and invoicing are all connected, so a quote flows naturally into a job.

What’s not: Pricing flexibility is limited. If you need complex pricing logic — quantity breaks, customer-specific rates, multi-stage projects — Jobber’s quoting will feel constrained. Reporting is decent but not deep. And once you hit 10+ users, the per-seat pricing adds up quickly.

Price: Starts around $40/month, but most contractors end up on the $80-$130/month plans to get the features they need.

ServiceTitan

Best for: Larger residential and commercial service businesses doing $2M+ revenue. Especially strong in HVAC and plumbing.

Quoting features: Pricebook-driven quoting with good/better/best options. Technicians can build and present quotes on-site using a tablet. Integrated financing options.

What’s good: ServiceTitan is the most feature-complete platform on this list. The pricebook system means consistent pricing across your whole team. The on-site presentation tools are genuinely impressive — customers see options, pricing, and financing right there on the kitchen table.

What’s not: It’s expensive. Really expensive. Implementation fees, monthly minimums, and long contracts. The learning curve is steep — plan for weeks of training, not days. And it’s opinionated software. ServiceTitan has a way it thinks you should run your business, and fighting against that is painful. If your workflow doesn’t match their assumptions, you’ll spend a lot of time on workarounds.

Price: Typically $250-$500+/month depending on team size. Setup fees can run into the thousands.

Tradify

Best for: Trade businesses in Australia and New Zealand doing residential and light commercial work. Electricians, plumbers, builders, HVAC.

Quoting features: Clean quote builder with pricing from your rate card. Quotes can be sent and approved digitally. Connects quotes to jobs, purchase orders, and invoices.

What’s good: Tradify is built for the trades, and it feels like it. The interface is simple without being simplistic. It handles the full job lifecycle — from enquiry to quote to job to invoice — without trying to do everything under the sun. Pricing is straightforward and reasonable.

What’s not: It’s less powerful than ServiceTitan or Buildertrend for complex projects. If you’re doing large commercial work with multiple stages, subcontractor coordination, and detailed cost tracking, Tradify will feel light. The reporting could be stronger. And integrations are limited compared to US-based platforms.

Price: Around $35-$50/month per user.

Buildertrend

Best for: Builders, renovators, and construction businesses managing projects from pre-construction through to handover.

Quoting features: Detailed estimates with cost groups, allowances, and selections. Change order tracking. Client portal where homeowners can make selections and approve changes.

What’s good: Buildertrend understands construction. The estimating tools handle the complexity of a build — allowances, provisional sums, selections, variations — in a way that simpler tools can’t. The client portal is excellent for managing homeowner expectations and getting approvals on changes.

What’s not: It’s overkill for service businesses. If you’re quoting one-day jobs, the overhead of Buildertrend’s project-focused workflow will slow you down. Setup takes time — you need to build out your cost catalogue properly for it to work well. And it’s built for the US market, so Australian businesses will notice some rough edges with tax handling and terminology.

Price: Starts around $99/month, with most builders landing on the $399+/month plans.

The Comparison at a Glance

When Off-the-Shelf Is the Right Call

For plenty of businesses, one of these platforms is exactly what you need. Here’s when off-the-shelf makes sense:

• Your quoting process is fairly standard. Line items, quantities, markup, send. If that describes 90% of your quotes, a platform like Jobber or Tradify handles it well.
• You’re under 15 users. At this scale, the per-seat pricing is manageable and the configuration options are usually enough.
• You want the whole ecosystem. If you need quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and CRM in one place, a platform gives you that out of the box. Building all of that custom would be expensive and unnecessary.
• You can adapt your process. Every platform has opinions about how things should work. If you’re willing to adjust your workflow to match the software, you’ll have a smooth experience.

When Off-the-Shelf Starts Breaking

But there’s a pattern we see regularly. A business buys one of these platforms, uses it for a year or two, and gradually builds a collection of workarounds for the things it can’t do. Pricing logic that lives in a separate spreadsheet because the software’s pricebook isn’t flexible enough. An approval workflow that happens in email because the platform doesn’t support it. A reporting dashboard in Excel because the built-in reports don’t slice the data the way the owner needs.

Here’s when the off-the-shelf approach starts costing more than it saves:

• Complex pricing rules. Customer-specific rates, tiered discounts, bundled packages, pricing that depends on job location or time of year. Every platform has limits on pricing logic, and when yours exceeds them, you end up with manual overrides that defeat the purpose.
• Multi-system workflows. If a quote needs to pull data from your supplier system, check stock levels, apply customer credit terms from your accounting software, and route for approval based on value and job type — no off-the-shelf quoting tool does all of that natively.
• Unique business logic. Every business has quirks. A glass company that prices by the square metre with minimums and waste factors. A construction firm that needs provisional sums and prime cost items with automatic reconciliation. These specific rules don’t fit into generic software.
• Integration requirements. You need your quoting data in your accounting system, your CRM, your project management tool, and your reporting dashboard — in real time, not via manual export.

The Custom Option

A custom quoting system isn’t for everyone. It costs more upfront, takes longer to build, and you’re responsible for it long-term. But for the right business, it’s transformative — because it does exactly what you need and nothing you don’t.

Custom makes sense when:

• You’ve tried two or more platforms and none of them quite fit
• Your team has built workarounds that are becoming their own maintenance burden
• Your quoting process is a genuine competitive advantage and you don’t want to be constrained by what a platform allows
• You need deep integration with existing systems that the platforms don’t connect to

The honest answer is that most businesses under $2M revenue are well-served by Jobber, Tradify, or a similar platform. Above that, it depends on complexity. Some $10M businesses run happily on ServiceTitan. Others outgrew it at $3M because their pricing model didn’t fit.

Making the Decision

Before you commit to any tool, do this:

1. Map your current quoting process end to end. Every step, every handoff, every workaround.
2. Identify your non-negotiables. What absolutely must work? Customer-specific pricing? On-site quoting? Integration with Xero?
3. Trial honestly. Put your real data in. Quote real jobs. Have your least tech-savvy team member try it.
4. Calculate the real cost. Per-seat fees, implementation time, training hours, ongoing admin. A $50/month tool that takes 20 hours to configure and 5 hours/month to maintain isn’t cheap.

The best quoting software is the one your team actually uses, that handles your pricing accurately, and that grows with your business instead of constraining it. Sometimes that’s an off-the-shelf platform. Sometimes it’s something built for you. The answer depends on your business, not on a comparison chart.