Two products, because two is how many we have implemented.

What this page covers, and what it refuses to

Two products assessed, because two is how many we have built integrations against. There are more in the category — Tradify, AroFlo, Fergus and others — and we have not implemented against them, so they are not ranked here.

That is a shorter page than the affiliate lists and a more useful one. A ranking that includes products the writer has never connected to an accounting package is a ranking of marketing copy — and the questions worth asking any vendor apply to whoever wrote the list as much as to the products on it.

The decision is structural, not featural

Both will schedule a job, hold a quote and raise an invoice. The difference that will actually shape your week is how each is priced and who it was built for.

ServiceM8 meters by jobs per month and states unlimited users on all paid tiers — so adding an apprentice to the system costs nothing, and growth shows up as job volume rather than headcount. Simpro publishes no pricing at all; its pricing page offers a "Request Pricing" action.

Plumbing-specific things to test

Plumbing work generates variations more than almost any other trade, because you cannot see what is behind the wall until you open it. Whichever product you pick, the variation screen is the one that matters — test it on a phone, outside, with wet hands.

The second thing to test is compliance paperwork. Backflow, certificates of compliance, and the documents that have to exist before you get paid. If the product cannot attach and find them against a job, somebody keeps a parallel folder — and a parallel folder is a leak.

• The variation screen On a real phone, outside. Plumbing jobs change scope more than most; if recording a variation is awkward it will not get recorded.
• Compliance documents against a job Certificates and backflow paperwork need to live with the job, not in a separate folder someone maintains by hand.
• Part-payments and deposits Common in plumbing. If they do not flow back from the accounting package, your job records misstate what is owed.
• After-hours call capture Burst pipes do not wait for business hours. Test what happens to a job created at 11pm — <a href="/services">the after-hours case is a real one</a>.
• Offline behaviour Under a house or in a plant room there is no signal. Field software that assumes connectivity fails exactly where you work.

Which we would point a plumber at

One to five vans, jobs rather than projects, and growth that looks like more work rather than more office staff: ServiceM8. The job-volume meter matches how you actually grow, and the free tier means the trial costs nothing but a week.

Multiple entities, staged work with progress claims, heavier inventory or scheduling: Simpro is built for that shape, and the implementation process that comes with it is part of why. Budget for the implementation as well as the licence.

Most of the plumbers we talk to are closer to the ServiceM8 shape than they assume, and buy heavier than they need. That is the most common expensive mistake in this category, and it is a version of the same error as building when you should have bought.

The thing that decides it either way

How cleanly it talks to your accounting package. Not "does it integrate" — every product says yes. Ask exactly what syncs, in which direction, and what happens when the sync fails.

Three specifics cover most of the re-typing we are later asked to remove: do customers sync both ways, do part-payments flow back, and do credit notes flow at all. Anyone who knows the product answers all three in a sentence.

That question matters more than any feature on either product, because a weak accounting sync is not a one-off cost — it is somebody re-typing every week for as long as you own the software. The accounting side of the same decision is its own page.

How to actually choose, in about three weeks

A week to write down how a job really moves through your business, then two weeks piloting one real job — a messy one, with a variation and a part-payment — through your preferred pairing.

Agree what would make it a no before you start. Deciding the criteria after two weeks of configuring is how people talk themselves into the wrong product, and it is the single most common failure in this category.

The full version of that process is on the buyer’s checklist, which includes the field test most shortlists skip.