Everyone has a calendar. Ask what the app does with no reception.
Field-service scheduling software is decided by three things: how a job is dispatched to a phone, how the office knows where the van is, and what the app does in a basement or a paddock with no reception. Six products publish enough to compare on the first two. Almost none publish the third. We have built against two.
Read this first: two of six implemented, and the offline question is the one nobody answers
We have built against ServiceM8 and Simpro in production. AroFlo, Tradify, Fergus and Jobber are described from their own pages, read on 3 September 2026. That split is marked on every line below.
The question this page could not answer from published material is the one that matters most to a tech in a plant room: what happens to the job card, the photos and the signature when there is no signal. We read the public feature and pricing pages of all six and none states its offline behaviour plainly enough to quote. Mobile services reach 99 per cent of the Australian population (Department of Infrastructure, read 3 September 2026) — and a population figure says nothing about a switchboard cupboard in Toowong or a shed outside Dalby.
So the honest advice is procedural: on the trial, put the phone in flight mode, complete a job, take a photo, get a signature, and turn the radio back on. Watch what syncs. That ten minutes is worth more than every feature grid on this page including ours.
Dispatch: dated jobs, undated jobs and who decides
A scheduling tool is really two tools. One handles a job booked for Tuesday at 10am. The other handles the forty jobs that need doing this week, in an order somebody has to choose at 6:45am. Most products are good at the first and quietly weak at the second.
ServiceM8’s free Job Allocations add-on exists exactly for the second: "schedule jobs without a specific booking date/time" by dropping them onto staff as urgent, morning, afternoon or anytime, alongside Route My Day for Google Maps routing and Track My Arrival so the customer sees the van coming by SMS (ServiceM8 add-ons). Jobber publishes route optimisation that will "automatically generate faster daily routes and alert your crews" (Jobber). Simpro and AroFlo are built for a dispatcher running a board across teams, which is a different job and a different price.
Decide which of the two problems you have before you look at a demo. A four-van maintenance plumber has the second problem. A commercial fire contractor with a scheduler has the first.
GPS: a phone, a tracker or a partner’s hardware
Three different things are sold under one word. App-based location captures where the phone was when something happened. A live map needs the phone reporting constantly, which costs battery. Vehicle tracking needs hardware in the van.
Jobber is explicit that its GPS waypoints record location at clock in, clock out, note, attachment and visit completion, and that a live fleet map requires FleetSharp devices installed in vehicles (Jobber GPS tracking). AroFlo sells its own AroPoint trackers — battery units with a three-to-seven-year life for assets and hardwired units for vehicles — bought up front with a small monthly fee, alongside phone-based tracking, on a live map inside AroFlo (AroFlo GPS). ServiceM8 publishes Track My Arrival for the customer’s benefit rather than a fleet map for yours.
Ask which of the three you are buying. "GPS tracking" on a pricing page can mean any of them, and the one you want for a stolen van is not the one you want for a timesheet dispute.
Six products, on what they publish
Australian pricing as published on 3 September 2026, GST as stated. Offline behaviour is marked "not published" wherever the vendor does not state it plainly on the pages we read.
- #1ServiceM8 — dispatch for small teams, unlimited users, priced on jobsFree for 30 jobs and one user; $29, $79, $149 and $349 a month including GST for 50, 150, 500 and 1,500-plus jobs; unlimited users on paid plans; SMS 10 cents (pricing). Job Allocations, Route My Day and Track My Arrival are free add-ons. Full public API, 180 requests a minute, webhooks on nine record types. Offline: not stated on the public pages read. Implemented — integration page. The constraint: no fleet map, and no dispatcher-grade board.
- #2Simpro — dispatcher-scale scheduling, priced on requestNo prices published on the Australian pricing page (Simpro pricing). Full public API with around 110 webhook events and signed payloads. Offline: not stated on the public pages read. Implemented — integration page. The constraint: built for a scheduler running teams, and the price is a sales call.
- #3AroFlo — Melbourne-built with its own GPS hardware, priced on requestNo prices published; 1300 794 818 (AroFlo pricing). Phone-based tracking plus AroPoint battery and hardwired trackers on a live map; devices bought up front with a monthly fee (GPS). Melbourne’s east. Offline: not stated on the pages read. Documented, not implemented. The constraint: the only product here selling you hardware as well as software.
- #4Tradify — AUD per user, small-team scheduling, no public API$48, $52 and $62 AUD per user per month excluding GST; 14-day trial (Tradify pricing). Offline and GPS: not stated on the pages read. Documented, not implemented. The constraint: no public API, so the schedule cannot feed anything else — ServiceM8 vs Tradify has the detail.
- #5Fergus — AUD per business with cheap timesheet seatsFrom $53 and $77 a month AUD, timesheet users from $26, contractor users $4 a day; 14-day trial without a card (Fergus pricing). GPS, offline and API: not on the pricing page. Documented, not implemented. The constraint: the least published about the field app of any product here.
- #6Jobber — the most explicit about GPS and routing, in US dollarsUS$49 Core for one user, US$139 Connect, US$199 Grow, US$499 Plus, with five-, ten- and fifteen-user bands; "All prices in USD"; Zapier on all plans, API on Plus (Jobber pricing). GPS waypoints on the app, live fleet map via FleetSharp hardware, route optimisation (GPS). Offline: not stated on the pages read. Documented, not implemented. The constraint: currency, and an API on the US$499 tier only.
The join to the ledger and the payroll
Scheduling data has two destinations: the invoice and the timesheet. Every product here names Xero. The question is what arrives — a summary line, or the job with its labour, materials and tracking category — and whether it arrives once or has to be re-keyed when the job changes on site.
That is the layer we build in. Job scheduling describes it for a business keeping its product and fixing the joins, which is most businesses. If your scheduling tool has no API — Tradify publishes none, Jobber’s is on the top tier — then the join is a spreadsheet or a Zapier step, and the choice between those is a cost question, not a technical one.
What this page does not do
It does not rank, because two of six is not enough to rank and because the dispatcher-scale products and the four-van products are not competing for the same business.
It does not answer the offline question, because the vendors do not answer it in public. That is the most useful sentence on this page, and the flight-mode test above is the fix.
And it does not tell you a schedule will fix a dispatch problem that is really a person problem — a coordinator who will not let go of the whiteboard. Choosing job management software covers the questions to ask in the room, and a Leak Check is where we work out which problem you have.
The questions people actually ask.
01Surely all of them work offline by now?
Probably most do, in some form. What we could not find was a plain public statement from any of the six of what works offline and how the sync resolves a conflict when two people edit the same job. That is not the same as saying they do not; it is saying you should test it rather than trust a feature icon, and the flight-mode test takes ten minutes.
02We have twelve vans. Are we a ServiceM8 business or a Simpro business?
Usually the answer is in whether someone sits in the office dispatching all day. If yes, you have the scheduler-and-board problem and Simpro or AroFlo are built for it. If the techs largely run their own day from a list, ServiceM8 with Job Allocations does the job at a fraction of the price. Twelve vans sits right on the line, which is exactly where twenty minutes with your actual numbers beats a page.
Stop bending.
Start shipping.
Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.