One charges by the job, one by the head. Work out which side of the crossover you sit on.

The two products price on opposite axes

This is the whole comparison and almost nobody frames it this way. ServiceM8’s published Australian plans are $29, $79, $149 and $349 a month including GST, with unlimited users on all of them and a ceiling of 50, 150, 500 or 1,500-plus jobs a month. Tradify’s published Australian plans are $48, $52 and $62 per user per month excluding GST, with no published job ceiling.

So one meters what you do and the other meters who does it. A business with lots of small jobs and few people is expensive on ServiceM8 and cheap on Tradify. A business with a big crew and fewer, larger jobs is the reverse — and it is a large reverse, not a marginal one.

Every other difference between these two products is smaller than this. Work out which side of the crossover you are on first, then argue about features.

The arithmetic, with published prices

Three shapes, using each vendor’s own published Australian pricing. Tradify’s figures are converted to GST-inclusive so the two are comparable, since ServiceM8 publishes inclusive and Tradify publishes exclusive. Check them yourself — both pricing pages are linked below the table.

ServiceM8 publishes an API. Tradify does not.

ServiceM8 runs a public developer site anyone can read without logging in: authentication, 180 requests a minute and 20,000 a day, cursor pagination, webhooks on nine record types, documented filtering limits and documented failure codes. It is not the most generous API in our register but it is entirely legible before you commit to anything.

Tradify publishes no API documentation at all. No developer portal, no reference, no OpenAPI specification, and no partner or app marketplace on any official Tradify domain. A full-text search of its own help centre for "API" returns articles that are all about somebody else’s API — Xero’s, MYOB’s, QuickBooks’ — none of them documenting one of Tradify’s own.

What Tradify has instead is a fixed set of first-party accounting integrations, and they are real and well documented. That is a legitimate product decision, and for a business that only ever needs Tradify plus their accounting package, the absence of an API is genuinely irrelevant. It becomes relevant the moment you want a third thing in the picture.

Where Tradify probably wins, and we would say so

High job volume with a small crew, as the arithmetic above shows — two people running eight hundred jobs a month pay about a third of what they would on ServiceM8. That is not a rounding difference and it would be dishonest to bury it.

Tradify also publishes a clearer feature ladder than most: its Plus tier names AI bill capture, service reminders, purchase orders, bulk invoicing and reporting, and its Pro tier names compliance certificates, health and safety forms and subcontractor scheduling. Whether those work well we cannot tell you, because we have not used them.

And it publishes real Australian phone support hours — 24 hours a day, five days a week, with weekend calls returned Monday — from a Chatswood address. ServiceM8 explicitly does not do phone support, routing everything to email, chat and its partner network. For some business owners that single fact decides it, and it is a reasonable way to decide.

Where ServiceM8 probably wins

Unlimited users on every paid plan is the headline, and it changes what a growing team costs. Adding a fifth tradie to ServiceM8 costs nothing until you cross a job ceiling; adding a fifth to Tradify costs another $52 a month excluding GST, every month, forever.

The published API is the other one, and it compounds. Anything you want ServiceM8 to do that it does not do out of the box is buildable, by us or by anyone. On Tradify the answer is whatever Tradify ships.

ServiceM8 is also an Australian company with a published ABN, pricing quoted in AUD including GST rather than excluding it, and a free plan at thirty jobs a month for anyone who wants to try the whole thing on real work before paying. None of that is decisive on its own; together it is a reasonable amount of goodwill.

How to decide in ten minutes

Count two numbers: jobs a month, and people who need a login. Divide the first by the second. A high ratio — many small jobs, few people — points at Tradify. A low ratio — a crew, fewer and larger jobs — points at ServiceM8, often by a wide margin.

Then ask one question: is anything else ever going to need to read from or write to this system? A quoting tool, a customer portal, a reporting dashboard, an automation, a system you have not thought of yet. If yes, that weighs toward ServiceM8 regardless of the arithmetic, because the alternative is not "harder", it is "not possible without the vendor building it".

Both publish trials — fourteen days on ServiceM8, and ServiceM8 has a permanently free plan at thirty jobs a month. Run a fortnight of real work through the one the numbers point at rather than reading any more comparisons, including this one. Choosing job management software covers what to look for while you do, and the ServiceM8 integration page has the full published detail if the API side is what you are weighing.

What we have not assessed

We have never implemented against Tradify. Everything on this page about it comes from Tradify’s own pricing page, help centre and contact page, fetched on one day and linked. We cannot tell you how its accounting sync behaves in practice, how its mobile app performs on a bad connection, or what its data export looks like if you leave.

We have implemented against ServiceM8, which means we know its API and not necessarily its product. Whether the scheduling feels right to a plumber at 7am is not something an integration gives you an opinion on.

Neither have we compared either against AroFlo, Fergus, Ascora or the vertical products for specific trades. Those are real options and their absence here means we have not assessed them, not that they lost. The capability register lists everything we have built against, and ServiceM8 versus Simpro covers the other comparison in this category.