Field service management software is a crowded shelf. ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, Workiz, ServiceM8, Successware, and a dozen more all promise the same Tuesday: calls become jobs, jobs become invoices, invoices become money in the account. The products are genuinely different. The marketing is genuinely identical. This guide is a method for telling them apart.
Full disclosure before anything else: we build Thorbis, which is field service software, so we have an interest here. The method below is written to work against us too. Run our own demo through the same seven questions and hold us to the same answers.
Start from the day, not the feature list
Every vendor publishes a feature list, and every feature list reads the same because the category has converged: scheduling, dispatch, estimates, invoicing, payments, some reporting. Comparing lists tells you almost nothing. What separates the products is how they handle one ordinary day in your shop.
So before any demo, write your Tuesday down. Not the ideal Tuesday: the real one, with the 6:40 a.m. leak call, the tech who is out sick, the emergency that jumps the queue at 8:15, the customer who calls about a job from January, and the invoice that has to get collected in the driveway before the truck leaves. That one page is your evaluation script. A product that handles your written Tuesday cleanly is a candidate. A product that needs your Tuesday to change shape first is a project.
The seven questions that expose a bad fit
Ask these in every demo, in this order. They are ordinary questions, which is the point: the answers are where the products stop being identical.
- Who types a job in twice? Follow one call from the phone ringing to the money landing. Count how many times a human re-enters the same information. The honest answer for good software is zero after intake. Every re-type is a place your data drifts.
- What does the technician see with wet gloves on? Ask for the technician's phone screen, not the office screen. If the next stop, the arrival button, and collect are not usable with a thumb, your crew will fall back to texting within a month, and the record dies there.
- What happens when the schedule changes at 8:15? Reassigning a job should be a drag, not a phone tree. Watch how long the reroute takes and how the tech finds out.
- Can the owner read the week in five minutes? What closed, what is open, who ran what. If the answer involves building a report, the answer is no.
- What does the bill look like at your size, and at your size plus three hires? Get the number in writing, per month, all modules you would actually run. Per-technician pricing means every hire raises your software bill. Do the math for the crew you want, not the crew you have. Our switching math calculator does this arithmetic for any vendor's numbers, including ours.
- How does your history get out? You are not marrying the product; you are hiring it. Ask for the export: what format, what tables, and whether it costs anything. A vendor who makes leaving hard is telling you what staying will be like.
- What is not built yet? Every product has a roadmap wearing a feature costume. Ask which of the things you saw today are generally available, which are beta, and which are coming. An honest vendor answers in stage words. We publish ours on the roadmap, and a limitation you can see beats a surprise after cutover.
The demo is not for learning the product. The demo is for watching your own Tuesday run on it.
Read the pricing page like a contract
The pricing traps in this category are well worn, and none of them are illegal. They are just designed to be discovered after you have signed.
- Per-seat pricing. The bill scales with headcount, so growth gets taxed. Fine at two techs, painful at ten. Model the crew you intend to have.
- The quote-only price. A pricing page with no prices means the price is what the salesperson thinks you can pay. It also means the renewal is, too.
- Module math. The advertised number covers a core, and dispatch, payments, reporting, or the customer portal turn out to be add-ons. Ask for the all-in monthly for the workflow you demoed.
- The implementation project. Setup fees and mandatory onboarding packages measured in thousands of dollars mean the switching cost is designed to hold you, not help you.
- The annual lock. A product confident in its Tuesday does not need a twelve-month contract to keep you.
For calibration: we publish one price, $99 a month per company with unlimited people, with metered usage billed on top and posted on the same page. We think that is the right shape for this category, and we wrote down why. But the method matters more than our answer: whatever you buy, get the all-in number for your real crew in writing.
Compare the short list in the open
Once the seven questions cut the field to two or three, compare them on paper where the claims have to sit next to each other. We maintain public comparisons of Thorbis against ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, and the rest of the field, with the honest three-state answers: has it, does not, ours is staged. Use them as a template even if you never consider us: any vendor's claims can be laid out in the same grid, and the grid is harder to shade than a demo.
Trade fit belongs in this pass too. A product tuned for plumbing or HVAC carries different defaults than a general one; the industry pages show what tuned-for-your-trade should mean in practice, beyond a landing page with your trade's name on it.
Run the migration test before you sign
The last filter is the only one that involves your data. Before the contract, ask the vendor to run a dry run of your migration: your customer list, your open jobs, your price book, loaded into a staging account you can inspect. Then check three things: the counts match your export, a job you remember looks right, and someone other than the salesperson can tell you what did not come over and why.
A vendor who will not run a dry run before signing is asking you to take the hardest part of switching on faith. It is also the part where shops get stuck for months. The switching guide describes how we run it (dual-run until you pick the morning, your current system live the whole time), and the shape is worth demanding from anyone: what comes over, what does not, stated before cutover, never discovered after.
Frequently asked questions
What does field service management software actually do?
It runs the operating loop of a service company: a call becomes a customer and a job, the job gets dispatched to a technician, the technician documents the work and collects payment, and the record feeds the books and the next visit. Everything else (marketing tools, AI, reporting) hangs off that loop. If the loop is weak, nothing bolted to it matters.
How much should it cost?
The honest answer is that the category runs from tens of dollars a month to four figures, and the sticker rarely equals the bill. Compute two numbers for any candidate: the all-in monthly for your real crew with every module you would run, and the same number after your next three hires. Our posted price is $99 a company plus usage; use whatever you are quoted, but insist it be as checkable as that.
Do I need it at two trucks?
Maybe not yet. A whiteboard and a group text genuinely work at small scale, and we wrote about exactly when they stop working. The honest trigger is not truck count; it is the first week the dispatcher's memory becomes the single point of failure.
How long does switching take?
For a shop with clean data and a vendor who runs a real dry run, days to a couple of weeks of dual-running, not a quarter. The one-week migration plan in our whiteboard piece is vendor-neutral and works as a template. Multi-month implementations are a pricing model, not a law of nature.
The short version
Write your Tuesday down. Ask the seven questions. Get the all-in price for the crew you want, in writing. Lay the finalists side by side in the open, and make the vendor run your data before you sign. That method survives every logo in the category, including ours.
If you want to run it against us: the product is on this site, the price is posted, the comparisons are public, and the waitlist is where the door opens. A person reads every entry.