First, the honest version
I build custom systems for a living, so you would expect this article to end with "buy a custom system". It does not. For a large share of the trades businesses reading this, Jobber or Tradify is the right answer, and I will tell you exactly which ones. What follows is the comparison I would give a mate over a coffee, not a sales page.
The three options are not really competing products. They are answers to different questions. Jobber and Tradify answer "how do I run a standard trades workflow without drowning in admin?" A custom system answers "my workflow is not standard, and forcing it into someone else's template is costing me money". The decision is about which question is yours.
What Jobber and Tradify do brilliantly
Price. Both are priced per user per month, at the cost of a takeaway per person. There is no capital outlay, you can cancel, and the cost scales down as well as up. For a small firm, that risk profile is genuinely hard to argue with.
Speed to start. You can sign up on a Tuesday and send your first quote from the app on Wednesday. No scoping, no build, no waiting. If your admin is on fire right now, that speed matters more than any feature list.
Mobile apps. This is the big one for trades. Both have polished apps your team can use in a van with one bar of signal. Job details, photos, signatures, time on site. Years of development money have gone into those apps, and it shows. No custom build gets that polish on day one.
The standard workflow. Enquiry, quote, schedule, job sheet, invoice, payment, all connected to Xero or QuickBooks. Reminders chase the quote, invoices raise themselves from job data. If your business runs on that loop, these tools remove most of your admin, and you should buy one this week.
Differences between the two are smaller than either's marketing suggests. Tradify is UK and ANZ centred and tends to feel more natural for British trades firms. Jobber is North American in origin, strong on client communication and payments. Both do the core loop well. Trial both for a fortnight with real jobs and pick the one your least technical person prefers.
Where vertical SaaS breaks
Every SaaS product is a set of boxes drawn from what most customers need. The product works when your business fits the boxes. Three gaps come up again and again with the firms I talk to.
Your process does not fit their boxes. Suppose your jobs run survey, design, quote, deposit, materials on order, first fix, second fix, snagging, retention. A tool built around "quote, schedule, invoice" can be bent towards that with custom statuses and tags, but the bending never stops. Each workaround is a rule that lives in someone's head, and you are slowly rebuilding the spreadsheet problem inside nicer software. CIS deductions, retentions held for months, phased invoicing against milestones: the further you are from domestic call-out work, the wider the gap gets.
Cross-department workflows. SaaS job tools manage jobs. But your quote depends on the estimator, the estimator depends on supplier price lists, the office needs to know what the surveyor found, and your Gas Safe or EICR certificates need to land in the client's inbox and your compliance folder at the same time. When the workflow crosses departments, you end up with the job tool, plus a pricing spreadsheet, plus a shared drive, plus a WhatsApp group stitching them together. The tool did not fail. It was just never designed to be the whole system.
Quoting logic that lives in an estimator's head. This is the most common one. The software has a price list; your estimator has fifteen years of knowing that this street has solid walls, that this client will change their mind twice, that plasterboard is up 12% since the last price list. So quotes get built in Excel and pasted into the tool as a single line. At that point you are paying for quoting software and not using it, and the estimator is still the bottleneck for every quote that goes out.
What a custom system changes, and what it costs you
A custom system is built around your actual process. Your stages, your approval rules, your quoting logic encoded so that a decent quote can be produced by someone who is not the estimator, your certificates and invoices generated from the same data the site team enters. One login, one source of truth, and it does the weird thing your business does, because it was built to.
The honest downsides: it costs more than SaaS up front. It takes weeks, not a Tuesday. You depend on whoever built it, so ask any builder how you get your data out and what happens if you part ways. And a custom build cannot match the day-one mobile polish of an app with years of development behind it; it will fit your workflow better, but arrive rougher.
How to actually decide
Work through these in order and stop at the first answer that fits.
- Are you still under about ten live jobs at a time, with simple in-and-out work? Stay on your spreadsheet with better discipline. Software of any kind is premature.
- Does your workflow broadly match quote, schedule, do, invoice? Buy Jobber or Tradify. Trial both, pick one, move on with your life. This is most firms doing domestic and light commercial work.
- Are you running a SaaS tool plus three spreadsheets plus a WhatsApp group to cover what it cannot do? Count the hours that stitching costs each week. If it is a few hours, live with it. If someone spends half their week re-keying between systems, the template no longer fits you.
- Is your quoting logic genuinely yours, and is it a bottleneck? This is the strongest signal for custom. When quotes take hours of one specific person's time, the cost is not software, it is every job you did not bid because the estimator was busy.
If you land on 3 or 4, do not sign anything on the strength of a slide deck. Have the system demonstrated against your real workflow before you commit money to it. Any builder confident in their work will show you the thing running first; that is exactly how I work, and it is the fairest test of whether custom is worth it for you.
And if you landed on 2: genuinely, buy the SaaS. It will be one of the better decisions you make this year.