TradesWork vs Simpro (2026): residential service vs projects and commercial

This compares our own product with Simpro, so read it with that in mind. They're aimed at different shops. Simpro is built for contractors who mix service with projects and commercial work; TradesWork is built for residential service shops. If a meaningful part of your revenue comes from multi-stage projects, takeoffs, kits or commercial maintenance across many sites, Simpro is very likely the better fit, and you should weigh this page accordingly. Simpro facts come from its pricing page and Help Guide, checked October 15, 2026.

A quick test before you read further: list last year's revenue by type of work. If projects, commercial contracts and tenders add up to more than a small slice, you're a Simpro-shaped business. If almost all of it is residential service calls, maintenance visits and replacements, read on.

Where Simpro is stronger

Projects and commercial work. Simpro's base plan lists project management, estimating and quoting, asset maintenance, asset tracking and testing, work order management, and multi-company compatibility¹. Its add-ons include Takeoffs for counting symbols and marking up plans for jobs, quotes and tenders¹. TradesWork doesn't do takeoffs, multi-stage projects or progress billing, and isn't designed to.

Kits and catalogue depth. Simpro's prebuilds are kits you quote from, and its catalogue carries pricing tiers, vendors, manufacturers and storage locations²³. For an electrical contractor quoting a panel change or a commercial fit-out, that structure saves real time. TradesWork's price book is built around flat-rate services, materials and equipment.

Inventory and purchasing. Simpro lists real-time inventory management and purchasing in its base plan¹. TradesWork has warehouse and truck stock with low-stock alerts, which fits a residential service shop, not a contractor buying for projects.

Breadth and track record. Simpro says it has more than 20 years in field service and more than 9,000 businesses on it, with support teams in the US and Canada, the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand¹. It integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, MYOB and more¹. TradesWork is new and supports QuickBooks Online.

Where TradesWork is stronger

Price you can see, and a trial. Simpro offers a tailored quote, an initial setup fee priced by complexity, and a guided demo rather than a self-serve trial¹. TradesWork publishes its prices, charges only for techs and sales staff (office staff are free), has no setup fee, and has a 14-day trial with no card. You can import your own customers and prices and try it on a Tuesday night.

Memberships for residential service. TradesWork memberships (Pro and up) bill dues automatically, retry failed cards with an update link, bring visits due onto a list and apply member pricing on estimates. Simpro's maintenance tools, including the Maintenance Planner add-on¹, are built around assets and preventive maintenance schedules, which suits commercial contracts better than a homeowner's comfort club.

Selling on the tech's phone. TradesWork builds good, better and best options from your price book on the tech's phone, with a monthly payment under each, and flags old units and repeat repairs as replacement opportunities.

A simpler app for residential techs. TradesWork Field walks each visit step by step, lets techs talk instead of type, and keeps saving estimates, notes, photos, forms and time with no signal, in English and Spanish.

HVAC records and phones. TradesWork keeps a refrigerant log tied to each tech's EPA 608 number, leak repair deadlines and warranty claim tracking, and includes missed-call text back and caller pop-ups, with an AI receptionist in early access on the AI plan. Simpro sells SMS as an add-on¹.

Cost: what you can and can't compare

Because Simpro doesn't publish prices, we can't put a fair number next to TradesWork here, and we won't quote third-party estimates as if they were Simpro's. What you can do is ask Simpro for a written quote that includes:

Then compare a 12-month total against TradesWork at your tech count: $79, $99 or $139 per tech or sales seat a month billed annually.

Day to day

Office. Simpro is a deep system with security groups, customer profiles, groups and tags, account managers and custom fields everywhere². That's power for a commercial contractor and setup work for a small residential office. TradesWork shows the caller's history, open jobs, balance and membership before you answer, and puts website, Angi, Thumbtack and referral leads in one inbox.

Techs. In May 2026 Simpro launched Lightning, an AI platform built around an assistant called Cooper that answers questions from your business data, with four launch agents: FieldReady trains techs on your own workflows, JobReady briefs them before dispatch, JobScribe captures job details by voice, and JobBrief writes a post-job summary for the customer⁴. That's a serious investment, and worth seeing in a demo. TradesWork techs get a step-by-step visit flow (arrive, diagnose, show options, do the work, wrap up), voice notes instead of typing, HVAC calculators and a running total of what they've earned today.

Owners. Simpro's reporting is deep and job-based; its own Help Guide notes that its reports are built for management decisions and won't match your accounting package's financial reports⁵. TradesWork reports show the jobs behind each number, and you can ask plain-English questions like "why was Tuesday slow?" against your own data.

Questions to ask in each evaluation

Ask Simpro: the full 12-month cost in writing, including setup and every add-on we'd use; how long implementation takes for a shop our size; how a residential maintenance plan with member pricing would work; which Lightning features are included and which cost extra.

Ask TradesWork: what happens to our project and commercial work if we switch; how our customers with several sites come across; what we lose without prebuilds, takeoffs and purchasing; what the AI receptionist does with after-hours calls.

Switching from Simpro to TradesWork

There's no dedicated Simpro importer in TradesWork. The general spreadsheet importer handles:

• Customers from Export › Customers (CSV or tab delimited), each with its address².
• Your catalogue from Export › Catalogue as a price book, with a name and price per row³.

What stays behind: extra sites beyond each customer's main address (add them by hand), prebuilds as kits, job, invoice and project history (keep Simpro's report exports), and stored cards (re-collected). If many of your customers have dozens of sites, that's a sign TradesWork isn't the right fit. The full plan is in migrating from Simpro to TradesWork, and every export is in how to export your data from Simpro.

Which should you choose?

Simpro if projects, takeoffs, kits, commercial maintenance or multiple companies are part of how you make money. It's built for that, and TradesWork isn't.

TradesWork if you're a residential HVAC, plumbing or electrical service shop of 3 to 50 techs, your revenue comes from service calls, memberships and replacements, and you'd rather see the price and try the software yourself than sit through a demo.