The short version: pick by what your quotes are made of. Materials-heavy trades get the most from Fergus and its supplier price books. Fast-turnaround service trades lean ServiceM8, which chases quotes that go quiet. As at August 2026, Tradify quotes completely at its $48-a-user Lite tier, and NextMinute includes quoting in every crew band. None of the four prices the job for you, and the tool that claims it can is the one to walk away from.
If your trade is joinery, the quoting tools below handle the document but not the take-off; kitchen joinery quoting: where the hours actually go covers the part they miss.
Judge the quoting, not the brochure
Every job tool says it does quoting, and at the checkbox level they all do. The differences that matter show up on the third quote of a busy Tuesday: how much of the document assembles itself, whether the material prices are this month's or last year's, and what happens to a quote after it goes quiet. Those three questions split the four NZ majors cleanly.
| Tool | Quoting strength | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Fergus | Supplier price books pull live material pricing into quote lines | The materials-trade pick; deeper pricing controls sit in Professional |
| ServiceM8 | Automated follow-ups chase quotes that have gone quiet | Job-volume billing keeps entry cheap for service crews |
| Tradify | Full quoting at the $48 Lite tier; quote options and templates in Pro | Quote reminders by text; simple per-user maths |
| NextMinute | Quoting included in every crew band, no tier shopping | Priced by crew size, built for established crews |
Prices behind that table live in the price index, with the tier detail in the dedicated pricing posts for Tradify, Fergus and NextMinute.
The feature most crews own and never switch on
Follow-up automation is the quiet job-winner. ServiceM8's Automation add-on and Tradify's quote reminders will both send a text or email at set points after a quote goes out, and stop the moment it's accepted or declined. Neither touches your price. Both save you remembering which of the eleven quotes in your inbox needs a nudge today, and the nudge is often the difference between winning the job and hearing nothing.
Most crews have never turned these on. If you already pay for one of these tools, check your settings before you shop for anything new; the upgrade you're looking for may be a toggle you already own.
What no quoting tool will do
Price the job. The number depends on what the site looked like, what access will cost you in hours, whether this client pays on time, and what the outfit down the road is charging this month. That knowledge lives in your head, not in a template, and the full argument for why the pricing decision should stay yours while everything around it automates is in nobody automates the quote. The one-line version: automate the assembly, the lookups and the chasing, and leave the number alone.
When none of the four is the fix
Two situations. First, if your quote bottleneck is really an invoicing bottleneck, quotes get out fine but the paperwork after acceptance eats your evenings, start with what automating invoicing actually costs, because that problem has a free level and the tools above can't fix a workflow issue with a subscription.
Second, if your quoting genuinely doesn't fit the templates, multi-stage commercial work, quotes assembled from three systems, or a pricing structure the tools can't hold, a small custom bridge around your own process will beat bending the process to fit a product. That's a scoping conversation and it starts with a free 30-minute call, where the answer is usually one of the four subscriptions above.
Pick in one sitting
Shortlist by your trade shape from the table, run your crew size through the stack cost checker, then take the 14-day trial of one tool and put a real week of quotes through it. Judge it on your own Tuesday. The wider job-management comparison beyond quoting is covered in the full four-way roundup.