The short version: these two are built for different jobs, and that gap is the useful part of the comparison. Tradify is a job tool with a public price, $48 to $62 a user a month, that a crew can adopt in a week. SimPRO is a project platform sold as a scoped implementation with no published price at all. If you're torn between them, work out which side of the job-versus-project line your business sits on, because that decides it long before any feature grid does.
Two different transactions
Buying Tradify is a subscription decision: pick a tier off the public pricing page, run the 14-day trial, and the worst case is a cancelled card. Buying SimPRO is a procurement decision: a scoped quote, an implementation project, training, and a go-live. The market read on SimPRO is consistent, it's built for the heavy end, staged commercial work, maintenance contracts across sites, stock and purchasing that need discipline, and its pricing works the way that market expects: quoted, not published.
How each one is sold tells you who it's for. A product that needs an implementation team is assuming your workflows are worth implementing; a tick-a-tier page has already decided they fit.
The line that decides it
| Your work looks like | The signal | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs | Work arrives, gets quoted, done, invoiced, mostly inside a fortnight | Tradify, or the other published-price tools |
| Projects | Stages, claims, retentions, subbies, materials bought against a budget | SimPRO territory, or Fergus's project features below it |
| Contracts | Recurring maintenance across many sites with SLAs and asset histories | SimPRO territory, ServiceM8 below it for lighter service work |
| Stock | A storeroom your margin depends on, purchasing against jobs | The strongest single SimPRO signal on this list |
Crew size correlates with those rows, but it's the rows that matter. A twelve-person crew doing fast residential service work is still a jobs business, and at that head count crew-band pricing is usually the maths worth checking before anything scoped. A six-person commercial outfit running staged installs with retentions is a projects business at six people.
The cost gap
Tradify's ceiling is public arithmetic: nine users on Plus is $558 a month, ex GST, with no implementation bill. SimPRO's floor is not public, quotes bundle subscription, implementation and training, and NZ reviewers report per-user figures several times Tradify's rate. The gap is real, and it buys project controls Tradify doesn't have. The mistake is paying project-platform money for a jobs business, or forcing a projects business through a jobs tool and burning the difference in spreadsheets on the side.
The middle path people skip: if the only project-shaped thing about your business is one workflow, progress claims, or a stock sheet, a small custom bridge on the tool you already run is usually cheaper than either migration. That's what a custom build costs against a subscription, and it's the comparison no vendor will show you.
How to decide in a week
Classify your last twenty invoices against the table above; the split tells you which business you're in. If it says jobs, run Tradify's trial and keep the week moving. If it says projects, get the SimPRO quote, then take the questions that keep a quote honest into the demo, and benchmark the whole exercise against the published-price field on the price index so the quote lands in context rather than in a vacuum.
Or borrow a neutral eye
I don't sell either product, which makes this an easy call to give you. Book a free 30-minute call, walk me through your last month of work, and you'll leave knowing which side of the line you're on and what it should cost you.
Questions I get asked about this one
Should I pick SimPRO or Tradify?
Pick by the shape of your work. If jobs arrive, get done and get invoiced, Tradify's published tiers at NZ$48 to $62 a user a month cover you with no implementation project. If your work behaves like projects, staged commercial jobs, maintenance contracts, stock to manage, that's the territory SimPRO is scoped and quoted for.
Is SimPRO more expensive than Tradify?
Almost certainly, and by design. Tradify's price is public: $48 to $62 a user a month ex GST. SimPRO publishes no pricing; quotes are scoped per business and typically bundle implementation and training, and NZ reviewers report per-user figures several times Tradify's. You are buying a different class of product, not a dearer version of the same one.
Can a crew outgrow Tradify without needing SimPRO?
Yes, and plenty do. If the pinch is price at head count, crew-band tools change the maths. If the pinch is one specific workflow the tool almost does, a small custom bridge on top of what you own is often cheaper than a platform migration in either direction.