Short answer. For a sole trader or a two-van business, Powered Now (£28 per user per month) and Tradify (£34 to £44 per user per month) are the two realistic choices, and both let you trial for 14 days without a card. Fergus is a credible third option but prices in US dollars. Commusoft is built for larger contractors and does not publish prices. Payaca has moved decisively upmarket and now starts at £299 a month.
All prices below were read from each vendor's own published pricing page in September 2026 and exclude VAT unless stated. Software pricing moves, so check before you commit. We have no affiliate relationship with any of these products and receive nothing if you sign up.
The five, compared on published price
| Product | Entry price | Top published tier | Trial | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Powered Now | £28 per user, per month | £40 (Premium) | 14 days, no card | Sole traders and small teams |
| Tradify | £34 per user, per month | £44 (Plus) | 14 days, no card | Sole traders up to small teams |
| Fergus | From $53 per month | From $75 (Professional) | 14 days, no card | Small to mid-size teams |
| Payaca | £299 per month | £3,199 (Scale Max) | Demo only, no trial | Established installers |
| Commusoft | On request | On request | Demo only | Multi-engineer contractors |
Powered Now: the cheapest credible option
Three published plans, Business at £28, Professional at £32 and Premium at £40 per user per month excluding VAT, with two months free if you pay annually. The Professional tier is the one most electricians end up on, because forms and certificates sit there rather than on the entry plan, along with VAT submission and Xero.
What you get for the money is the whole administrative loop: quotes, invoices, expenses, supplier invoices, job sheets, project management and Making Tax Digital compliance. Scheduling, a customer portal and automatic chasing of unpaid invoices only appear on Premium, which is worth knowing before you compare the entry price against a competitor's mid tier.
Tradify: the one most electricians have heard of
Lite at £34, Pro at £37 and Plus at £44 per user per month. As with Powered Now, the entry plan is thinner than it first appears: compliance certificates, job photos, recurring jobs, enquiry forms and appointment reminders all live on Pro. If you are pricing Tradify against anything else, price the Pro tier, because that is the one that does what an electrician actually needs.
Two details worth flagging. Tradify sells an "Instant Website" add-on at £10 a month, which is a template with your details in it rather than a site built around your services and your area. And text message quotes, invoices and reminders are charged per message at 10p, which is trivial at low volume and less trivial when you are sending several hundred a month.
Fergus: capable, but priced in dollars
Fergus publishes from $53 a month for Basic and from $75 for Professional, with a 14-day trial and no lock-in. The feature split is sensible: GPS tracking, checklists, job phases, purchase orders and the health and safety tooling sit on Professional. For a UK electrician the practical objection is not the product, it is that a dollar-denominated subscription means your monthly bill moves with the exchange rate.
Payaca: no longer a small-business product
This is the finding most likely to surprise anyone who looked at Payaca a few years ago. Its published pricing now runs from an Accelerator plan at £299 a month, which is restricted to businesses with eight or fewer employees incorporated in the last two years, through Growth at £1,199 a month and Scale at £1,999, both with a one-off onboarding fee of £1,500. There is no free trial, only a demo.
That is not a criticism of the software, which is aimed squarely at installers running sales teams and finance options. It is a warning that the product has repositioned, and that any comparison article quoting a low monthly figure for Payaca is out of date.
Commusoft: for when you have engineers, not mates
Commusoft does not publish prices. What it does publish is the shape of the commitment: all contracts run for twelve months, billed monthly by direct debit, excluding VAT, with users counted as office staff, managers and engineers alike. Volume discounts start above a hundred users, which tells you plainly who the product is for.
For a contractor running multiple engineers with planned maintenance, parts, stock and subcontractors, it is genuinely strong. For a sole trader it is the wrong tool and the wrong contract length.
When it stops being optional
A notebook and a phone works, and it works for longer than software companies would like you to believe. What it does not survive is a second person. The moment somebody else is booking work, two people are writing in two places and the diary stops being true.
Three triggers, any one of which is the real signal:
- You lost a quote. Not lost the job, lost the quote. You know you priced it and you cannot find what you said.
- Somebody else is booking work. A partner, an apprentice, an office day a week. Two diaries is one diary too many.
- You are spending more than three hours a week on paperwork. At a £45 day rate that is over £2,000 a year of your own time, which buys any of these products several times over.
If none of those is true, the honest answer is that you do not need this yet and the money is better spent elsewhere. Nothing on this page will make you busier.
Certificates: the detail that decides it for most electricians
This is where the comparison articles are least useful, because they list "forms and certificates" as a tick and leave it there. For an electrician it matters which plan the certificates sit on, because it is rarely the cheapest one.
| Product | Certificates on which plan | What that costs |
|---|---|---|
| Powered Now | Professional, not the entry Business plan | £32 per user, per month |
| Tradify | Pro, not Lite | £37 per user, per month |
| Fergus | Forms on Basic, fuller tooling on Professional | From $53 to $75 per month |
| Commusoft | Included, but the whole product is priced on request | On request, 12-month contract |
| Joblogic | Included, aimed at EICR and NICEIC workflows | On request |
So the real comparison for a certificate-issuing electrician is £32 against £37 per user per month, not the £28 and £34 headline figures. Compare the tier you would actually be on.
The alternative is to keep certificates in a dedicated app and use job management purely for quoting, scheduling and invoicing. Plenty of electricians do this, and it is usually cheaper and faster on site. Our EICR software guide covers that side.
What switching actually costs you
Nobody prices this into the decision and it is the part that hurts. Moving between products costs you time rather than money, and the size of it depends almost entirely on one thing: what the product you are leaving will let you export.
- Customers and contacts. Usually exportable as a spreadsheet. The easy part.
- Job history and notes. Frequently not exportable in any usable shape. This is what you lose.
- Certificates already issued. Ask specifically whether you keep access after you stop paying. You remain responsible for a report you signed for years afterwards.
- Photographs. Often buried inside jobs with no bulk download.
Ask about export before you subscribe, not when you are leaving. A product confident about its export will answer in a sentence. One that will not answer has told you what you needed to know.
Free trials, and how to use two weeks properly
Powered Now, Tradify and Fergus all offer fourteen days without a card. Payaca and Commusoft offer a demo instead, which tells you something about who they are built for.
Two weeks is enough if you use it on real work rather than on exploring menus. Take three actual jobs through end to end: quote, accept, schedule, attend, invoice, get paid. Do it on site on a phone, not at the kitchen table on a laptop, because on site with one bar of signal is where these products differ most.
Trial two products, not five. Five trials running at once means you use none of them properly and pick on the interface rather than on the work.
How to choose in ten minutes
- Count the people who need a login. Every one of these products charges per user, and engineers count.
- Decide whether certificates live here or elsewhere. If you already use a dedicated certification app, you do not need to pay for forms twice.
- Check the tier, not the headline price. On both Tradify and Powered Now the useful features sit one plan above the advertised entry point.
- Trial two, not five. Fourteen days is enough to know, and running five trials at once means you will not properly use any of them.
- Ask about export before you sign. Getting your data out later is the cost nobody prices in.
The part that is usually missed
Whichever you pick, the software only pays for itself if enquiries arrive in it. Most electricians install a job management system and then carry on receiving work through an email address, retyping every enquiry by hand. That is the gap: a website whose quote form drops a lead straight into your system, as a job, with the customer details already populated.
It is the one thing a generalist web designer will not do, because it means understanding your trade's software rather than just your brand colours. If you want that part handled, it is what our software integration service exists for.