Bookso vs Tradify: which fits your trade business?

If you're running a growing team and the pain is paperwork, not repeat bookings, Tradify is the stronger tool. It handles quoting, invoicing, payments, job scheduling across multiple engineers, timesheets and certificates - the operational spine of a bigger trade business. Bookso doesn't do any of that and isn't trying to.

Trades who benefit most from Tradify usually have 2+ people in the field, send a lot of quotes, invoice regularly and want one place to manage the whole workflow rather than stitching separate tools together. If that's you, Tradify (or a similar full suite) is the right call - it will pay for itself in admin time saved.

Bookso is built around one job that full suites don't do especially well: closing the rebooking loop. When your customer's next service is due, Bookso emails them from your business name with a one-tap booking link. They pick a slot, the job lands in your diary as a confirmed booking, and you get notified. If they ignore the first email a chaser goes out automatically, and on paid plans one SMS follow-up too.

Because Bookso does only that, it's cheap and fast to set up. £14.99/month on Pro for unlimited customers, no per-user fees, no contract, and you can be running in about 5 minutes. There's a free tier for your first 5 customers so you can try it on a handful of regulars before moving your book across.

It's also designed to complement full job-management suites rather than replace them - you can keep Tradify for the paperwork and add Bookso alongside it for the rebooking. Most reminder-only tools stop at 'reminder sent'; Bookso goes one step further and gets the booking on the diary.

Yes, and it's a common setup. Trades who care about both paperwork and rebooking often use Tradify (or Commusoft, Joblogic, Gas Engineer Software) for quoting, invoicing, scheduling and certificates, and add Bookso alongside for the customer-side rebooking loop. The two tools don't step on each other - Tradify runs the job, Bookso brings the next one in.

There's no integration between them today - you'd add your customer to Bookso when you complete a job, set the service interval, and let Bookso handle the reminder and booking. For a lot of gas engineers, plumbers and electricians that combination gives them the full workflow without paying for two full suites.

The honest headline is that Bookso and Tradify aren't really competing for the same slot on your phone. Tradify is a job-management platform - if you've ever felt that quoting, invoicing, scheduling and timesheets are eating your evenings, that's the pain it solves. Bookso is a rebooking platform - if you've ever finished a job, said 'see you next year', and then watched that customer google someone else 12 months later, that's the pain Bookso solves.

Because of that, the right question isn't 'which is better' - it's 'which pain is bigger for you right now?' A one-person gas engineer with a solid book of repeat customers and a simple invoicing setup usually gets more value from Bookso first. A three-engineer firm sending 20 quotes a week and trying to keep timesheets straight usually gets more value from Tradify first. Neither is wrong; they're doing different things.

The pricing shape reflects that. Full job-management suites are typically priced per user because they scale with the size of your team. Bookso is priced per business because it scales with your customer list, not your headcount - free for the first 5 customers, £14.99/month on Pro for unlimited customers, £44.99/month on Business if you need a small team. That's why plenty of trades who already pay for a full suite still add Bookso: it's a small fixed cost that plugs the one gap the suite doesn't cover.