The honest bit first
Fergus is the best-designed job board in this market. Seven lifecycle columns, each carrying a job count and a summed sell price, so you read where your money is stuck rather than how many cards you have. Jobs move themselves as work happens instead of waiting for someone to remember a dropdown. Fully paid jobs drop off, so it self-cleans. That is good software and we've said so in our own notes.
Two things to know before you renew.
The money model lives in Xero, not in Fergus. Fergus leans on Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks as the source of truth for money by design. Several reports, plus the Business Overview and Business Performance dashboards, need a live Xero connection to work at all. A job-management product whose analytics stop working if you disconnect your accounting subscription has outsourced its own reporting.
You can't find out what it costs. Fergus publishes "from $53" and "from $75" and no per-user rate at all. No seat bands, no calculator. Above ten staff the page just says contact us. We publish ours.
The one difference that matters
Fergus records the admin beautifully. Service Ninja performs it.
Both products will show you a tidy job. Only one of them fills it in for you: forward the customer's email and the job creates itself, customer and site and all. Finish on site and the follow-up work books itself before the tech gets back in the van. Return visits and quote requests stop falling through.
Side by side
| Service Ninja | Fergus | |
|---|---|---|
| Forward an email, get a job | Full email extraction, no app needed | Create-from-file with AI extraction, mobile app only |
| Follow-up work books itself at completion | Manual | |
| Published pricing | Every seat count, on this page | "From" floors only; contact us above 10 staff |
| NZ certificates: CoC, ESC, CoV, RoI | In the plan, with the sign-off rules enforced | $50/month add-on (1-9 staff), $100 for 10+ |
| Sending a certificate to the customer | In build In build. Today they file against the job | |
| Custom statuses and boards | Your language | Seven fixed lifecycle columns |
| Configurable job screen | Fixed | |
| Sites as a real entity | Top-level, with merge tooling | |
| Multiple visits on one job | Each with its own priority | Via phases |
| Reporting works without Xero | No accounting dependency | Key dashboards require a live Xero connection |
| Line items you add on the fly get saved | Kit sets accumulate | Invoice-only items are not saved to the price book |
| Connect an AI assistant to your data | Built-in assistant and MCP connector | Not documented |
| Reporting suite | Not built | Ten-plus reports |
| Purchase orders and supplier documents | Not built | |
| Back costing as a gate before invoicing | Not built | A board column work must pass through |
| Take a card payment on site | Not built | Tap to Pay and QR |
| SMS to customers | Not built | $15 per 100 texts |
| Accounting | Xero | Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks |
Competitor detail and pricing captured from their published documentation on 1 August 2026.
Four things Service Ninja does that Fergus doesn't
Tells you what you'll pay before you get on a call.
Fergus publishes a floor and nothing else. No per-user rate, no bands, no calculator, and fully opaque above ten staff. Certificates are $50 a month on top for a small team, $100 for a larger one. SMS is $15 per hundred. Service Ninja is $100 for the first user and $60 for each one after, plus GST, with certificates in the plan. The whole price is on this website.
Keeps the pricing knowledge you build.
In Fergus, a line item you type onto an invoice is invoice-only and is explicitly not saved back to your price book. The next job starts from scratch, and changing one line on a quote means creating a whole new version. Service Ninja's kit sets are built once and reused, on quotes, jobs and invoices, with the labour minutes in them. Five years in, your estimating gets better instead of staying the same.
Certificates in the plan, not at $50 a month on top.
Fergus has NZ certificate templates and they're decent smart forms: conditional fields, tags that pull customer, site and employee values off the job. Two things they don't do: link a certificate to the standard it satisfies, or stop you signing one that isn't finished. Service Ninja issues the CoC, ESC, CoV and Record of Inspection with the rules enforced. A Record of Inspection can only be signed by someone with an inspector registration, nothing can be signed while a required test result is blank, and an unlodged WorkSafe reference prints blank rather than invented.
And it's in the plan. Fergus charges $50 a month for certificates on a small team and $100 for ten-plus. That's $600 to $1,200 a year to issue the documents your licence depends on.
Books the next job before the van leaves.
When a tech completes a job in Service Ninja, the guided flow asks what still needs to happen and creates it: the return visit, the quote request, the follow-up. In Fergus the tech chooses between "my work is complete" and "I need to come back", which sets a status. And then someone in the office has to notice it and act.
Where Fergus is still ahead
Back costing as a mandatory gate.
Fergus won't let a job reach Invoicing until labour, stock and supplier invoices have been confirmed against it, with supplier reconciliation and uninvoiced costs as named sub-states. Margin verification is a place work must physically pass through, not a report someone might run. It's the single best thing in the product and we don't have it.
Dollars on every board column.
Job count and summed sell price, per column. Cheap to compute, far more useful than a card count. Ours doesn't do this yet.
Phases.
A Fergus job is a container of semi-independent sub-jobs, each with its own schedule, time, materials and invoices, each moving through the board independently, all rolling up to one financial summary. For staged commercial work that model is right and ours is simpler.
Reporting.
WIP, timesheet overview, business activity, cost, compliance, certification, customer invoice, staff overview, financial summary. We have none of that yet. And note the Xero caveat above cuts both ways: their reports exist, ours don't.
Purchase orders, supplier documents, stock on hand.
All there. None here.
Payment on site.
Tap to Pay and scan-to-pay QR in Fergus Go.
SMS.
$15 per hundred texts. We have none.
Sending the certificate.
Fergus emails it out. We issue it and file it against the job; sending is the next thing being built. Until it ships, this is theirs.
Don't switch if
- Back costing is how you protect your margin. Nothing here replaces it yet.
- You run staged commercial work that genuinely needs phases.
- You live in the Fergus reports.
- You're on MYOB or QuickBooks.
- You need certificates emailed to customers from inside the software. Ours are issued and filed against the job; sending is in build.
Price, side by side
Fergus's published New Zealand pricing, captured 1 August 2026. Service Ninja prices are plus GST.
| Service Ninja | Fergus | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | $100/month | From $53 (Basic) / $75 (Professional) |
| 5 users | $340/month | Not published |
| 10 users | $640/month | Not published |
| 10+ staff | $100 + $60 each after | "Contact us for a custom plan" |
| Certificates | Included | $50/month (1-9 staff), $100/month (10+) |
| SMS | Not built | $15 per 100 texts |
| Setup | $0 | From $0, plus a free one-hour onboarding |
| Data migration | Paid service, quoted per business | Not published |
| Contract | No lock-in | No lock-in, monthly |
We can't complete the middle of that table, and neither can you until you've been on a call. That's the point we're making.
We publish what isn't built too.
Back costing, purchase orders and reporting are all things Fergus has and we don't. They're on this page, marked as what they are.
See what's built →Questions people ask
Is Service Ninja a Fergus clone?
No. Fergus's board is genuinely good and we've learned from it. But Fergus is built to record a lifecycle and we're built to perform the admin inside it. Different products, not different skins.
Does Service Ninja need Xero to work?
No. It syncs invoices to Xero when you connect it. Nothing stops working if you don't.
What does Service Ninja actually cost for eight people?
$520 a month plus GST. $100 for the first user, $60 for each of the other seven.
Can I bring my Fergus data across?
Yes. Migration is a service we run for you, charged separately and quoted once we've seen the size of it. It isn't a self-serve import button and we won't pretend it is.
Fergus has more features. Why would I move?
On a feature count, Fergus wins today and we'd say so. The question is whether you want more places to record the admin or fewer places to do it. If it's the first, stay.
Comparison accurate as at 1 August 2026, from publicly available documentation and pricing. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.