The honest bit first
Simpro isn't organised around the job. It's organised around the cost centre, the way an accounting system is: a job is really a container of costed sub-ledgers, and scheduling, invoicing and permissions all bind to those, not to the job. That's why its progress claims, retention and project costing are the deepest here by a distance. If you run staged commercial work with retentions, nothing in this comparison touches it.
It's been around a long time and it shines at projects and complicated estimating. We talked to one plumber who can do a $700k quote in 15 minutes, out of his own expertise and Simpro's take-off and pre-build systems. That's the trade Simpro offers: capability and customisability, against a settings structure that makes easy things hard.
Three things you should establish before you sign.
Ask what it costs. You can't find out. Simpro publishes no price at any seat count: one "Base Plan", an add-on catalogue, and a Request Pricing button. There's a confirmed setup fee, amount not published, that depends on "the complexity of your business." Add-ons for Digital Forms, Data Feed, Maintenance Planner, Takeoffs, GPS and SMS are all separate purchases with no published prices.
Ask what it costs to issue a New Zealand Certificate of Compliance. The answer is at least two add-ons, and you still won't have a record.
Ask to see it work where your techs actually work.
The one difference that matters
Simpro can do more than most apps in this market. Service Ninja is usable on day one, and it knows what a CoC is.
Simpro's depth arrives as status codes, triggers, cost centres, security groups, forms setup and licences to be configured before you book the first job. The difficulty comes with the capability, but it isn't required by it. Simpro's own help guide warns that working in more than one browser tab at a time can save data incorrectly, and that the main menu needs a screen 1400 pixels wide before it shows text labels. A five-person electrical shop shouldn't need a paid implementation before it gets value.
Side by side
| Service Ninja | Simpro | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | $100 first user, $60 each after, plus GST | No price at any seat count |
| Setup fee | $0 | Confirmed, amount not published |
| NZ CoC / ESC / CoV / Record of Inspection | Issued from the job, in the plan | Digital Forms add-on only. Attaches a PDF; the answers don't populate fields without also buying Data Feed |
| Native electrical certification | Built to NZ standards | Queensland forms only |
| Sign-off rules enforced by the software | Inspector registration required to sign an RoI; can't sign with a blank test result | Not documented |
| AS/NZS or Energy Safety in the docs | Built by a registered electrical inspector | Zero occurrences across 820 articles |
| Add-ons required for a working build | None | Premium + mobility licences + Digital Forms + Data Feed + more |
| Forward an email, get a job | Not documented | |
| AI assistant | Built in | JustAsk: max three users, metered credits, data up to 24 hours stale |
| Connect your own AI to your data | MCP connector: plug Claude in and ask | A full REST API, the best in this set, but no connector: you build and maintain the bridge yourself |
| Configurable job screen | Forms Setup, configured by an implementer | |
| Progress claims and retention | Not built | Native |
| Project jobs and cost centres | Not built | The core of the product |
| Stock with FIFO costing | Not built | Including a margin alert before you invoice |
| Reporting | Not built | ~90 reports plus a query builder |
| Route optimisation | Not built | Travel-distance ranking; an AI scheduler on the Lightning tier, documented only in a release note |
Competitor detail and pricing captured from their published documentation on 1 August 2026.
Three things Service Ninja does that Simpro doesn't
Treats a New Zealand certificate as a record, not an attachment.
The NZ CoC, ESC and Record of Inspection exist in Simpro: as Digital Forms templates, in a separately licensed product. And the integration is one-way. A completed form auto-attaches to the job as a PDF, but "no data filled in is populated in fields in Simpro Premium" unless you also buy the Data Feed add-on. Two paid products later, your certificate is still a PDF stapled to a job. Meanwhile Simpro's native electrical certification is Queensland-only, and across 820 help articles there are zero occurrences of AS/NZS or Energy Safety.
Service Ninja issues the CoC, ESC, CoV and Record of Inspection from the job, in the plan. No second product, no third product to make the data come back.
And because it was built by someone who signs these for a living, the certificates comply with New Zealand standards and regulations, and the software enforces the sign-off rules rather than just printing the right layout.
That is a structural difference, not a feature gap. And it's the kind that takes domain knowledge rather than engineering time to close. Simpro has the larger engineering team by some distance. It has had a decade. It has zero mentions of AS/NZS across 820 help articles.
Tells you the price on a web page.
Simpro is the most opaque vendor in this comparison: no number at any seat count, a confirmed setup fee of an unpublished amount, and an add-on catalogue with no prices on it. Ours is $100 for the first user and $60 for each one after, plus GST, no setup fee, on this website.
Lets you point an AI at your own business.
Simpro brands itself AI-first, and inside the product AI is a family of paid add-ons documented across 33 of its 820 help topics, with the master switch still labelled "Artificial Intelligence T&C (BETA)" and acceptance described as irreversible. "Cooper", the conversational AI in Simpro Group's marketing, has zero occurrences in the help documentation. The one that exists, JustAsk, caps at three users, runs on metered credits, and warns its data may be up to 24 hours behind. A business assistant that's a day stale isn't an operational assistant.
To be fair about the plumbing underneath: Simpro has the best API in this comparison set, a full REST API that real integrations get built on. What it doesn't have is a connector. An MCP connector is an API with the instruction booklet included: you plug Claude in and ask your own jobs a question in plain English. The difference shows up in the market. Trade owners are currently being coached through paid workshops to hand-build API connections to Simpro and stash the credentials in a lockbox. That work exists because the API is good and the connector is missing. Service Ninja ships both the assistant and the connector, in the plan.
There's a second thing worth noticing. Simpro built the best offline field app in this category, a full local replica engineered so a tech in a plant room has the whole business in their pocket, and then layered its AI on top in a way that fails in exactly those conditions. "Note that AI capabilities are not available in offline mode" appears verbatim in at least six separate places in the help documentation. The assistant disappears at the moment the app was engineered to survive.
Where Simpro is still ahead
We'd be embarrassed to publish this page without this section, because on capability Simpro wins most of it.
Offline, at real depth.
Simpro Mobile downloads the entire dataset on first login and refreshes deltas: a full local replica, not a cache of today, with writes queued and flushed on reconnect. It is the most thoroughly engineered offline in this category, and it's fair to say so.
Progress claims and retention.
Claim a percentage, an amount or per item, with a claim summary on the invoice showing what's been claimed to date and what's left, and retention configured up front. Not built here.
Project jobs and cost centres.
If a job is really a set of costed sub-ledgers grouped into sections, Simpro models that and we don't.
Reporting.
~90 standard reports plus a self-serve query builder and custom dashboards. We have no reporting module.
The API.
The best in this comparison set: a full, documented REST API, and the reason anything can be built on Simpro at all. Tradify and Fergus publish nothing close.
NZ supplier integration.
Automatic catalogue and supplier invoice sync with around twenty NZ merchants, including Ideal, J.A. Russell, Corys, Mico and Plumbing World. The strongest in this set.
Estimating big work fast.
Take-off templates and pre-builds in the hands of an expert are the quickest path to a large quote in this comparison. The plumber doing $700k quotes in 15 minutes is real.
Stock with FIFO costing that argues with you.
Assign stock where the FIFO cost exceeds what you're billing and it alerts you to lift the price. Costing that interrupts before the margin is lost. That's a good idea and we've written it down.
Scale.
Five staff to two hundred.
Small craft.
Number fields that accept arithmetic; Ctrl+D to stamp time, date and your name into a note; Alt-key shortcuts straight to a new job or a saved search. Details that respect the person typing.
Don't switch if
- You run project work with progress claims and retentions.
- You need stock control with real costing.
- You live in the reports.
Price, side by side
Checked on Simpro's own New Zealand pricing page, 1 August 2026. Service Ninja prices are plus GST.
| Service Ninja | Simpro | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | $100/month | Not published |
| 5 users | $340/month | Not published |
| 30 users | $1,840/month | Not published |
| Setup / implementation | $0 | Confirmed fee, amount not published |
| NZ certificates (CoC, ESC, CoV, RoI) | Included | Digital Forms add-on, price not published |
| Getting the form data into fields | Included | Data Feed add-on, price not published |
| AI assistant | Included | Add-ons, prices not published |
| SMS | Not built | Add-on, price not published |
| Data migration | Paid service, quoted per business | Included in the setup fee, amount not published |
| Billing | Monthly | Monthly or annual, discount not published |
Every "not published" in that column is a fact, checked on Simpro's own New Zealand pricing page on 1 August 2026. We're not being cheeky. You genuinely cannot find out.
We publish what Simpro does better.
Offline depth, progress claims, cost centres, stock and reporting are all real gaps on our side, and they're on this page as gaps.
See what's built →Questions people ask
Can Service Ninja handle a project with retentions?
No. If that's your work, Simpro is the better product and we'd tell you so on the call.
Can I bring my Simpro data across?
Yes. Migration is a paid service, quoted per business. Worth asking Simpro what leaving costs too.
Why does an electrician's compliance matter so much on this page?
Electrical certificates are a statutory requirement. Many apps support certification, natively or through third-party tools. We keep up to date on the compliance requirements for these certificates and make sure our tools help you issue compliant paperwork.
Is Service Ninja trying to be a smaller Simpro?
No. Service Ninja reinvents the way you do admin. Instead of being a tool you do admin with, we actually do a chunk of the admin for you. Technology is changing, and that has created a gap between what's possible and what the existing apps enable. We're here to fill that gap.
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.