The honest bit first
Tradify has been doing this for over a decade and has thousands of New Zealand trade businesses on it. If you're on Tradify and it's working, that is a real thing and this page isn't going to pretend otherwise.
What's worth knowing is what you actually bought. Tradify is sold as Lite, Pro and Plus, and the gaps between them are not cosmetic. Timesheets, compliance certificates, job photos and files, recurring jobs, custom statuses and progress invoicing all sit above Lite. Purchase orders, kits, reporting, bulk invoicing and job tasks are Plus only. So "Tradify does that" is usually a claim about a tier, not about the product.
Service Ninja is one plan. Everything that's built is in it.
The one difference that matters
Tradify gives you a good place to type the job in. Service Ninja creates the job.
Forward the email from the customer and the job builds itself: customer, site, contacts and the description, extracted from the whole email, not just the subject line.
Tradify has a forwarding address too, and it's a genuinely good feature. But it creates an enquiry that someone then opens, fills in and converts. The work is still yours. That gap, repeated forty times a week, is the entire product thesis.
Side by side
| Service Ninja | Tradify | |
|---|---|---|
| Forward an email, get a job | Customer, site and description extracted | Creates an enquiry to convert by hand |
| Kit sets on jobs and invoices | Parts and labour, first class everywhere | "Kits are exclusive to quotes" |
| Timesheets | Full seven-day, public holiday category | Pro and Plus only |
| NZ certificates: CoC, ESC, CoV, RoI | In the plan, with the sign-off rules enforced | Pro and Plus only; reversible to draft, unversioned |
| Sending a certificate to the customer | In build In build. Today they file against the job | Email only, no bulk export |
| Custom job statuses and boards | Your language, not ours | Pro and Plus only |
| Configurable job screen | Add, remove, reorder the cards | Fixed layout, four custom fields |
| Multiple contacts per customer | Contacts with roles, click to call | One contact per customer, no merge |
| Multiple visits on one job | Each with its own priority | Appointments, no visit-level record |
| Connect an AI assistant to your data | Built-in assistant and an MCP connector | No API, webhooks or Zapier documented |
| Purchase orders and supplier bills | Not built | Plus plan |
| Take a card payment on site | Not built | Mobile app |
| SMS to customers | Not built | $0.20 per message |
| Accounting | Xero | Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and more |
| Price, 5 users | $340/month plus GST | $310/month (Plus, ex GST) |
Competitor detail and pricing captured from their published documentation on 1 August 2026.
Four things Service Ninja does that Tradify doesn't
Your kits survive the job.
Tradify is explicit: "Kits are exclusive to quotes. They cannot be used within Jobs, Invoices or Purchase Orders". Their reason is that the accounting systems it integrates with have no way to receive a kit. To get a kit onto an invoice you accept the quote and tick "group kits", which collapses your careful build into one line. Service Ninja treats a kit set as a real thing with parts and labour in minutes, on the quote, on the job and on the invoice. The pricing knowledge you build up stays yours.
Every customer has more than one person at it.
"Due to variations in our accounting integrations, Tradify is not able to add secondary contacts to customers." One name per record. No merge, so deduplicating means resetting every document to draft and swapping the customer over by hand. If you do property-management or commercial work, you already know what that costs you. Service Ninja has contacts with roles on the customer and the site, and you ring them from the job card in one tap.
Your data is reachable by an assistant.
Across Tradify's 809 help articles there is no API, no webhooks and no Zapier. The only ways out are five accounting connectors and a CSV export. Service Ninja ships an MCP connector, so you can point Claude at your own jobs and ask it questions in plain English. Trade owners are currently being taught in paid workshops to hand-build API bridges and store credentials in a lockbox, because their job software has no way in. You shouldn't have to.
The certificate knows the rules, not just the layout.
Service Ninja issues the CoC, ESC, CoV and Record of Inspection, built from the forms a New Zealand electrician actually issues. The part that matters isn't the layout, it's what the product refuses to let you do: a Record of Inspection can only be signed by someone with an inspector registration, the electrician who did the work is named separately from the person signing, nothing can be signed while a required test result is still blank, and an unlodged WorkSafe reference prints blank rather than something invented.
Tradify issues certificates too. But across 809 help articles, EWRB gets zero mentions. AS/NZS, zero. NZS 3000, zero. Record of Inspection, zero. Prescribed electrical work, zero. You cannot learn from their documentation when a CoC is required rather than an ESC, or who is allowed to sign one. And in Tradify an approved certificate can be reset to draft, there's no versioning, and the history log records that a form was emailed but not who changed which field. A statutory certificate that can be quietly edited after approval has exactly the wrong property for the one document you might have to defend.
Where Tradify is still ahead
Getting the certificate to the customer.
Tradify emails a certificate out. We file it against the job and that's currently all: sending is the next thing being built. Tradify's certificate delivery is genuinely thin (one channel, no bulk export, no hosted link) but thin beats none, and until sending ships this belongs in their column.
Purchase orders and supplier bills.
Tradify has them on Plus. We don't have them at all.
Card payment on site.
Take Onsite Payment, on the mobile app. Not built here.
SMS.
Quotes, invoices and appointment reminders by text, at $0.20 a message. We have no SMS at all yet.
Accounting choice.
Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and more. Service Ninja syncs to Xero. If you're on MYOB, this is a hard stop today.
Ten years and thousands of customers.
Service Ninja has one reference business: Legacy Electrical, run by the person who built it. Every feature had to survive a real week of work before it shipped, which we'd argue is worth something, but it isn't the same as an install base.
Free accounts for subbies.
Tradify's Connections gives subcontractors a genuine free login to the scheduler, with colour-coded accept/decline and chase emails at 8am local time. Neat, and we have nothing like it.
Don't switch if
- You need certificates emailed straight to customers from the software. Ours are issued and filed against the job; sending is next up.
- You're on MYOB or QuickBooks.
- Purchase orders are load-bearing in how you buy materials.
- You take payment on the doorstep at the end of every job.
- You're a solo operator watching every dollar of overhead. Tradify Lite at $48 is cheaper than us and always will be.
Price, side by side
Captured from Tradify's published New Zealand pricing on 1 August 2026. Tradify quotes NZD per user per month, ex GST. Service Ninja prices are plus GST.
| Users | Service Ninja | Tradify Lite | Tradify Pro | Tradify Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $100 | $48 | $52 | $62 |
| 3 | $220 | $144 | $156 | $186 |
| 5 | $340 | $240 | $260 | $310 |
| 10 | $640 | $480 | $520 | $620 |
We're not the cheap option and we're not going to pretend to be. What we'll say plainly: there is one Service Ninja plan, so the price above is the price. No tier to discover you're on the wrong side of, no add-on for certificates, no per-message SMS line. Tradify's own plan comparison is published as a single tall image with no text, and it leaves out at least five plan-gated features that only appear in release notes. Ours is a table on this website.
Certificate sending is in build, and we're saying so here.
Nothing on this page is claimed as live unless it is. Where Tradify is ahead, it's in their column, not hidden.
See what's built →Questions people ask
Can I bring my Tradify data across?
Yes. Data migration is a service we do for you rather than a self-serve import button, and it's charged separately. We'll quote it once we've seen what you're carrying. Ask on the demo call and you'll get a number.
Is Service Ninja finished?
No, and this page lists what isn't, in Tradify's column. What's shipped is genuinely shipped and running a live electrical business every day.
Why is it more expensive than Tradify?
Because it does more of the work. That's the honest answer, and if the licence line is the number that decides it for you, Tradify is cheaper and you should stay.
Do I have to pay extra for certificates?
No. Certificates are in the plan. Fergus charges $50 a month for certificates on top of the subscription; Tradify puts them behind Pro.
Can I text customers from Service Ninja?
Not yet. We haven't built SMS. Tradify has it at $0.20 a message. If SMS reminders are part of how you run the day, that's a real gap on our side today.
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.