Cadi vs Jobber vs Tradify: field service software vs purpose-built cleaning platforms (2026)

TL;DR: the honest verdict up front

Jobber is the most mature field service software for small businesses in the English-speaking world. It handles scheduling, quoting, invoicing, and client management well. If you are running a large cleaning operation — ten or more operatives, complex routing, multiple service types — its depth starts to justify the cost. But it was built for trades and the North American market. It has no MTD ITSA support. The scheduling model is designed around one-off jobs, not recurring weekly cleans. You will still need a separate UK accounting tool alongside it. For most UK cleaning businesses, it is overbuilt in the wrong directions and missing the features that actually matter.

Tradify is aimed firmly at UK and Australian tradespeople — plumbers, electricians, builders. The job model, the quote logic, and the compliance features are all built for trades. It does not fit a cleaning business. It is on this list because cleaning businesses frequently encounter it when searching for UK trade software; it should not be on your shortlist.

Cadi is built specifically for UK cleaning businesses. Recurring appointment scheduling, a cleaning-specific pricing calculator, open banking, and MTD ITSA built directly into the platform — not bolted on, not bridged, not "coming soon". It launches 1 June 2026. The waitlist is open now.

Quick comparison table

Why field service software doesn't fit cleaning businesses

The category of software known as "field service management" was built to solve a specific problem: coordinating workers who travel between jobs, carry equipment, and need quoting and invoicing tools. It was built for HVAC engineers, plumbers, electricians, lawn care crews. These are legitimate, complex businesses with real scheduling challenges — and field service software solves them well.

The problem is that a cleaning business is operationally different from a trade business in several fundamental ways, and the differences are not cosmetic.

The recurring appointment model

A cleaning business runs on recurring appointments. The same client, the same address, the same cleaner — every week or every fortnight. Income is not project-based. It is a standing calendar of repeating jobs that generate repeating invoices. The operational challenge is not "book a new job"; it is "manage a stable rota of existing commitments, handle absence and rescheduling, and add new clients into an already-full calendar without creating conflicts".

Field service software models the other thing: discrete, one-off jobs. A boiler service. A rewire. A garden clearance. These jobs are quoted, booked, executed, invoiced. Done. The scheduling logic is built around job creation, not rota management. When you try to run a cleaning round through a field service tool, you are fighting the assumptions baked into the data model. Recurring appointments become a workaround rather than the primary use case.

The pricing model

Trade businesses quote on time and materials. An electrician quotes hours plus parts. A plumber scopes a job and prices accordingly. Field service tools support this well — they have quote builders designed around labour rates and stock items.

Cleaning businesses price differently. The quote is based on property size, number of rooms, frequency of clean, and any extras — oven cleaning, ironing, specialist treatments. The rate is typically a fixed recurring charge, not a variable time-and-materials calculation. A field service quoting tool built for trades is the wrong tool for generating a cleaning quote. It creates unnecessary friction and does not enforce consistent margin logic.

The compliance picture

Neither Jobber nor Tradify supports MTD ITSA — Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment. This is the HMRC-mandated quarterly digital reporting obligation for sole traders earning above £50,000 per year, with the threshold dropping to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. If your cleaning business is growing, you will hit one of these thresholds. When you do, you will need software that can submit quarterly updates to HMRC via the approved API.

Jobber and Tradify cannot do this. They were not built for the UK compliance landscape. You would need a separate accounting tool — QuickBooks, Xero, or a bridging solution — running alongside. That is a second subscription, a second system to learn, and a data flow to maintain between tools. It is exactly the kind of fragmented stack that purpose-built software exists to replace.

Cadi: purpose-built for UK cleaning businesses

Cadi is built by Mackies Cleaning — a UK cleaning business with residential, commercial, and specialist exterior arms. Every feature in Cadi exists because we needed it ourselves and could not find it in any existing tool. The perspective is operational, not theoretical.

The feature set is built around the actual workflow of a cleaning business:

• Scheduling built for cleaning. Recurring appointments are the primary unit — not a bolt-on feature. Create a weekly or fortnightly clean for a client, assign it to a specific cleaner, attach a per-client job checklist, and manage rescheduling when availability changes. The calendar is a rota, not a job board.
• Cleaning-specific pricing calculator. Generate consistent quotes based on property size, room count, clean frequency, and service type. Stop pricing from gut feel. Protect your margin. Speed up the quoting process for new enquiries.
• Invoicing connected to the schedule. When a job completes, the invoice is generated. Recurring invoices go out automatically. Late payment reminders fire without manual intervention. Payment status is visible at a glance — before you turn up for next week's job.
• Open banking. Real-time bank feed integration. Know your actual cash position — not last month's reconciled statement. For a sole trader managing cash flow week to week, this visibility matters.
• MTD ITSA — built in, not bridged. Quarterly income and expense submissions to HMRC via the approved HMRC API. No third-party bridging tool. No separate accounting platform. Sole traders can complete their own submissions directly through Cadi without needing an accountant involved in the compliance process.
• Staff management. Track hours, allocate jobs to specific cleaners, manage rota changes. For businesses moving beyond solo operation, staff management is the operational bottleneck — not revenue.

Pricing: Free (core features, sole trader), Pro at £39/month (full feature set, small teams), Max at £79/month (advanced reporting, multi-arm, priority support), and Enterprise (custom pricing for larger operations). Cadi launches 1 June 2026. The waitlist is open at cadi.cleaning/launch.

Jobber: mature field service, wrong market

Jobber has the most developed feature set in the field service software category. Scheduling, quoting, invoicing, client hub, online booking, two-way SMS — it is a comprehensive platform with a large, established user base and years of refinement. It deserves its reputation in the field service world.

The problem for UK cleaning businesses is structural, not cosmetic.

Built for North America, not the UK. Jobber was built primarily for the North American market. Its compliance, tax, and billing assumptions reflect that. There is no MTD ITSA support. UK-specific invoicing requirements are present but not native. If you are a UK cleaning business with UK compliance obligations, you are building on a platform that was not designed with your regulatory environment in mind.

The scheduling model is trades-first. Jobber's scheduling is excellent for managing discrete, one-off jobs across a field team. It is less well-suited to the rota model of cleaning — recurring weekly appointments for stable client lists, managed as a repeating calendar rather than a queue of new jobs. Recurring jobs exist in Jobber, but the platform's DNA is job-creation, not rota-management.

Per-user pricing escalates quickly. Jobber starts at around £35/month for the Core tier, but pricing rises steeply as team size grows. For a cleaning business adding cleaners — where the additional revenue per operative may be modest — per-user pricing compresses margin quickly. Cadi's pricing is tier-based, not per-seat.

The MTD gap is a real operational cost. Using Jobber for operations and a separate tool for MTD ITSA compliance means two subscriptions, two systems, and a reconciliation process between them. The combined cost and friction of this arrangement often exceeds the cost of a purpose-built platform that handles both.

The case for Jobber is strongest for a cleaning business that has outgrown simpler tools and is managing a large field workforce — ten or more operatives — across complex scheduling requirements. At that scale, Jobber's scheduling depth, its mature client hub, and its mobile app quality start to justify the cost. Even then, MTD compliance requires a separate solution. For businesses below that scale, or those not yet locked into Jobber's infrastructure, a purpose-built cleaning platform is the cleaner answer.

Tradify: built for trades, not cleaning

Tradify targets UK and Australian tradespeople — electricians, plumbers, builders. It handles job management, quoting, and invoicing for trade businesses competently. It has a clean interface, a reasonable price point at around £25/month, and a clear focus on its target market.

That target market is not cleaning businesses. This matters more than it might initially appear.

The job model is for one-off trade work. Tradify is built around the lifecycle of a trade job: enquiry, quote, book, execute, invoice, done. This is exactly right for a plumber or electrician. It is exactly wrong for a cleaning business, where the operational reality is a standing rota of recurring appointments, not a queue of new jobs to book and close. There is no meaningful recurring appointment model in Tradify.

The quote logic is trades-based. Tradify's quoting is built around time-and-materials — the standard model for trade jobs. Cleaning businesses price on property size, frequency, and service type. The two models are different enough that forcing cleaning pricing into a trades quoting tool creates friction at every quote and inconsistency across your client base.

No MTD ITSA. As with Jobber, MTD ITSA is absent. A separate UK accounting solution is required for quarterly HMRC submissions.

Poor fit on every dimension that matters for cleaning. Scheduling model: wrong. Pricing logic: wrong. UK compliance: absent. Tradify appears in this comparison because cleaning business owners searching for "UK trade software" or "field service software UK" will encounter it. It should not survive that evaluation for a cleaning business. It is not designed for you and it does not pretend to be.

The MTD compliance gap: what it means in practice

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment is not a technicality. It is a mandatory quarterly reporting obligation with real penalties for non-compliance. If your cleaning business earns above the threshold, you must submit quarterly income and expense updates to HMRC via an approved software API. A spreadsheet cannot do this. A field service tool without MTD ITSA cannot do this. "I'll sort it at year-end" is not a compliant approach.

Neither Jobber nor Tradify can make MTD ITSA submissions. If you use either of them as your primary business platform, you are running an incomplete compliance stack. The workarounds are:

• A second accounting platform. QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks — running separately, fed manually or via integration. Additional subscription cost, additional data entry overhead, additional opportunity for errors between systems.
• Bridging software. A third-party tool that sits between your records and HMRC's API, pulling data from your existing tools and formatting it for submission. Additional cost, additional configuration, and an additional point of failure in a process that HMRC expects to be reliable and regular.
• An accountant handling submissions on your behalf. This adds cost that sole traders running small cleaning businesses should not need to incur for routine quarterly submissions. The whole point of MTD ITSA is to make this a direct, digital process — not to create a professional services dependency.

Cadi removes all three of these workarounds. MTD ITSA submissions are built into the platform. Sole traders can submit their own quarterly updates directly to HMRC without an accountant, without bridging software, and without a second system. The compliance obligation is met as part of normal platform use — not as a separate, annual panic.

Verdict

This comparison has a clear answer for most UK cleaning businesses.

Choose Cadi if you are a UK cleaning business — sole trader or small team — and you want a single platform that handles your scheduling, invoicing, client management, open banking, pricing, and MTD ITSA compliance without requiring additional tools. It is purpose-built for your business type. It launches 1 June 2026. The waitlist is at cadi.cleaning/launch.

Consider Jobber if you are running a larger multi-trade operation with ten or more field staff and complex scheduling requirements that go beyond a single cleaning service type. Accept that you will need a separate UK accounting solution with MTD ITSA support running alongside it, and factor that cost and complexity into your evaluation. Jobber's maturity at scale is real; its cleaning-specific fit is limited.

Do not choose Tradify for a cleaning business. It is a trades tool. The scheduling model, the pricing logic, and the compliance features are all built for tradespeople. Cleaning businesses are not Tradify's target market, and Tradify does not try to be the right tool for cleaning. Use it for what it was built for.

Frequently asked questions