Home services businesses lose more work to slow replies than to price. A homeowner with a leak contacts three companies, and the one that answers first usually gets the job before anyone has quoted.

The second thing that decides it is the quote itself — how fast it goes out, how it looks, and whether anyone follows up on it. Most general CRMs handle neither of those particularly well.

Key takeaways

Disclosure: this article is published by Scalry, which appears on the list. We have tried to describe every tool as its own users would, including where they beat us — but read it knowing who wrote it, and check the claims against each vendor.

What home services businesses actually need from a CRM

This industry has requirements that barely appear in general CRM marketing, because they happen after the sale rather than before it.

Answering out of hours

A significant share of enquiries arrive evenings and weekends, when the comparison is not against a competitor's salesperson but against their voicemail. Automated first contact or a rota is worth more here than in almost any other industry.

Quote to follow-up in one place

Most unaccepted quotes are never chased. If the quote lives in a separate tool from the contact record, nobody sees that it has been sitting untouched for nine days — and that is recoverable revenue sitting in plain sight.

Scheduling the actual job

Winning the work is half of it. Dispatching a crew, tracking materials and closing the job out is a scheduling problem that sales CRMs do not model at all.

Repeat work and maintenance cycles

Annual servicing, seasonal callbacks and warranty follow-ups are predictable revenue that most businesses leave on the table because nothing reminds them.

The best CRMs for home services businesses

1. Keap

Price: From $249/mo (2 users), +$39/user
Best for: Businesses where quoting and invoicing matter as much as marketing

The general CRM that comes closest to this industry's shape: quotes, invoices and payment collection attach to the contact record, with automation to chase unaccepted quotes without anyone remembering.

Where it wins: Quote-to-cash and marketing automation in one system, with paid setup available.

Where it falls short: Expensive relative to the field service tools, no job dispatch, and implementation is required before you launch.

2. Pipedrive

Price: $14–$79/seat/mo annually
Best for: Small operations that just need enquiries not to get lost

A cheap, fast pipeline with clear ownership. For a two-van operation that currently runs on a phone and a notebook, this is a large improvement for very little money.

Where it wins: Cheapest way to stop losing enquiries, and easy to adopt.

Where it falls short: No quoting, no scheduling, no invoicing — pipeline only.

3. Scalry

Price: $29–$199/mo, flat
Best for: Businesses generating their own local marketing

Lead capture with automatic assignment, booking, follow-up sequences and after-hours voice agents on one record, plus generation of the before-and-after social content and local ads that drive enquiries in this industry.

Where it wins: Flat pricing regardless of crew size, with after-hours handling and content production included.

Where it falls short: No quoting, no invoicing, no job scheduling or dispatch — a field service tool covers those and this does not.

4. Zoho CRM Plus

Price: $57/user/mo annually
Best for: Larger operations wanting to consolidate office systems

Bundles CRM, help desk and projects, which maps reasonably onto enquiries, customer issues and jobs for a business with office staff to run it.

Where it wins: Broad coverage for the price if you will use several apps.

Where it falls short: Per-user pricing and configuration effort; not built for trades.

The vertical specialists

Field service platforms are usually the right answer here and it would be misleading to bury that. Jobber and Housecall Pro are built around exactly this shape — quote, schedule, dispatch, invoice, chase — for small and mid-sized trades businesses. ServiceTitan targets larger operations with more complex dispatch and reporting needs. What they do that no general CRM does is model the job itself: crews, time slots, materials and completion. If your business is constrained by scheduling work rather than winning it, start there.

We have not verified pricing for the specialist tools named above and are not quoting figures for them — check their own pages. They are included because leaving them out would make this list less useful, not because we have tested them.

Quick comparison

Pricing for both products was checked against the public Scalry and each general-purpose tool listed pricing pages in August 2026. SaaS pricing changes often — confirm the current numbers with each vendor before you commit to a plan.

What to check before you buy

• What happens to a Friday 8pm enquiry? If the answer is Monday, that is your biggest available win.
• Where do quotes live, and who chases them? Unaccepted quotes are the cheapest revenue in this business.
• Do you need job scheduling? If yes, a general CRM is the wrong category entirely.
• Can you trigger maintenance reminders a year out without anyone remembering?
• Will the crew use it on a phone? Anything requiring a desk will not get updated.
• Price it per office seat — technicians rarely need full CRM licences, and vendors do not always make that clear.

How to shortlist without a two-month evaluation

Software selection consumes more time than it should in home services businesses, usually because the shortlist starts too wide. This narrows it quickly.

• Start with what you already pay for. The tool you have often does more than anyone realised, and buying overlap is the most common waste here.
• Check the vertical specialist first, even if you expect to reject it. If it fits, nothing general will beat it on workflow; if it does not, you will know why in an hour.
• Trial with real data, not samples. Import a genuine list and work a genuine week — field mapping and adoption problems only appear with the real thing.
• Price at twelve months, not today. Per-seat and per-contact tools diverge sharply as you grow, so today's comparison will not hold.
• Test the export on day one. Confirm you can get your data out before you depend on it, not on the day you want to leave.
• Ask about industry pricing. Several vendors discount for specific sectors and almost none advertise it.

Questions to ask before you commit

Whichever way you are leaning, these are the questions that change the answer. Work through them against your own numbers rather than anyone's feature matrix — including this one.

• How many enquiries arrive outside working hours? Count a real week.
• How many quotes went out last month, and how many were chased?
• Is winning work or scheduling work the constraint? They point at different products.
• Who answers the phone at 7pm?
• Do you sell maintenance contracts? That is recurring revenue a CRM can protect.
• How much of your marketing do you produce yourself?

If you cannot answer the first three, you are not ready to choose between Scalry and a CRM for home services businesses yet — you are still deciding what you need, which is a cheaper problem to solve first.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best CRM for a contractor?

If scheduling and dispatching jobs is your constraint, a field service platform like Jobber or Housecall Pro will fit better than any general CRM. If the problem is enquiries getting lost and quotes not being chased, Keap from $249/month handles quoting natively, and Pipedrive from $14/seat is the cheapest way to stop the leak.

Do I need a CRM or field service software?

Ask whether you lose more money failing to win work or failing to schedule it. Losing enquiries and unchased quotes point at a CRM; double-booked crews, missed appointments and messy invoicing point at field service software.

How do I stop losing after-hours enquiries?

Decide explicitly what happens to them rather than leaving it to chance. The options are a stated response window on your website, a weekend rota, or automated first contact — any of the three beats the current answer, which for most businesses is that nobody has decided.

Can a CRM send quotes?

Most general CRMs cannot. Keap is the notable exception, with quoting, invoicing and payment attached to the contact record. Field service tools all do it, which is a large part of why they win this vertical.

How much should a home services CRM cost?

A small operation can start on Pipedrive at $14 per seat. A business that needs quoting and automation should expect $250 or more a month on Keap. Field service platforms are typically priced per user with setup, and we have not verified their current rates.