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ServiceTitan vs Housecall Pro vs Service Fusion
Breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of each software.
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Housecall Pro and Service Fusion are two of the more well known field service management software (FSM) on the market. Each product helps service businesses improve operational efficiencies for things like scheduling, dispatching, and invoicing—and offers long lists of other features to help service businesses operate and grow.
Our product, ServiceTitan, is another software option for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other field service companies looking to invest in a business software solution.
When you look at the features offered by Housecall Pro, Service Fusion, and ServiceTitan, there is a lot of overlap in what each has to offer. However, despite listing nearly identical feature sets, how these software solutions actually work and what they’re like to use varies significantly.
We’ve created this article to help service businesses better understand these differences.
Below we’ll begin with a high-level overview of how these three products matchup and who they’re each best for. Then we’ll get into strengths and weaknesses of specific features to help you better understand how the tools differ, and choose the right tool for you.
Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get pricing and a personalized demo of our software today.
Housecall Pro vs Service Fusion vs ServiceTitan: An Overview of 3 Top Field-Service Management Software
The overarching difference between ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and Service Fusion is that the latter two services are solid tools for basic tasks like scheduling and dispatching, but generally lack depth and sophistication when it comes to many of the other features they offer.
Depending on your business needs, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, certain businesses will benefit more from using a platform like ServiceTitan, which is generally built with a greater level of depth and sophistication.
Specifically, in contrast to Housecall Pro and Service Fusion, ServiceTitan provides:
Greater efficiency gains through deeper automation features
Better user experiences for staff and end customers
Better mobile app functionality for techs in the field
Advanced reporting capabilities and business insights for owners and managers
Greater ability to scale with your company as you grow
So which businesses would Housecall Pro or Service Fusion be a sufficient solution for? And which ones would benefit more from using ServiceTitan?
Here’s how we recommend service businesses think about this:
For small businesses transitioning away from pen and paper for the first time, Housecall Pro and Service Fusion can be great introductory tools. In particular, for mom and pop shops that are content with their current size, aren’t looking to grow their company, and just want some basic efficiency improvements in their operations, these tools can be perfectly sufficient.
Alternatively, if you’re aspiring to grow your service business (i.e. company size, operations, revenue, etc.):
A) It’s probable that you’ll outgrow these tools and need to switch to something with greater capabilities in the near future (which comes with the costs of your entire staff learning a new software, again).
B) It’s likely you’ll reach your growth goals faster by starting off with a more sophisticated tool like ServiceTitan to begin with, because many of its features are designed to help increase revenue and scale.
With these higher level differences in mind, now we’ll dig into some specifics and explain how each of these services matchup to ServiceTitan at the feature level.
Note: We’ve also written in-depth comparisons between our product and Jobber, Fieldedge, and other top field service software.
Key Differences Between Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan
Housecall Pro is known for servicing all types of home service businesses, from pest control and carpet cleaning to HVAC and electrical. Their original and primary use case was to make scheduling and dispatching easier to execute, and these features have remained their software’s greatest strength.
In particular, their intuitive user interface (the view that service businesses see and interact with when scheduling and dispatching jobs) is well known for its modern feel and ease of use. Service businesses find that it’s easy to learn and takes minimal time to get started using.
But while they’ve expanded their product to handle many other use cases, overall they have fewer features—and many of the extra features they do offer lack the depth of functionality that equivalent features have in ServiceTitan. And they also rely on third party integrations for many of the features they offer (i.e. users need to connect and pay additional money for different apps and SaaS services in addition to their product to accomplish different things).
In our in-depth comparison of Housecall Pro vs ServiceTitan, we lay out several key differences between the two products. Here are some examples:
Pricebook Functionality
Housecall Pro’s basic pricebook functionality is similar to using a spreadsheet to manage your pricebook. It allows you to list the names of your various services and prices, but lacks tools that make it easy to update, manage, or view items in your pricebook.
For example, let’s say you want to apply markups to parts across your business due to rising materials costs. In Housecall Pro, you don’t have an efficient way to do this. You could apply a 10% markup to all of your services, but not all of your services include materials (e.g. a basic drain unclogging). So instead, to maintain accurate pricing, you’d need to go in and individually update all of your services that require materials line by line.
They have introduced a new flat rate Pricebook powered by Profit Rhino, but it requires an integration plus an additional monthly cost.
In contrast, ServiceTitan makes this type of pricebook management easy, providing users with the ability to set dynamic pricing rules. For example, you can apply markup costs for materials with rules such as marking up any parts under $10 five times, any parts between $10-$20 three times, and so on. In a few clicks, you can have those rules applied across your entire pricebook in real-time, and immediately be reflected in new estimates and invoices being created in the office or field.
This is a significant improvement on efficiency, and it’s demonstrative of how the details and the depth of functionality in the service software you choose matter.
In addition to these types of dynamic pricing features, ServiceTitan also offers tools for calculating labor rates and billable hours, job costing for profitability, and the ability to integrate with top industry materials catalogs through our Pricebook Pro addon.
A service company’s pricebook is the key to their financial success, and at ServiceTitan we’ve ensured that companies have the tools they need to efficiently and effectively maintain profitability.
Note: Both Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan also offer a QuickBooks integrations (compatible with both QuickBooks online and desktop) to ensure your accounting remains accurate and up to date .
Reporting Capabilities
Housecall Pro offers a number of pre-built and customizable reports for service business owners, such as the ability to view basic revenue, service history, or job data. Different dashboards can also be set up for people in different roles, such as dispatchers, admins, and owners.
However, Housecall Pro doesn’t offer marketing ROI reports, so users don’t have an easy way to tell which marketing channels or campaigns are performing well.
In contrast, ServiceTitan gives users in-depth insight into their marketing performance, allowing them to see which campaigns are producing the best ROI—and importantly, which aren’t. As a result, service businesses can focus their marketing dollars on the channels and campaigns that give them the best returns.
Facilitating Accountability Across Your Organization
Many service business owners are a part of trade organizations that teach best practices for operations and maintaining profitability in the service industries. But knowing best practices is only valuable if they’re implemented by your staff in day to day operations.
One of the features we offer in ServiceTitan (for which Housecall Pro has only partial capability) is the ability to create predefined steps for field techs and office staff to follow as they execute different types of jobs. These “gated workflows” help ensure that the best practices you want to put in place are actually used.
ServiceTitan users have also found that these workflows make training new staff easier because field technicians have predefined operating systems to follow, including details that hold staff accountable and create good customer experiences like wearing a mask or putting on shoe coverings before entering a customer’s home.
Mobile Features and Accessibility
Housecall Pro is an app-first platform. Like ServiceTitan, it works with both iOS and Android devices. However there are a number of critical mobile features that they lack (which ServiceTitan’s mobile app provides).
First, despite being an app-first platform, their app isn’t customized for tablets. It’s designed for a phone only, and the tablet app is just the phone app stretched out to fit the screen. This impacts both the ease of use for techs in the field and the experience of customers—neither of which are trivial things when you’re investing in an FSM software with mobile capabilities.
Second, they don’t have offline functionality. If your service tech is out of cell service range, they can’t use the fundamental tools and features they need to do their job. Whereas with ServiceTitan, technicians can switch into offline mode, and have access to everything they need in our mobile app—work order details, materials details and screenshots, and other relevant customer information.
Lastly, Housecall Pro lacks certain mobile features that help increase average ticket prices. For example, when techs present options to customers via their tablet, ServiceTitan allows them to display membership discounts that show customers what the price would be if they were to become a member. It helps to visually show customers the value of a maintenance agreement, which promotes higher close rates and increased revenues over the long term.
Customer Portal
Lastly, Housecall Pro’s customer portal is limited to only membership customers. Members can do basic tasks like update their credit card information, but there’s no way to allow new or non-membership customers to use their portal.
In contrast, ServiceTitan’s customer portal can be used with any customer, allowing them to access estimates they’ve received, update account information, and pay outstanding bills.
This both provides a more convenient customer experience, and gives businesses another way to collect on open receivables so they can put that money to use in other areas of their business.
To continue learning about the differences between ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro, check out our head to head comparison.
Note: ServiceTitan’s customer experience features also provide users the ability to communicate with customers via SMS messages and notifications, as well as show customers when techs will arrive through GPS tracking.
Key Differences Between Service Fusion and ServiceTitan
In our head to head comparison with Service Fusion, we wrote at length about the key areas of difference between our products, which break down into three main categories:
Automation capabilities
Mobile experience
Reporting functionality
Here we’ll provide a summary of each, including examples of specific features and an explanation of why they matter for service businesses.
Automation Capabilities
One of the greatest efficiency gains from adopting a field service management software is the ability to automate recurring tasks.
There are a number of automation features offered by ServiceTitan that are either only available in Service Fusion as a third party addon, or don’t have as extensive of functionality. Here are just a few examples:
Membership billing notifications: ServiceTitan has features to automatically notify members when their monthly payments are due, and allow them to pay online via the customer portal.
Automated reports: ServiceTitan users can schedule automated reports to be sent to their inbox on a recurring basis. For example, owners can have a report sent to them showing their weekly revenue every Friday. Or, office managers can have a timesheet report sent to their inbox every Tuesday.
Job booking automations: ServiceTitan operates as a complete CRM (customer relationship management system) for service businesses. This includes the automatic capture of name and address information for dispatchers when phone calls come in, call recordings for training and CSR accountability, as well as automated appointment confirmations for customers and day-of appointment notifications. We also offer automated online booking.
For business owners and staff alike, automation features save time, improve accountability, and allow service businesses to spend more time on the things that matter most (e.g. providing top notch customer support, executing more jobs, closing more unsold estimates, etc.).
Mobile Experience
Like ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro, Service Fusion offers a mobile app for techs to use in the field via their phone or tablet. However, in speaking with a number of previous Service Fusion users, we’ve learned that there are a couple areas where their mobile app is lacking.
First, the design and structure of the app isn’t very intuitive. Techs need to continually scroll and search to find the items they need when they’re on the job looking up parts or creating estimates. This can be frustrating and time consuming for techs when they’re feeling under pressure to provide a great customer experience, and also get to their next job on time.
In contrast, we’ve built ServiceTitan’s mobile app to be highly intuitive and easy for techs to use in the field. Techs can see an overview of everything they might need to access while on a specific job. And the app is structured so they can find things quickly and easily without having a lot of continuous scrolling. This significantly improves a tech’s experience and efficiency when they’re out in the field.
The other area Service Fusion’s mobile app is lacking is their estimate presentation. When presenting options to customers via a tablet, the options appear as basic line items. It’s not visually compelling or clear to customers about exactly what each option includes, which can make it more difficult for techs to close jobs—and also provide worse customer experiences.
ServiceTitan’s mobile app on the other hand has a visual pricebook that displays pictures of different equipment and services. It’s intuitive to click through, show customers options, and build customized estimates and Good Better Best proposals. And ultimately, the visual presentation and clarity about what each package includes makes for an improved customer experience and increases close rates.
Reporting Functionality
Lastly, Service Fusion offers reporting to its users, but similar to Housecall Pro their reporting features are less sophisticated than what ServiceTitan has to offer.
For example, Service Fusion reports don’t update in real-time as jobs are completed. So when office managers or business owners want to glance at their data, they first need to make sure that the reports they want to pull are up to date.
In ServiceTitan, all reports reflect live numbers which are continuously updated as actions and jobs are completed throughout day to day operations. This ensures that any time owners or management want to review a report, they’re seeing the most up to date picture of their data.
Plus, ServiceTitan users have additional capabilities to drill down into their data. In Service Fusion, when you see a number reported, you don’t have the ability to click into that number to see how it was calculated and double check it’s accuracy. You just have to hope and trust that it’s correct.
Whereas with ServiceTitan, you can click on a number in a report, and see exactly how that number was calculated, allowing you to confirm the accuracy of the data being reported and have full trust in your numbers. Owners and managers find this level of depth in our reporting to be invaluable.
Housecall Pro vs ServiceFusion vs ServiceTitan: Which Service Is Best For You?
The right field service software for you depends on your business’s specific wants and needs. As we mentioned above, mom and pop service businesses that just want some basic operational efficiency improvements can be a great fit for Housecall Pro or Service Fusion.
Alternatively, if your shop has ambitions to grow its market share and scale its operations, or if it desires deeper functionality in the features we’ve described throughout this post, ServiceTitan may be a better fit for you.
Beyond what we’ve described in this post, ServiceTitan provides nearly everything a service business needs to run and grow a successful business, from routing and time tracking, to inventory management, to accounting and payroll.
Discover how ServiceTitan can streamline your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a personalized demo of the software today.
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