Quick Answer
Pick Commusoft if you are a 5 to 30 engineer plumbing, heating or HVAC firm that lives or dies on quote-to-cash workflow and wants a mature mobile app. Expect about £97 per user per month on a 12-month contract, plus £500 to £5,000 in onboarding. Pick BigChange if you run mixed trades, multiple vans and need built-in vehicle tracking baked into the platform. Pricing is around £69 to £99 per vehicle per month, but the contract is the real cost; lock-ins of 3 to 5 years are normal. Pick Job Logic if PPM, asset-driven compliance certificates and commercial maintenance contracts are the bulk of your work. It is the cheapest entry point at roughly £45 per user per month, but you will run into bolt-on charges. None of them are perfect, and the switching cost between them is brutal, so the platform you pick in 2026 is the one you live with for at least three years.
Table of Contents
Commusoft
BigChange
Job LogicAt a glance
I have watched a lot of trades businesses pick the wrong FSM platform, and the pattern is always the same. They sit through a slick demo, fall for a feature they will use twice a year, and sign a contract they cannot get out of. Then they spend the next eighteen months either fighting the software or rebuilding their entire operation around its quirks.
Commusoft, BigChange and Job Logic dominate the mid-market FSM conversation for UK trades right now. They all promise to schedule your jobs, manage your engineers, handle invoicing and tie back to Xero or Sage. On the surface they look interchangeable. They are not.
This guide is built from real switching stories, public Capterra and Trustpilot reviews, current published pricing pages, and the gap nobody talks about: what these platforms actually cost you in productivity loss during the first three months of rollout. There is no affiliate fee paid to TrainAR by any of these vendors. Just the picture as honestly as I can paint it in mid-2026.
| What you need to know | Commusoft | BigChange | Job Logic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2006, London | 2013, Leeds | 2002, Birmingham |
| Best fit | Plumbing, heating, HVAC, 5 to 30 engineers | Multi-trade, fleet-heavy, 10 to 100 vehicles | PPM, commercial maintenance, compliance-led |
| Starting price | ~£97 per user per month | ~£69.95 per vehicle per month | ~£45 per user per month |
| Minimum commitment | 4 licences, 12 months | Typically 36 months | 12 months on Standard |
| AI engine | Ai:den (baseline), Ai:den+ coming soon | BigChange Lightning (JobReady, JobScribe, JobBrief) | No branded AI layer yet |
| Capterra rating | 4.7 / 5 (210+ reviews) | 4.5 / 5 (300+ reviews) | 4.3 / 5 (92+ reviews) |
How each platform actually works
Before pricing, before AI, before any of the fancy stuff, you need to understand the philosophy each platform was built around. That philosophy shapes every workflow you will ever run inside it.
Commusoft is a workflow product. The core insight is that the lifeblood of a service business is the customer journey, from first enquiry through quote, job, invoice and follow-up. Every screen is built around that journey. The mobile app is unusually polished for FSM, and engineers tend to adopt it without much resistance. It was founded in London in 2006 by Jason Morjaria and has stayed independent.
BigChange is a fleet product wearing FSM clothing. It started in Leeds in 2013 as JobWatch, which is still the name on the licence. Vehicle tracking is not a bolt-on, it is the spine of the platform. That makes BigChange brilliant if your operations director thinks in vans rather than jobs, and it is why facilities and security firms with thirty-plus vehicles default to it. It was acquired by Great Hill Partners in 2022.
Job Logic grew up around planned maintenance contracts and compliance. Asset registers, recurring service visits, certificate generation, customer portals for facilities managers, all of that is native. After acquiring Clik in 2024 they layered in a stronger compliance and certificate engine. If you spend most of your week renewing gas safety certificates, emergency lighting tests or fire alarm checks, Job Logic feels purpose-built.
2026 pricing reality check
None of these three vendors publish prices on their websites in the way you would actually buy. They all funnel you to a discovery call before quoting. That makes apples-to-apples comparison hard, so here is what the market is actually paying right now, pulled from public review sites, vendor pricing summary pages and trade community discussions.
Commusoft sits around £97 per user per month for Core, with Plus and Premium tiers above that. The minimum licence count is four, so the floor is roughly £388 a month or £4,656 a year before VAT. Onboarding and training is quoted separately at £500 to £5,000 depending on complexity. Monthly rolling licences are available for seasonal staff, which is unusual and useful if your headcount swings.
BigChange publishes £69.95 per vehicle per month for JobWatch and £99.95 for JobWatch Plus, with vehicle tracking at an additional £14.95 per vehicle if you want the tracker hardware. The pricing unit is the vehicle, not the user, which is a quirk that catches a lot of firms out. If you have engineers who hot-desk between vehicles, you can sometimes squeeze efficiency out of that. If you have engineers in personal vans you do not own, the maths gets uglier. The contract length is where the bill grows; 36-month minimums are standard and 5-year deals are common.
Job Logic is the cheapest entry point at roughly £45 per user per month on the Standard plan. Premium and Enterprise sit higher and unlock the compliance engine, asset register depth and customer portal. The catch is that features sold as standard during the demo, like automated reminders, can land in a paid Marketplace add-on after you sign. Several Capterra reviewers have called this out publicly.
AI scheduling head-to-head
This is the section that gets the most marketing noise in 2026, and where the gap between vendor claims and reality is widest. All three platforms are pushing AI as a differentiator. Here is what each one actually delivers today.
Commusoft Ai:den
Ai:den is Commusoft's baseline AI layer, integrated into the platform and live for current customers. It handles task automation: drafting customer follow-up emails, summarising long job notes, suggesting invoice line items based on parts used. It also powers assisted scheduling, where the system proposes appointment slots based on travel time, technician skills and customer preferences. The proposed slots are suggestions, not auto-applied.
The more advanced Ai:den+ add-on, which is meant to recommend the most profitable routes by analysing technician shifts, predicted travel time and profitability goals across the whole schedule, was still flagged as "coming soon" on the Commusoft plans page as of April 2026. If you are buying Commusoft today for its AI roadmap, buy the platform on its current capabilities and treat Ai:den+ as a bonus when it lands.
BigChange Lightning
Lightning is the most ambitious of the three on paper. It is positioned as an AI intelligence layer sitting on top of JobWatch, with four named agents. JobReady reviews site history, technician skills and required materials, then briefs the engineer automatically before each job. JobScribe transcribes job documentation in real time from voice input on the mobile app. JobBrief produces a customer-facing summary after every job covering what was done, what was found and recommended next steps. JustAsk is a natural-language business intelligence agent; you ask a question in plain English and it returns the answer pulled from your data.
BigChange demoed Lightning at events through 2025 and rolled the first agents to existing customers through 2026. Customer feedback on real-world accuracy is still early. JobScribe in particular is impressive when it works and brittle when the engineer is in a loud plant room.
Job Logic
Job Logic does not have a branded AI layer in the same sense. The platform has rules-based automation, smart scheduling that respects engineer certifications and asset locations, and an automated certificate engine that pulls forward expiry dates and triggers reminders. That is useful for compliance work, but it is not AI in the LLM sense the marketing pages are starting to use. If you want generative AI baked into the dispatch and customer comms, you are not buying it from Job Logic in 2026.
Commusoft deep dive
Commusoft is the platform I see chosen most often by 10 to 30 engineer plumbing, heating and HVAC firms, and there is a reason. The mobile app is the strongest of the three for the engineer experience, the office workflow follows a clear quote-to-cash arc, and the company has been in this niche since 2006.
Their stock control module is well thought out, the proposal builder for boiler replacement quotes is a standout, and the customer portal works for both domestic and small commercial accounts. The integration with Xero is mature and reliable, and the Sage integration came of age over the last two years.
The mature workflow comes with a cost. Setup is hard, and the learning curve for office staff is steeper than the demo suggests. Custom Heat, a heating firm that grew from 60 staff in 2020 to over 100 by 2023, has been a Commusoft customer since 2016 and credits the platform with the operational scaffolding to grow. WPJ Heating has been on Commusoft for fifteen-plus years. These are not isolated examples.
| Where Commusoft wins | Where Commusoft hurts |
|---|---|
| Best-in-class mobile app for engineers | Four-user minimum makes it expensive for very small firms |
| Workflow-first design that maps to real service jobs | Setup and onboarding can run to £5,000 on top of subscription |
| Strong stock control and proposal builder | Reporting flexibility lags BigChange |
| Mature Xero and Sage integrations | Limited fleet tracking compared to BigChange |
| Independent UK company, London HQ | Customer support response time varies by tier |
| 15,000+ customers gives them real depth of trade knowledge | Ai:den+ still flagged as coming soon |
BigChange deep dive
BigChange is the platform I see at facilities firms, mixed-trade contractors, security and fire alarm installers, and any business where the day-to-day reality is more about routing vans than tracking jobs. JobWatch is the product name, BigChange is the company. The two get used interchangeably.
The strengths are real. Vehicle tracking is integrated, not bolted on. The schedule respects driver hours, traffic and vehicle restrictions. The dispatch board scales to hundreds of vehicles. JobScribe and the wider Lightning AI suite are interesting and ship roadmap features faster than the other two. BigChange runs an active user community with events that customers actually rate.
The weaknesses are also real. Three patterns come up repeatedly in independent reviews. First, the sales process oversells what the platform can do for niche workflows, so onboarding becomes a stress test of the gap. Second, the contracts are long, often three to five years, and getting out early is hard. Third, smaller domestic-only firms find the breadth of features overwhelming and the per-vehicle pricing model awkward.
| Where BigChange wins | Where BigChange hurts |
|---|---|
| Integrated vehicle tracking, not a bolt-on | Per-vehicle pricing penalises single-engineer vans |
| Scales smoothly to 50, 100, 200+ vehicles | 3-5 year contracts are standard, lock-in is heavy |
| Lightning AI is the most ambitious roadmap of the three | UI feels dated to people coming from Commusoft |
| Strong customer success team based in the UK | Some users report long times to fully operationalise |
| Flexible job grouping and resource sharing | Email deliverability has been flagged in reviews |
| 2,000+ UK businesses, large peer community | Add-on charges for accounting sync are common |
Job Logic deep dive
Job Logic is the most affordable entry point of the three and the strongest by some margin on planned preventative maintenance, asset registers and compliance certificate generation. After the Clik acquisition in 2024 the compliance engine got noticeably stronger; you can build bespoke certificate templates with mandatory fields, validation rules and logic checks. For gas safety, fire alarm, emergency lighting, fixed wire testing and similar recurring compliance work, that matters.
The platform sells well to facilities maintenance contractors who service commercial customer portfolios. The customer portal lets your clients log jobs themselves, see asset history and pull compliance certificates, which removes a real chunk of admin from your office team.
The trouble is that the mobile app is the weakest of the three. Picture uploads in particular have been a long-standing complaint, with engineers reporting slow uploads on weak signal and near-impossible uploads on mobile data. The custom reporting engine pushes most power users out to Excel, and customer support response times have a chequered history in public reviews. Some firms also report that features they expected as standard during the sale turn out to be Marketplace add-ons after the contract is signed.
| Where Job Logic wins | Where Job Logic hurts |
|---|---|
| Cheapest entry point at ~£45 per user per month | Mobile app picture uploads are slow and unreliable |
| Best-in-class compliance certificate engine | Custom reporting is weak, expect Excel exports |
| Strong PPM and asset register depth | Customer support response times can be slow |
| Useful customer portal for facilities clients | Marketplace add-on charges catch firms out |
| Clik compliance engine layered in after the 2024 acquisition | No real LLM-based AI offering today |
| Supports 50+ engineer teams without breaking | UI feels clunky to firms switching from Commusoft |
Head-to-head feature comparison
Strip out the marketing language and these are the categories I would weight if I were buying today. Each cell is a working judgement, not a vendor score, based on my read of the platforms across the last twelve months.
| Feature | Commusoft | BigChange | Job Logic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile app quality | Excellent | Good | Adequate |
| Office workflow design | Excellent | Good | Good |
| Scheduling and dispatch | Very Good | Excellent | Very Good |
| Vehicle tracking and routing | Basic | Excellent (native) | Basic |
| Quote and proposal builder | Excellent | Good | Good |
| Stock and parts management | Excellent | Good | Good |
| PPM and contract maintenance | Good | Very Good | Excellent |
| Compliance certificate engine | Good | Good | Excellent |
| Asset register depth | Good | Good | Excellent |
| Customer portal | Very Good | Good | Excellent |
| Xero or Sage integration | Excellent | Good (extra cost) | Very Good |
| AI layer maturity (2026) | Live (Ai:den) | Live (Lightning) | Limited |
| Reporting flexibility | Good | Very Good | Weak |
| Contract flexibility | 12 months, monthly rolling option | 3 to 5 years standard | 12 months on Standard |
| Best for company size | 5 to 30 engineers | 15 to 100+ vehicles | 10 to 50+ engineers |
The real switching experience
Most head-to-head FSM comparisons skip the bit that actually decides whether you regret your choice; what it feels like to move. I have spoken to firms who have moved between every pair of these platforms in the last two years. A few patterns repeat.
Migrating customer data, job history and asset records is where projects stall. None of these three platforms have a one-click import for the others. You will hand-build CSV exports, clean them in Excel, and accept that some history simply will not transfer. Plan for three to four weeks of office time on a clean cutover, and double that if you also want historical jobs in the new system.
Engineer adoption is the second silent killer. If you migrate during peak season your engineers will hate it, your office team will hate it, and the cost of the rollout will not be the subscription fee but the dropped jobs and missed compliance dates. Aim for January, June or August. Avoid October to December at all costs.
Integrations break. Xero connection, Stripe payments, Mailchimp follow-ups, your accountant's reporting dashboard, your customer portal, your quote PDF templates, all of those need to be rebuilt. Budget two weeks for integration work and accept that the first month on a new platform will see at least one invoice land in the wrong place.
If you are running a sole-trader or sub-five engineer business, none of these three are likely right for you yet. The right starting point is a lighter-touch platform that costs less and locks you in less. See our breakdown of free and low-cost job management software for UK trades for the alternatives at that scale.
And if you are scaling past 50 engineers and starting to feel platform pain at the top end, the calculus changes again. Larger firms tend to bring ServiceTitan into the mix, which we covered in our ServiceTitan vs Commusoft vs SimPRO scaling comparison. For a wider view of what software stack to run at each stage of business, see our trades business software stacks by company size guide.
What tradespeople are saying
Real reviews from verified Capterra accounts, pulled in mid-2026. The positive and the critical, side by side, because a balanced view is the only useful view when you are about to sign a 12 to 60 month contract.
Recommended videos
Independent walkthroughs and vendor demos worth watching before you book a sales call. Skip the marketing reel and look for tutorials by people actually using the platform day to day.
Commusoft tutorial for beginners 2026
Master Field Service Management
BigChange: The complete job management platform
BigChange official channel
Joblogic review, tutorial and demo (2026)
How to use Joblogic
BigChange feature focus: scheduling
BigChange official channel
Joblogic route scheduler walkthrough
Joblogic official channel
BigChange case study: The McDougall Group
BigChange official channel
Frequently asked questions
Job Logic on Standard, on a like-for-like 10-engineer setup, lands around £15,000 over three years before add-ons. Commusoft Core lands around £36,000 once you include onboarding. BigChange on a 10-vehicle 36-month deal lands around £31,500 plus tracking. The cheapest sticker is not always the cheapest year three; bolt-on costs can close the gap fast.
Not easily. Standard BigChange contracts run 36 to 60 months and the early termination clause typically requires you to pay out the balance. A handful of customers in public reviews have flagged this as the single biggest regret of their FSM decision. Read the contract carefully before signing, and negotiate the term down to 24 months if you can.
The base Ai:den layer is live and useful for email drafting and note summarisation. Assisted scheduling is solid for bulk planned maintenance. Ai:den+ is the more ambitious AI-driven routing layer and it is still "coming soon" as of April 2026, so do not buy Commusoft on a feature you cannot use yet. Buy it on what works today and treat Ai:den+ as future upside.
This is where Job Logic shines. The compliance engine, strengthened after the Clik acquisition, lets you build bespoke certificate templates with mandatory fields and validation rules. CP12, fire alarm, emergency lighting, fixed wire testing, all of it can be set up to auto-renew, alert before expiry and pull through to the customer portal. It is the single biggest reason to pick Job Logic over the other two.
Commusoft has the most mature Xero integration; invoices, payments and customer records sync cleanly. Job Logic syncs invoices and contacts but is a less seamless experience. BigChange syncs to Xero too, but it is one of the integrations customers most often flag as an extra charge that was not made clear during the sale. Always ask, in writing, whether the Xero connector is included in your quoted price.
If you have ten plus vehicles and a busy customer comms inbox, JobBrief alone could save several hours of admin a week per engineer. JobScribe is hit and miss in noisy environments. JustAsk is the most novel piece. Worth the upgrade if you commit to the workflow change. Not worth it if your engineers will fight a voice-driven note workflow.
Commusoft, by quite some margin, in the 5 to 30 engineer range. The mobile app, the quote-to-cash workflow and the depth of plumbing and heating-specific templates make it the default. Job Logic picks up firms that lean heavily into commercial maintenance contracts. BigChange picks up firms with bigger fleets or those running multi-trade.
Not really. All three are powerful enough that they need an internal owner who understands them. Plan for one office-based person to become the platform admin and to spend their first three months learning the system properly. The firms who skip this and try to roll out FSM as a side project are the same firms who write angry reviews two years later.
My verdict
If I am running a plumbing, heating or HVAC firm with somewhere between 5 and 30 engineers, I am picking Commusoft. The mobile app is the best of the three, the quote-to-cash workflow is the most polished, and the 12-month contract gives me room to change my mind. Ai:den is good enough today to take real load off the office. Ai:den+ will be a bonus when it lands.
If I am running a multi-trade firm with 15 plus vehicles, mixed engineer roles, or a serious commercial van fleet, I am picking BigChange. The integrated vehicle tracking, the dispatch board, the Lightning AI roadmap and the depth of fleet features make the longer contract worth it. I am also reading the contract clauses three times and pushing for 24 months instead of 36.
If compliance certificates and planned maintenance contracts are the spine of my business, and the per-user price really matters at the 12-month decision point, I am picking Job Logic. I am also budgeting for the marketplace add-ons I will inevitably need, and I am setting realistic expectations about the mobile app and custom reporting.
Whichever way you go, three things will save you most of the pain. First, negotiate the contract term down before signing. Second, plan the cutover for a quiet month. Third, give one person inside the business the explicit job of owning the platform. Get those three right and the platform you pick matters less than the discipline with which you adopt it.
