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If you’re considering purchasing field service management software and want to find out more about what Commusoft offers, then you’re in the right place.
When it comes to revealing their software, Commusoft are very guarded, providing restricted opportunities for prospective customers to see how it operates.
To make life easy for you we’ve created this review, comparing some of Commusoft’s best and weakest features with a detailed comparison of how it stacks up against a popular alternative, Payaca.
For transparency this blog has been written by a member of the Payaca team, however, we have endeavoured to make our review as balanced as possible.
If you want to get a better idea of some of the other quoting solutions out there and how they compare, check out our Tradify alternatives blog.
If you want to know how much Commusoft costs, you may find it difficult to find prices. This is because Commusoft keep their prices hidden until you book a call with them.
According to the Commusoft users we’ve spoken to, a typical starting price is £80 per month for two users (single-user accounts are unavailable).
Packages are also sold by the year, meaning you will be tied into paying £960 for a whole year, with no way of exiting early after your first 2 weeks.
These packages are split into 4 categories: Go Paperless, Customer Journey, Automation and Enterprise. Each package offers the features of the level below plus some further perks, and prices increase with each upgrade.
Commusoft also charge for mandatory onboarding and training. These prices can vary, but from the conversations we've had, these prices typically cost anywhere from £1500 to multiple thousands of pounds (although prices do vary).
In general, Commusoft’s approach with pricing is to shift many of their costs onto their customers. For example, Commusoft recently updated their user interface and moved their customers across to the updated UI. As part of this process, customers were charged a mandatory fee.
They are also introducing a new sales feature which they are charging for. When considered together these costs can add up to a lot of money.
Payaca’s prices are split into 3 categories, Core, Business and Scale.
On a core plan with a single-user account, you will pay £79 per month or £790 for a year - meaning you get two months free. For each additional user, the pro subscription costs a further £30.
The Payaca Business plan is priced at £499 per month with unlimited users. The yearly subscription costs £4990.
The scale programme works differently to other Payaca plans offering a highly customised experience combined with one to one consulting and optimisation meetings with Matt and Luke. This plan starts at 49,990, but prices are negotiated on a case by case basis.
Within any subscription, you can also set up service plans.
These are charged based on the number of customers you have signed up - unless you're on the scale programme, in which case it's included. The first 5 are free, after that, it’s £20 for anywhere between 6 and 100 customers, then £50 for 101 - 500, £100 for 501 - 1000 and £200 for over 1000.
Commusoft provides structured training and support. This is usually conducted via video calls and digital demos. It is possible to get in-person training, however, this does cost extra.
Onboarding training is mandatory and must be paid for, with some users reporting paying multiple thousands of pounds.
Commusoft also has a dedicated help guide page with information on how to use the software in specific use cases.
Further support is provided via email.
If you want to try the software before you buy you will not be able to do so unless you contact the customer support team. Commusoft have no advertised free trial.
Even if you just want to see their demo video you will need to enter your email address and phone number.
Training and support with Payaca is similar to Commusoft - the key difference being that with Payaca paid training is not mandatory.
With Payaca you can sign up for a 7-day free trial where you will have access to all Payaca’s features.
Before you buy a subscription, a free initial demo is available. This will go through how to use the software and help fit it to your needs. Once you do sign up, further training is available.
For more exclusive highly specialised training, there is the option to pay for this service with prices negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Furthermore, Payaca has an extensive bank of freely accessible support articles and videos that will walk you through how to use and optimise all Payaca’s features.
If you do have an issue you can reach customer support via email, intercom or over the phone if the problem can’t be resolved straight away.
Commusoft allows you to create three types of invoices; additional invoices, interim invoices, and final invoices. Interim invoices are used for staged invoicing and additional invoices allow you to add extra costs to a project.
Like in Payaca, designing quotes in Commusoft is straightforward. Rather than building the quote from scratch, you can import all the data from your saved job directly into the quote saving you from having to duplicate it.
You can also attach any photographs or relevant files below the quote.
In-quote item images along with some other features are only available if you pay for their new premium sales plan additionally to any of their other packages.
When it comes to quoting and invoicing, Payaca and Commusoft offer many of the same features. Within Payaca you can create templates, send invoices and attach item images and files as you can with Commusoft.
You can also send change proposals and follow-up invoices in Payaca as you can in Commusoft.
What sets Payaca apart is the ability to add interactive multiple choice and optional extras within the quote as well as using in-quote images at no extra cost.
These features make it far easier to sell high-value products and increase quote conversion.
The quotes produced by Payaca have been described as market-leading by many of their customers.
Commusoft has a good selection of field service capabilities, most notably their vehicle and time-tracking functionality.
Within the software, you have the ability to live-track your field team as they travel to a job. You can also clock in and clock out using the Commusoft app which allows you to easily calculate costs according to an hourly rate.
One capability that really marks them out is the ability to enter a postcode and the software will let you know when, according to your calendar, you are going to be in that area, making booking jobs together far more simple.
Where it lacks is on big jobs where you need to assign multiple users. Within Commusoft you can only assign one user to any event, a limitation that you won’t find with Payaca.
Like Commusoft, Payaca provides a mobile and tablet app, available on Apple and IOS.
Although Payaca do not yet have vehicle tracking, it does have dedicated technician accounts. These allow for seamless communication between the field team and admin staff in the office.
You can also control the visibility of job data, with the ability to hide and show relevant information to your field team.
Automations within Commusoft can be used to complete a number of different tasks.
These include:
These are activated by choosing the automation and turning it on or off.
Payaca’s automations are flexible and powerful.
Within Payaca you can create highly customised automations that can be designed to fit numerous different parameters.
For example, you can set up payment reminders that will automatically remind all recorded customers to pay 7 days after the job is marked as complete. This reminder can be set to be ongoing.
Furthermore, you can also set exceptions so that the automation won’t run in certain instances. You might for example want customers with a certain tag on their account to not receive reminders.
What Payaca allows is for you to build custom automations that can fit specific user requirements rather than ready built systems that can not be adapted to specific user cases.
This is only scratching the surface of what Payaca’s automations can do. We highly recommend checking out the automations page on the Payaca website or giving our video on automations a watch.
Commusoft use a drag-and-drop calendar or diary.
Within this view, you can see all your upcoming, in progress and completed jobs. You can easily see each engineer's diary, including what jobs are due that day. These are all visible in one place with each engineer's itinerary displayed one below the other.
You can also easily see a more expanded view of a single engineer's work by hovering the mouse over a job in the diary.
Filters are also available, allowing you to focus your view on individual technicians, by skill (ie. if you’re doing an install or maintenance, etc) or according to different time frames (daily, weekly, monthly).
Commusoft are also introducing a new sales pipeline feature, designed to help businesses with their customer journeys. This feature is remarkably similar to Payaca’s pipeline but lacks some of the qualities of the original.
Furthermore, this package is charged additionally to a standard subscription.
Payaca also have a calendar feature where users can see all their customers and ongoing projects. This works similarly to the Commusoft calendar.
Where Payaca stands apart is in its pipeline and table view, which have been carefully designed to help manage a business's customer journeys and process new jobs.
Each stage of the pipeline allows you to see how a project is progressing. These steps include: ‘new lead’, ‘proposal sent’, ‘proposal accepted’, ‘invoiced, paid’, and ‘expired’.
Within this view, you can move a job through the different stages by manually dragging and dropping or you can set up automations to progress work through the pipeline automatically.
All this functionality is included within all Payaca subscriptions at no extra cost.
Both Payaca and Commusoft have an extensive list of features and capabilities, not all of these are covered in this article but some additional features of note are the following:
Both Payaca and Commusoft have a feature that allows you to embed a booking portal into your website. This allows your customers to book into your calendar directly.
Tags are a feature unique to Payaca and can be used to categorise or mark different jobs. These tags can then be used in conjunction was automations and other features to better manage ongoing work.
Data analytics is available with both Commusoft and Payaca. This feature allows you to see all the important data relating to your account. Information such as the number of accepted quotes, profits and timesheet data.
Payaca also includes tag analytics, which allows you to analyse data relating to tags and jobs that have been categorised a certain way.
With Payaca and Commusoft you can integrate your account with accounting add-ons such as Quickbooks, Xero and Zapier meaning all your data passes seamlessly between the two.
In some reviews, Commusoft’s integration have been reported to be unreliable so you may want to bear this in mind if you plan on using them.
Both Payaca and Commusoft also have Stripe integrations which allow businesses to take payments easily.
When viewed side by side, the main difference that really stands out between Commusoft and Payaca is transparency.
Both offer solutions that provide significant value to any service business. The difference with Payaca is that we have made it as easy as possible to try out the software and see if it fits your business.
It may be that Commusoft provides all the features you need, but it’s difficult to commit to any provider if you haven’t tried it yourself.
With Payaca you can try the free trial, give the features a go and see if it works for you. You can even start on a monthly subscription if you want more time to see if it fits without committing long-term.
This commitment to transparency and our confidence in the quality of the software speaks for itself. We’re sure that if you try Payaca, you’ll love it and if it’s not for you that's just fine too. Ultimately we want you to have the best solution for your needs.
If you want to give Payaca a go you can sign up for a free trial today, no card details required.
We offer a free trial of all our features, no credit card required. Setting up takes just 30 seconds.
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