Aspire vs Jobber for Landscaping: Which One Fits Your Crew?

Here's the tension every growing landscaping business hits eventually: Aspire is purpose-built for landscaping but costs more than some crews make in a week. Jobber is affordable and easy to learn but wasn't designed with your industry in mind. Both get recommended constantly. Both have loyal users. And both will cost you real money — in subscription fees or in features you're missing — if you pick the wrong one.

I've spent weeks digging into both platforms, talking to landscaping operators who've used them, and cross-referencing review data from G2 and Capterra. This isn't a feature-list dump. It's a recommendation for real landscaping businesses trying to make a smart call.

If you want the broader landscape (pun intended), check out our best landscaping business software roundup. But if your decision has narrowed to these two, keep reading.

Who Each One Is Built For

This is the most important section of this article, because the right choice depends less on features and more on where your business actually is right now.

Aspire — now owned by ServiceTitan — was built specifically for commercial landscaping and field service companies doing $1M+ in annual revenue. Their ideal customer runs multiple crews, juggles maintenance contracts alongside install work, and needs granular job costing down to the labor-hour level. Aspire's marketing talks about "growing 2x faster than competitors," and that language tells you exactly who they're after: companies that already have revenue and want to scale operations, not startups figuring out their first CRM.

The platform includes modules for estimating, scheduling, purchasing, invoicing, equipment tracking, and real-time reporting — all tailored to how landscaping companies actually operate. If you run 10+ crews and manage commercial properties, Aspire speaks your language.

Jobber is a general-purpose field service management platform built for small service businesses across dozens of industries — landscaping, HVAC, cleaning, plumbing, pest control, you name it. Their sweet spot is the 1-to-15-person operation that needs professional quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and client communication without a steep learning curve.

Jobber doesn't pretend to be landscaping-specific. It's a horizontal tool that happens to work well for small landscaping crews because the core workflows — quote, schedule, dispatch, invoice, get paid — are universal across service businesses. With over 200,000 service pros on the platform and a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Capterra (based on 900+ reviews), Jobber has clearly nailed the small-business experience.

The bottom line: Aspire is built for landscaping companies. Jobber is built for small service businesses. Those are different things, and the distinction matters more than any feature comparison.

Estimating & Job Costing

This is where Aspire earns its price tag — and where Jobber's generalist approach shows its limits.

Aspire: Built for Landscape Math

Aspire's estimating engine was designed by people who understand landscaping operations. You get landscape-specific material calculators, assembly-based estimating (build a "kit" for a paver patio install and reuse it across bids), and production rate tracking that ties labor hours to specific service types.

The real power is in job costing. Aspire tracks actual costs against estimated costs in real time — materials, labor, subcontractors, equipment — and shows you job profitability before the invoice even goes out. For a company running 30 maintenance contracts and a handful of install projects simultaneously, this is the difference between guessing at margins and actually knowing them.

Aspire also handles multi-phase projects well. A $200K commercial install with separate phases for hardscape, planting, and irrigation? Aspire lets you estimate, schedule, and track costs for each phase independently while rolling everything up into a single project view.

Users on Capterra (where Aspire holds a 4.5 out of 5 rating across 214 reviews) consistently highlight estimating and job costing as the platform's strongest features. The most common praise: "We finally know which jobs are actually profitable."

Jobber: Gets the Job Done, Barely

Jobber's quoting is functional. You can create professional-looking estimates, add line items with descriptions and pricing, and send them to clients for digital approval. It's clean, fast, and clients love how easy it is to accept a quote from their phone.

But that's about where it ends for landscaping-specific estimating. There are no material calculators. No assembly templates. No production rate libraries. No real-time job costing that compares estimated vs. actual costs at the line-item level. Jobber's reporting will tell you revenue by job, but it won't tell you that your mulch install crew is consistently 20% over budget on labor because your production rates are off.

For a two-person crew doing residential mow-and-blow, this doesn't matter. You know your costs intuitively. But the moment you start running install projects or managing multiple crews with different cost structures, Jobber's estimating becomes a spreadsheet supplement rather than a replacement.

Winner: Aspire, decisively. If job costing and estimating accuracy are your primary pain points, Aspire is in a different league. This is the single biggest reason landscaping companies upgrade from tools like Jobber — they need to stop guessing at margins.

Scheduling & Dispatch

Here's where the comparison gets more nuanced, because "better scheduling" depends entirely on what your days look like.

Jobber: Fast, Simple, Daily

Jobber's scheduling interface is one of the best in the small-business field service category. Drag-and-drop calendar, color-coded by crew or job type, with a map view that helps you route efficiently. You can build a full day's schedule in minutes, and your crew sees updates on their phones instantly.

For daily scheduling — "Mike's crew goes to these four properties today, Sarah's crew handles these three" — Jobber is hard to beat. It's intuitive enough that most owners have it figured out within a day of signing up. The mobile app is clean, crews can clock in/out from the field, and clients get automatic notifications when someone's on the way.

Jobber also handles recurring jobs well, which matters for maintenance contracts. Set it and forget it — the schedule populates automatically, and you just handle exceptions.

Aspire: Built for Complexity

Aspire's scheduling handles things Jobber simply can't. Multi-day projects with crew assignments that shift based on phase. Route optimization across commercial properties spread across a metro area. Resource allocation that accounts for equipment availability, not just crew availability.

If you're managing 15 crews across a mix of maintenance routes and install projects, Aspire gives you the visibility to see who's where, what's behind schedule, and how to reallocate resources on the fly. It's a dispatching command center, not just a calendar.

The trade-off? Aspire's scheduling has a steeper learning curve. Multiple users on review sites mention that initial setup takes weeks, not days. You're configuring production rates, crew capabilities, equipment assignments, and service territories before the schedule starts working the way it should.

Winner: Depends on your operation. For crews under 5 people doing mostly residential work, Jobber's simplicity is a feature, not a limitation. For operations with 10+ crews running mixed service types across a wide territory, Aspire's scheduling depth justifies the learning curve.

Pricing Reality

This is where we follow our own framework for evaluating field service software: transparency matters. A tool you can't afford is a tool that doesn't work.

Jobber: Transparent and Tiered

Jobber publishes pricing on their website, which is already a point in their favor. Current plans:

• Core: $49/month (1 user) — basic scheduling, invoicing, client management
• Connect: $119/month (up to 5 users) — adds quoting, automated follow-ups, online booking
• Grow: $199/month (up to 15 users) — adds job forms, quote follow-ups, two-way text
• Plus: Starting at $599/month (15+ users) — adds advanced reporting, dedicated support

Annual billing drops these prices by roughly 25-35%, bringing Core down to around $25/month and Connect to around $89/month.

Real cost for a 5-person crew: You're looking at the Connect plan at $119/month, or roughly $89/month on annual billing. Call it $1,000-$1,400/year all-in. That's manageable for almost any operating landscaping business.

Real cost for a 15-person operation: The Grow plan at $199/month, or the Plus plan at $599/month if you need the advanced features. Annual cost: $2,400-$7,200/year. Still reasonable, but the jump to Plus is significant.

Aspire: Call for Pricing (Red Flag)

Aspire does not publish pricing. Their website says "pricing varies based on company size, complexity, and what solution best fits your business." You have to talk to a sales rep.

Based on industry reports and user discussions, Aspire typically starts at $500-$700/month for smaller implementations and can run $1,500-$3,000+/month for larger operations. That's $6,000-$36,000+ annually. There are also implementation fees that users report ranging from several thousand dollars for onboarding and training.

Per our evaluation framework, we flag any software that hides pricing as a yellow card. It doesn't mean the product is bad — it means the vendor knows the number will cause sticker shock and wants a sales conversation to justify it first. That's a strategy, not a service.

Real cost for a 5-person crew: Likely $500-$700/month minimum. That's $6,000-$8,400/year — roughly 5-6x what Jobber would cost for the same team size. For a business doing $250K-$400K in annual revenue, that's a significant line item.

Real cost for a 15-person operation: Expect $1,000-$2,000/month or more, plus implementation. $12,000-$24,000+/year. For a $1M+ company, that's 1-2% of revenue — expensive but defensible if the job costing features prevent even one bad estimate per month.

Winner: Jobber on transparency and value for small teams. Aspire's pricing only makes sense at scale. If Aspire's job costing saves you from two underpriced $50K contracts per year, it pays for itself. But that math doesn't work when you're doing $300K in revenue.

Customer Support & Onboarding

A quick note here, because it matters more than people think.

Jobber's support is consistently praised in reviews. Live chat, phone support, and a knowledge base that actually answers questions. Most users are fully operational within a week. The platform is designed to be self-serve, and it shows.

Aspire's onboarding is a different animal. Users report multi-week implementation processes, required training sessions (sometimes at additional cost), and a learning curve that can frustrate teams used to simpler tools. Once it's configured and your team is trained, users generally love it. Getting there is the hard part. Several Capterra reviewers specifically call out slow support response times and the complexity of initial setup as pain points.

If you're comparing Jobber to Housecall Pro specifically, we've got a dedicated breakdown for that comparison as well.

The Verdict

I'm going to be direct, because hedging doesn't help you make a decision.

If your landscaping business does under $500K in annual revenue:

Use Jobber. It's not close. At this stage, your bottleneck isn't job costing accuracy — it's getting organized, looking professional, and not dropping leads. Jobber does all of that for $100-$200/month. Aspire at $500+/month would eat margins you don't have yet, and the implementation time alone would cost you weeks of productivity.

If your landscaping business does $1M+ with multiple crews:

Aspire starts making real sense. At this level, a 5% margin improvement on a $1.5M book of business is $75K — more than enough to justify Aspire's annual cost. The estimating precision, job costing visibility, and multi-crew scheduling capabilities address real problems that Jobber wasn't designed to solve. You've outgrown the generalist tool.

If you're in the $500K-$1M range:

This is where people get burned. You're big enough to feel Jobber's limitations — especially around estimating and job costing — but not yet generating enough revenue for Aspire's cost to feel comfortable. My advice: stay on Jobber, supplement with a good spreadsheet system for job costing, and make the jump to Aspire when you have the revenue base and operational complexity to justify it. The worst decision is overspending on software that requires three months of implementation when your business needs that time and money focused on growth.

One more thing: don't let the "purpose-built for landscaping" marketing convince you that a general tool can't work. Thousands of landscaping businesses run successfully on Jobber. The question isn't whether Jobber can work for landscaping — it's whether your specific operation has outgrown what it offers.

Both are solid platforms. The right one is the one that matches where your business is today, not where you hope it'll be in three years.

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Looking for more options? Check out our full best landscaping business software roundup for additional picks across every budget and business size.