There are two completely different kinds of software sold to you under this heading, and telling them apart is worth more than any feature grid.
The first kind is a shop management system or a field service platform: written around a front counter, a bay, a service writer, a dispatcher moving a crew between addresses. Those products are older, deeper and much better funded. They also assume a division of labour you do not have, because you are the counter, the technician and the dispatcher, and the only screen on the job is the one in your pocket.
The second kind is what this page calls a van tool: a small product, usually built in the last few years, often by one or two people, priced for a single operator and sold on the phone being the whole thing rather than a companion to somebody else’s desktop. Six of the thirteen below are van tools. On this query they are the real competition, and until this page was rewritten it did not contain a single one of them.
Every claim about a product other than Fixty is a sentence from that company’s own website, with the link and the date it was read sitting under it. Where a company’s own pages did not answer a question, the entry says we could not confirm it rather than filling the gap in. Silence on a website is not a missing feature and this page never reads it as one.
The six products most of these lists leave out
Search this query and the results are dominated by shop management systems, because those companies have marketing budgets and a decade of links. The products people in this trade actually end up using are smaller and quieter, and six of them are on this page: Trackara Pro, QuoteIQ, ARI, Orderry, Mobile Mechanic Hub and Deelo. Four were added to this list on the day somebody finally ran the search instead of assuming the answer.
They share a shape. One flat or very low price. No seats to buy. A phone app that is the product rather than a companion. And, in four of the six cases, at least one capability that the expensive platforms charge a lot more for: route sequencing, van level stock, offline working, a phone number of your own.
They also share a weakness worth naming, because it is the thing that will actually bite you: they are young. Roadmaps here are short, and more than one capability that reads as shipped on a marketing page turns out to be in progress when you open the roadmap. Ask, before you migrate, whether the specific thing you are buying it for exists today.
Every one of these can send an estimate. That is not the question
Line thirteen products up on features and they blur. Digital estimates: all thirteen. Every one of them will take money in some form. A category where every product does the obvious thing is a category where the feature grid has stopped being useful.
What still separates them is a single assumption, and each company states it themselves. AutoLeap writes for a mechanic working from a van rather than a shop. Tekmetric describes its phone app as carrying a service adviser and a technician from the curb to the bay. Shopmonkey ships the technician app under its own name and leaves owners and service writers in the web app. ServiceTitan puts work order creation in the office on a desktop application and in the field on a mobile app.
Read those four sentences next to each other and half the ranking above stops being an opinion. Three of them describe a division of labour: someone at the front, someone in the back. That division is exactly the thing a mobile mechanic does not have, and no amount of feature parity fixes it. The six van tools do not have that problem, which is why they are all above the shop platforms here, including the ones that are cheaper and better funded.
Where Fixty loses, stated plainly
Route optimization: Fixty does not do it. Trackara Pro sequences the run and drops parts pickups into it, Deelo orders the day and hands off to maps, Jobber generates routes for a whole crew, Housecall Pro maps routes across a crew, ServiceTitan publishes optimized technician routing. If your day is eight stops across a metro area, that gap is real and it is a reason to pick one of them.
Parts on the shelf: Fixty tracks parts on a job, not stock in the van. Trackara Pro, ARI and Orderry all publish van or shop level inventory, and Orderry goes as far as reserving a specific part against a specific job. Four of the shop platforms publish it too.
Price: Fixty is not the cheap option here and this page will not pretend otherwise. Four products below it cost less, one of them costs nothing, and one of them is a flat rate covering every feature they sell. If the deciding question is the monthly number, Fixty loses it.
Offline: Fixty now ships native iPhone and Android apps, but the app still needs a signal. Trackara Pro is sold as working offline and syncing later, and a mechanic who works in underground garages and rural driveways should weigh that.
A second person, and the books: Fixty is one mechanic in one workspace by design, and has no QuickBooks or Xero integration today. Almost every other product here publishes multi user support, and several publish an accounting sync. The day you hire a helper is the day Fixty stops fitting, and that is a design decision rather than a roadmap item.
If you want a free app
Two products on this page publish a free tier, and the limits are what separate them.
Deelo’s is a plan you can stay on. Their own page lists the limits: one user seat, 1 GB of storage and 50 AI credits a month, with Deelo branding on the pages your customers see. It does not run out. In their words, the free plan never expires and never converts to a paid plan on its own. One seat is the whole business for a solo mechanic, so for a lot of people reading this, that is a working system at no cost, inside a general business suite rather than an auto repair product.
ARI’s is a sample of an auto repair product. Their pricing page calls it a freemium model and caps it at five each of invoices, estimates, inspections, clients and vehicles. How long you can stay on it is not stated on their site. Five of each shows you the product properly. Whether it carries your actual work depends on how many jobs you do, and you know that number better than this page does.
Fixty has no free plan. It is 14 days free on both plans. Cancel anytime. That buys you the whole plan you pick for a fixed number of days, which is a different trade from part of a product for nothing. If the question is whether software helps you at all, answer it on one of the two above for nothing. If you already know, and the question is whether your customers approve and pay from the same link, the trial is the quicker way to find out.
If this is side work on top of a day job
Then you may not need a CRM yet, and a page published by a CRM company should say so. If the jobs come from people who already have your number, and the paperwork fits in a notes app and a payment app, software adds a login and a bill to work that is already getting done. This page does not rank those tools, but they are real answers, and for evening and weekend work they are often the right ones.
If you are not sure, do not pay to find out. Deelo’s free plan has no end date and one seat covers you. ARI’s free tier lets you put real jobs into an auto repair product, up to five of each. Either one tells you whether you actually open it between jobs, and that is the first thing to find out.
It starts paying for itself when the follow up is what slips. You send a quote on your lunch break, the customer means to answer, and by the end of your shift nobody has. An invoice goes out and sits. A customer forgets the appointment you booked days ago. That is the work a CRM does while you are at the other job, and it is the loop Fixty is built around. The estimate goes out by text, the customer approves it and pays on the same link, and the appointment reminder goes out without you sending it. On Growth, so does the review request.
Fixty is also one mechanic in one workspace by design, which is the shape side work already has. When you try it, or anything else with a clock on it, start in a week with jobs booked. A trial of 14 days only tells you something if real customers go through it.
How to settle this in one afternoon
Start with the two that cost nothing to open. ARI publishes a free tier capped at five each of invoices, estimates, inspections, clients and vehicles, and how long it lasts is not stated on their site. Deelo publishes a free plan with no clock on it at one user. ARI will show you the shape of the product but will not carry a week of real work; Deelo will, within its own limits.
Then add one paid trial. Fixty gives 14 days on both of its plans. A card is collected at signup and first charged on day 14. Trackara Pro publishes a timed trial with the first charge after it ends. QuoteIQ publishes one on every plan and asks for a card. Orderry publishes a shorter one and asks for nothing but an account.
Two say no outright. Tekmetric offers demos and self guided tours rather than trials. AutoLeap says it does not offer a trial because it builds the system around your shop data first. Two more we could not confirm either way: nothing on the pages we opened for Shopmonkey or ServiceTitan offered a trial of any length. Ask them.
Whichever you start with, run the same real job through it end to end: a diagnostic call, an estimate the customer approves from their phone, a photo of the failed part, an invoice, a card payment, and the review request afterwards. Most of these products break somewhere in the second half of that sequence, and which half matters more is the only question this page cannot answer for you.
