Shortlist
Sorted for a shop with one to three bays and an owner who still turns wrenches: can a second person work in it, what the first month costs, and whether it reaches your books.
The vendor pages behind this list were read between August 29, 2026 and November 10, 2026.
A shop with one to three bays and an owner who still turns wrenches sits between two kinds of software. One kind is built for a counter, a service writer and ten bays behind them. The other is built for one person in a van. A small shop needs a little of each, and most of this page is about the distance between the two.
So the list does not open with price, or with how modern the screens look. It opens with the question a shop answers differently from a van: can more than one person work in it, and does it count the stock on your shelf? The next tests are what the first month costs, whether the invoices reach your books, and whether you can run a job from a phone at the car, with the customer approving and paying on theirs. The last is a check that the vendor names auto repair at all, and every product here passes it, so it never changes the order. The first test sorts the products into groups, and inside a group the next test on which two products differ decides the order. When two products tie on every test, the list puts them in alphabetical order, and Fixty is never in a tie.
Eight products are ranked, seven made by other companies and one by us. Fixty publishes this page and is last on it. It fails the first test outright, and its entry says so before it says anything kind.
Every statement about another product below is read off that vendor’s own pages, with the date it was read. Where we could not find a page saying something, the entry says that we did not find it, which is not the same as saying the vendor does not do it. That is slower to write than a list of adjectives, and it is the only kind of comparison a shop owner can check before spending a month on it.
What is not on this list
Jobber, Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan are not ranked. Each describes its customer, in its own words, as a home service business or a home and commercial service contractor, and none of the cells we hold for the three names auto repair or mobile mechanics. For two of them we could not find stock tracking on their pages, and the third asks you to request pricing. They are sound products for the work they were made for, and a bay is not that work. The same three are ranked on other pages of this site, where the question is a different one.
QuoteIQ is left off because two of the five tests above are scoped, in its own words, to plans above the entry one: its stock management is included on its upper plans, and its own list of what the entry plan does not include puts QuickBooks Online on a higher plan. Ranking it would mean pricing one plan and judging another. Mobile Mechanic Hub is left off because we could not find a price, a second user, stock tracking or an accounting sync on its pages, which is most of what the tests above ask about. A ranking built on blanks is a guess.
Dealer systems, enterprise groups, tire only systems and fleet maintenance platforms are not ranked either, because this page is for the independent shop with one to three bays and none of them is aimed at it. Shop systems that are not in our sourced dataset are not ranked, since a claim about a product we have not read on its own site is exactly what this page refuses to make. If one is on your shortlist, hold it to the same five tests.
Nothing here is ranked on ordering parts from suppliers, labor guides, estimating databases or customer ratings. The dataset has no cell for any of them on every product. ARI names labor guides in its own description and Shopmonkey names purchase orders; for the rest, silence on a page is not the same as a no. If ordering parts inside the software decides it for you, ask each vendor to show you the screen.
What a one to three bay shop needs, and what a ten bay shop buys
Start with who writes the work. In a ten bay shop one person takes the call and writes the ticket and another does the repair, and features such as technician assignment, efficiency reports, counter views and purchase order flows tend to exist to hand a job across that seam without losing it. In a shop with one to three bays the owner is usually both people, and the seam is a few feet wide.
That changes what is worth paying for. A small shop gets most of its value from five plain things: a record for each customer and vehicle, an estimate the customer can approve without a phone call, a way to be paid at the car, a stock count that does not live in one person’s head, and a route to the books. The first three are the same as for a van. The last two are what can pull a bay shop away from tools made for one person, because once a second person touches a part or an invoice, the shared fact has to live somewhere other than the owner’s memory.
What a ten bay shop buys on top is mostly coordination: reporting per technician, a service advisor workflow, controls across locations. None of that is bad, but it is built around a payroll, and a small shop should check which billing basis a quoted figure sits on before comparing it with a month to month price.
So the sensible order for a small shop is to buy for the test it would fail first. If you have a helper and a parts shelf, the shop basics decide it and the price decides between the survivors. If you work alone and carry nothing on a shelf, price and phone decide it, and a tool built for one person can be the right answer. That is the whole reason this page is written for one to three bays: the answer changes somewhere inside that range.
What a first month really costs, and what a demo is not
A published monthly figure tells you less than it seems to. On this list it comes in four kinds. Deelo has a free plan, and the sentence we hold says it never expires. ARI and Trackara Pro state month to month figures below Fixty’s Starter. Shopmonkey, Tekmetric and AutoLeap state starting figures above both Fixty plans, and each entry says what that vendor ties its figure to. Orderry lists prices, but the sentences we hold do not state its entry figure, so we cannot place it. Fixty sits between the groups with a month to month price and a trial.
A demo is a sales conversation about your shop, set up by the vendor. A trial is you running your own jobs through the product. They answer different questions. The demo tells you what the product can do. The trial tells you whether you will keep doing it on a Thursday afternoon with a car on the lift. For a small shop the second question is the one that matters, and only some of these eight state a trial at all: Orderry, Trackara Pro, Deelo, ARI in the form of a free tier, and Fixty. AutoLeap and Tekmetric say they do not offer one, and for Shopmonkey we could not find one stated. If a vendor offers only a demo, ask what a month to month plan costs, because our dataset holds no month to month figure for any of the three shop platforms.
Count the second seat before you compare anything. Two entry plans here are capped in their own words: Deelo’s free plan includes one user seat, and Orderry’s entry plan is limited to two employees and one location. ARI’s entry plan page says an account can be shared with multiple users with different roles, and Tekmetric says it does not charge by user. Trackara Pro charges nothing for a technician you only assign work to, but a technician who needs their own app login is a paid seat on top of its flat price. A cheap entry can stop being cheap at the second user, and a price that covers everyone can change the order. Deelo prices its paid plans per seat. Read the unit the price is quoted in before you read the number.
How to switch systems without losing customer and vehicle history
Almost nobody loses history in the switch itself. They lose it just before, by cancelling the old system before checking what leaves it. Do the steps in this order.
First, find out what the old system will hand back and in what form. Customers, vehicles and invoice history are separate exports in most shop systems, and a vendor that offers one does not always offer the others. Ask for a sample of each and open it. A file you have not opened is not a backup.
Second, ask the new vendor what its import actually brings in. This is where small shops get surprised. Fixty loads customers, as name, phone and email: in the browser from a CSV or vCard file, from the phone’s contacts in the iPhone app, or by a person at support loading a list with you. It does not bring in jobs, vehicles or invoices, so a shop that wants its vehicle history inside Fixty will be typing it, and the honest advice is to keep the old file.
Third, keep the old system readable for as long as customers might call about old work. A warranty question about a repair from last spring should not depend on whether you remember where the paper went. Draw a line on a date: before it, the old system answers history questions; after it, the new one takes every new job. Running both for new jobs is how a shop ends up with two incomplete sets of books.
Last, move the books. Accounting is the part with a deadline, so change it at the start of a month or a quarter and not in the middle, and run one invoice through both systems to see that the totals agree. If the new system has no sync to your accounting package, decide who retypes, and when, before you switch rather than the week after.
Why Fixty is last on a list it published, and who it still suits
A page that ranks its own publisher last invites the obvious question of why it exists. The answer is that the first test is the one a shop fails first. Fixty was built for one person who writes every job, and its own comparison record says so: one workspace, no job assignment, no stock counts, no accounting integration. For a shop with a helper and a shelf those are not gaps to be closed next quarter. They are the shape of the product.
The other half of the answer is that the same shape is what makes it quick for a different reader. Where one person does the estimate, the inspection, the repair and the invoice, there is nothing to hand across, so the whole job can live in a phone. If that describes your garage, and the books are something you do yourself on a Sunday, then the first and third tests cost you nothing and the fourth is one Fixty passes in full. That reader should try the trial and then run the same job through ARI or Orderry before choosing.
We cannot tell from here where the line falls for you. A helper who hands over tools is not a second writer. A part time bookkeeper who retypes invoices is a cost, and ARI or Orderry may be worth it just to remove that retyping, since both state a QuickBooks Online sync. What we can say is that every product above was put through the same five tests, and anyone can re-run them, because every cell behind them is quoted and dated in the entries.
