ServiceYak vs Fergus
Fergus splits its features across two plans and beats us outright on supplier price books, MYOB and safety forms. ServiceYak puts everything on one $37 seat. This is the closest comparison in the set, and we've written it that way.
Fergus and ServiceYak, side by side
Fergus is a strong product built for the same kind of business we are — trade businesses that want to know where the margin went — and it does several things better than we do. Automatic supplier price-book imports are their wedge and we have no answer to it. They connect to MYOB and we don't. Their Professional plan carries hazard registers and SWMS, which our checklists are not a substitute for.
Where we differ is the plan structure. Fergus's Essentials plan withholds a lot: checklists, forms, job phases, tasks, purchase orders, tiered pricing, hazards and SWMS, and the advanced, financial and business reporting are all Professional-only, from their own published plan comparison. Phone support is Professional-only too — Essentials is email and chat. ServiceYak has one plan, $37 per user per month ex GST, and every seat gets every feature.
There's no seat-by-seat cost table on this page, and that's not an oversight — see the pricing section. Fergus publishes plan prices "from $53 per month" without stating a per-user or a GST basis, so any seat comparison would be built on our assumption rather than their figure.
What Essentials doesn't include
Every item below is Professional-only, taken from Fergus's own comparison of their two plans and checked in August 2026. All of them are in the single ServiceYak plan.
- Checklists, forms, job phases and tasks — the basic field paperwork.
- Purchase orders and tiered pricing.
- Health & safety: hazards and SWMS.
- Advanced, financial and business reporting.
- Automatic supplier integrations — Essentials does supplier price books manually, Professional does it automatically.
That's a real decision to make at purchase rather than a detail. A business that buys Essentials because the entry price looks right, then finds it wants purchase orders and a hazard register, is looking at a plan change rather than a setting.
Support is on the plan too
Fergus's Essentials plan gets email and chat support. Phone support starts at Professional. Their own comparison table says so.
We think tying support to spend is the wrong shape, so ServiceYak doesn't do it — chat and email support are the same on every seat and there's no tier that buys you a better answer. In fairness, we don't offer phone support to anyone, so on Professional they beat us there and we've marked that below.
"From $53 per month" and what it doesn't tell you
Fergus's pricing page reads "Plans starting from $53 per month" for Essentials and "from $77 per month" for Professional, with Enterprise 10+ on a custom quote. What it doesn't state is whether those figures are per user, or whether they're inclusive or exclusive of GST. Their comparison pages elsewhere say "per full user" — but their pricing page is the citable source, and it doesn't.
So we can't tell you what Fergus costs at three seats, and neither can their pricing page. What we can tell you is what ours costs at any seat count: $37 per user per month ex GST, or $370 per user per year ($30.83 a month), in Australian dollars, on a GST-itemised invoice. Multiply by your crew and you have your number.
Two other Fergus figures worth knowing when you get your quote, both published: timesheet-only users from $26 a month, and contractors at $4 per user per day — a genuinely useful model if you carry subbies in and out. Their add-ons are SMS at $15 per 100 texts and Certificates at $30 a month for 1–9 staff or $80 for 10+.
What Fergus does that we don't
Three things, and they're not small. If any one of them is on your requirements list, this comparison is over and Fergus wins it.
- Automatic supplier integrations. Fergus pulls supplier price books in — manually on Essentials, automatically on Professional. That is their whole wedge and it's a good one: if your merchant's pricing changes and your quotes move with it, that's hours a month and fewer margin leaks. ServiceYak has kits and saved rates you maintain yourself, which is not the same thing.
- MYOB. Fergus connects to Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB, on both plans. We sync with Xero and QuickBooks only. If your BAS comes out of MYOB, that settles it.
- SWMS and hazard registers. Their Professional plan carries health and safety forms including SWMS. ServiceYak has job and visit checklists, which are useful and are not regulation-seeded safety documents. If you need a signed SWMS off a template, they have it and we don't.
Worth adding, since it's to their credit: Fergus's trial doesn't charge you until the end of the first calendar month after it ends, they include a free hour of onboarding, and their Setup & Training starts at $0. That's a more generous on-ramp than most of this market offers, ours included on the onboarding front.
Feature comparison
| Feature | ServiceYak | Fergus | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | One plan, every feature | Essentials from $53/mo, Professional from $77/mo, Enterprise 10+ custom | You can't need a feature and not have it. |
| What the price means | $37 per user per month, ex GST, AUD | "Plans starting from $53 per month" — no per-user or GST basis stated on their pricing page | You can't work out a monthly bill from a 'from' price. |
| Purchase orders | Included | Professional | Ordering materials isn't an advanced use case. |
| Checklists, forms, job phases and tasks | Included | Professional | This is basic field paperwork, not a premium tier. |
| Reporting | 16 reports, four suites, included | Advanced, financial and business reporting on Professional | Knowing which jobs made money shouldn't be an upgrade. |
| Support | Chat and email, the same on every seat | Email and chat on Essentials; phone added on Professional | We don't gate support by plan — but we have no phone line at all, and on Professional they do. |
| Supplier price-book integrations | ✗ — saved rates and kits you maintain yourself | Manual on Essentials, automatic on Professional | Live merchant pricing flowing into your quotes is their wedge, and we have no answer to it. |
| Accounting sync | Xero and QuickBooks | Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB, on both plans | If your books are in MYOB, Fergus connects and we don't. |
| SWMS and hazard registers | Limited — job and visit checklists, not regulation-seeded | Health & safety hazards and SWMS on Professional | If you need a signed SWMS off a template, they have it and we don't. |
| Onboarding | Self-serve, with chat support | Free 1-hour onboarding; Setup & Training from $0 | An hour with someone who knows the product is worth having. |
| Caps on quotes, jobs and invoices | None | None published | Neither of us meters your work. Worth confirming on their quote. |
| AI meeting summaries | Record on site, get a sendable recap | ✗ | The site walk-through writes itself up. |
| Lock-in | None — monthly or annual, cancel anytime | None | Both of us would rather earn it monthly. Credit where it's due. |
| Free trial | 30 days, no card | 14 days, no card; not charged until the end of the first calendar month after the trial | Ours is longer; their billing grace period is more generous. |
Rows marked Fergus wins are the ones where they beat us outright. Their column was checked in August 2026.
Pricing, worked — and where it stops
AUD per month. ServiceYak at $37 a user, ex GST. Fergus's published figure is a plan price — "Plans starting from $53 per month" — with no per-user basis and no GST basis stated, so it can't be scaled to a seat count.
| Scenario | Seats | ServiceYak | Fergus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sole trader | 1 | $37 | Essentials from $53 |
| Two-van plumbing business | 3 | $111 | Not publishable |
| Small crew with office admin | 6 | $222 | Not publishable |
We could multiply $53 by a seat count and this table would look far better for us. We won't: their pricing page doesn't say the price is per user, and a comparison built on our assumption about somebody else's pricing isn't a comparison — it's a guess with a dollar sign on it, and this market is full of them in every direction. Ask them for a quote at your seat count, on the plan that carries the features you need — for most trade businesses that's Professional, not Essentials — and put it next to $37 × seats. Annual billing takes ServiceYak to $370 a seat a year, or $30.83 a month.
Switching from Fergus
One thing to settle before the runbook: if you're on Professional for the supplier integrations, the hazard register or MYOB, you're moving away from three things we don't have. Work out whether you can live without them first — the rest of this is just logistics.
- Check what you're actually using on Professional. Supplier price books, SWMS and hazards, and MYOB have no equivalent in ServiceYak. If any of them is load-bearing in your week, stay where you are — that's the honest advice.
- Export before you cancel. Client list and job history out while the subscription is live. Afterwards it's a support ticket, if it's possible at all.
- Capture your price book manually. If your rates have been flowing in from a supplier automatically, they'll need to live in ServiceYak as saved rates and kits that you maintain. Export the current price book while you still can, and budget an afternoon for this — it's the biggest single piece of work in the move.
- Reconnect the books and test one invoice end to end. Connect Xero or QuickBooks, raise one real invoice, and check it lands on the right account before you trust it with a month's work.
- Move at a quiet point in the year. Not mid-build, and not in December.