How to actually choose
The one test that predicts everything: take a real, awkward week from your own schedule, the one with a sick cleaner, a last-minute booking and an invoice query, and put it into each product during their free trial. Count how many times you type the same client name, and check whether an invoice can come out of a completed job without re-keying anything.
Feature lists are close to useless for this decision. Every product in this category schedules jobs and stores clients. What differs is the shape of the workflow, and you only feel that shape under load.
The three categories you are choosing between
Products marketed at cleaning companies fall into three groups, and half the confusion in this market comes from comparing across them as though they were alternatives.
- General field service platforms (Jobber and similar) serve many home service trades. Broad, mature, good integrations. You configure them into cleaning rather than finding cleaning assumed.
- Workforce and deskless team apps (Connecteam and similar) solve scheduling, time tracking and communication for staff. Strong at that, but they do not invoice, hold client records or produce compliance evidence.
- Cleaning-specific platforms (CleanFlo, ZenMaid and similar) assume the trade. The question then becomes which market they assume, ZenMaid is built for US residential maid services, CleanFlo for UK cleaning companies handling both domestic and commercial work.
What UK-specific actually means
It is not a marketing line. In practice it is four concrete things, and each one is either handled by default or handled by you.
- VAT at 20% on cleaning services, shown net and VAT per line, with your registration number on the invoice.
- BACS payment details: sort code, account number and a unique reference, because most UK commercial clients pay by bank transfer, not card.
- Health & safety documentation: COSHH assessments, site-specific RAMS and training records that commercial clients request during tenders.
- UK employment costs, the 12.07% holiday accrual, employer National Insurance and auto-enrolment pension that make an employed cleaner cost 25–32% more than their wage.
If your work is entirely domestic and cash-in-hand simple, none of this matters much. The moment you win an office contract, all four do. Our free calculators cover the maths behind the last one, and the contracts guide covers the documentation.
There are free ones. Take one, if it fits
Two products in this market give a small cleaning business something free that is a product rather than a trial, and a page comparing cleaning software without saying so is hiding the cheapest answer from the reader most likely to need it.
- Connecteam has a free-for-life tier under a headcount, covering the rota, the time clock and the team chat. It holds no clients, quotes nothing and raises no invoice, so the money half of the business stays wherever it is now.
- ServiceM8 has a free plan for one user with a cap on how many jobs you can create in a month. It stops at that single user, which is the point at which a cleaning business becomes a cleaning business.
- A spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group is the third free option and the one nearly everybody is actually using. We wrote the whole page on when it is still the right answer, and under about fifteen recurring clients it is.
Start paying for something when you have staff to tell where to go, invoices to raise from work that was actually done, or a client asking you for a risk assessment before they will sign. Not before.
Compare pricing models, not today's price
There are two shapes, and the second one is the one people miss. Per seat: Jobber, Squeegee and GetCleanFlow all charge for each person on the account, so the software cost rises every time you hire, which is the one thing a growing cleaning company does constantly.
Metered on the work: ZenMaid's entry plan caps how many appointments you can book in a month, ServiceM8's plans are banded on jobs a month, and Swept prices on the number of locations you clean. None of those moves when you hire, and all of them move when you win work, which is the other thing a growing cleaning company does constantly. A round that doubles its visits pays more without a single new cleaner.
CleanFlo charges £19.99 a month and counts neither: no cap on staff, clients, locations, jobs or appointments. For a two-person operation the difference is small, and where a metered plan is genuinely cheaper the individual comparisons say so. Model it against your likely headcount and your likely job count in two years rather than today's, and the comparison usually looks different.
