They solve different halves of the problem
Connecteam is very good at what it does. If your problem is "I have forty deskless staff, I need shift scheduling, a time clock and a way to reach everyone", it is a strong answer and it serves many industries well.
But a cleaning business has two halves. One is the workforce: who is working, where, when, and did they turn up. The other is the commercial side: who the client is, what was agreed, what the site specification says, what to invoice, whether it has been paid, and what compliance evidence exists for that location.
Connecteam handles the first half. It does not attempt the second, because it is not a cleaning product. Businesses that adopt it typically end up running it alongside accounting software and a spreadsheet of clients, which works, but means the schedule and the invoice never know about each other.
The cost of the gap between systems
The practical consequence of splitting the two halves is re-keying. A job is scheduled in one system, completed, then someone manually creates an invoice in another, matches it to the right client, and later reconciles the payment.
At ten jobs a week that is an irritation. At two hundred it is a part-time job, and it is where errors enter: jobs completed but never invoiced is the single most common revenue leak in cleaning businesses that run split systems.
CleanFlo generates invoices directly from completed jobs, which removes that gap by design. That is the main structural argument for a single cleaning platform over a workforce app plus accounting software.
Where Connecteam genuinely wins
Two situations. First, if your workforce is large and the hard problem really is time tracking, GPS verification and mass internal communication, Connecteam is built for that at a depth a cleaning platform will not match.
Second, if cleaning is one function inside a bigger organisation: an in-house facilities team, or a multi-service contractor, then you are not running a cleaning business, you are managing staff, and a general workforce tool is the right shape.
We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
An honest summary
Connecteam if the problem is workforce management across a large deskless team, and invoicing already lives elsewhere.
CleanFlo if you are running a cleaning company and want the quote, the schedule, the job, the invoice and the compliance record to be the same system: for £9.99 a month with unlimited staff.
Check Connecteam's current pricing on their own site. Their plan tiers scale with user count, which is worth modelling against your expected headcount rather than today's.