Arrively vs Jobber: Which Scheduling Tool Fits Your Field Service Business?

TL;DR

Jobber is a full-featured field service platform with quoting, invoicing, and CRM — great for growing teams. Arrively is a focused scheduling tool with drive-time awareness and usage-based pricing — ideal for solo to small teams where scheduling is the core problem. Your choice depends on what you need most.

Two Different Tools for Two Different Problems

Jobber and Arrively both serve field service professionals, but they start from different assumptions about what you need.

Jobber assumes you want one platform that handles everything: scheduling, quoting, invoicing, payments, CRM, and reporting. It's been building toward that since 2011, and it does it well.

Arrively assumes that your schedule is your business. If the schedule works, the day works. It focuses entirely on smart scheduling — with drive-time awareness, automated reminders, and customer self-booking — and leaves invoicing and quoting to the tools you already use.

Neither approach is wrong. The question is which problem is bigger for you right now.

Pricing: The Biggest Difference

This is where the gap is widest.

Jobber:

• Core: $39/month (1 user)
• Connect: $119/month (up to 5 users)
• Grow: $199/month (up to 15 users)
• Additional users cost extra on every plan

Arrively:

• First 20 jobs: free (one-time trial)
• $0.99/job for the first 200 each month
• $0.69/job from 201–500
• $0.49/job above 500
• No monthly cap — the more you grow, the less you pay per job
• No per-user fees, no contracts

Let's put real numbers on it. Say you're a 3-person HVAC team running 80 jobs a month.

On Jobber Connect, you're paying $119/month plus any per-user add-on fees. On Jobber Grow (which you'd want for the route optimization and automated emails), it's $199/month.

On Arrively, 80 jobs at $0.99 each is $79.20/month. Same 3 techs, same 80 jobs, roughly half the cost. If you grow to 300 jobs, you pay $198 + $69 + $49 = $247/month — and the per-job cost keeps dropping the more you grow.

The pricing model matters philosophically too. Jobber charges by the size of your team. Arrively charges by the volume of work. In slow months, your Arrively bill drops. Your Jobber bill doesn't.

Scheduling: Arrively's Core Advantage

Both tools let you drag jobs onto a calendar and assign them to time slots. But Arrively's scheduling does something Jobber's doesn't: it knows how long it takes to drive between jobs.

When you book a 1pm job in one part of town, Arrively checks actual drive time to your next appointment and blocks the travel window. If a customer tries to self-book a slot that would require you to teleport across the city, that slot doesn't show as available.

This sounds like a small thing. It's not. Double-bookings and late arrivals are the #1 source of lost revenue and bad reviews for mobile service businesses. Drive-time awareness prevents both automatically.

Jobber's scheduling is solid for assigning and viewing jobs, but the travel-time calculation is something you still need to do in your head or ignore entirely (and pay for it later with angry customers).

Arrively also syncs with your phone calendar, so personal appointments and kids' soccer games block out time without you manually entering them.

Where Jobber Wins: Quoting, Invoicing, and CRM

This is where you need to be honest about what your business needs. If the answer is "I need to send professional quotes, convert them to invoices, collect payments, and track all my customer interactions in one place" — Jobber is genuinely good at that.

Jobber's quoting workflow: Create a quote, send it to the customer, they approve it online, it converts to a job on your schedule, you complete the work, it converts to an invoice, the customer pays online. That's a clean pipeline.

Jobber's CRM: Full customer profiles with property details, job history, communication logs, and notes. If you're doing recurring maintenance for hundreds of properties, this matters.

Jobber's invoicing: Professional invoices with online payment, batch invoicing, and integration with QuickBooks and Xero.

Arrively doesn't do any of this. It's not trying to. The philosophy is that a great scheduler paired with your existing invoicing tool (QuickBooks, Wave, FreshBooks, or even a simple Square invoice) is better than a mediocre version of everything in one package.

If you're spending more time on paperwork than scheduling, Jobber might be the right call.

Customer-Facing Features

Both tools give your customers a way to interact with your business digitally, but the approaches differ.

Arrively offers self-booking pages where customers pick an available time slot that already accounts for your existing schedule and drive time. Customers also get automated SMS and email reminders before their appointment. When someone cancels, Arrively's gap-fill feature can automatically reach out to customers with upcoming appointments to offer the earlier slot.

Jobber offers client-facing portals where customers can request work, approve quotes, view their upcoming jobs, and pay invoices. Jobber also sends appointment reminders and has an online booking feature.

Jobber's customer features are broader — customers can do more things. Arrively's are more focused on the booking experience and making sure customers actually show up.

Ease of Use

Arrively takes about 15 minutes to set up. Enter your service area, set your hours, and you're booking. The mobile app is built for techs who are working with one hand while holding a pipe wrench in the other.

Jobber has more to configure because there's more to the platform. Setting up your service catalog, quote templates, invoice settings, and CRM fields takes time. Budget a day or two to get it dialed in. Their support team is helpful during onboarding, and they have extensive documentation.

This isn't a knock on Jobber — it has more settings because it does more things. But if you just want to schedule better starting today, the setup time matters.

Team Size and Scale

Arrively is designed for teams of any size. The scheduling features work at any scale, and the product is optimized for the contractor who is also the dispatcher. There's no per-user fee, so your second and third techs don't change your monthly cost — and volume discounts mean bigger teams pay less per job.

Jobber scales from 1 to 50+ people. If you're at 3 techs today and plan to be at 15 in two years, Jobber grows with you. It has team management features, GPS tracking, performance reporting, and workflows that make sense at that scale.

If you know you're staying lean — and a lot of successful contractors do — Arrively's simplicity is an asset. If you're on a growth trajectory and need one platform to carry you from 3 to 30, Jobber has more runway.

Feature Comparison Table

Feature	Arrively	Jobber
Drive-time scheduling	Yes	No
Customer self-booking	Yes	Yes
SMS/email reminders	Yes	Yes
Cancellation gap-fill	Yes	No
Phone calendar sync	Yes	No
Quoting	No	Yes
Invoicing	No	Yes
CRM	No	Yes
Online payments	No	Yes
Per-user pricing	No	Yes
Annual contract required	No	No
Free tier	20 jobs free	14-day trial

Which One Should You Pick?

Choose Arrively if:

• Your biggest pain is scheduling, double-bookings, or late arrivals
• You're a solo operator or small team (1-5)
• You already have an invoicing system you're fine with
• You want to pay only for what you use
• Drive-time awareness would solve your #1 daily headache

Choose Jobber if:

• You need quoting, invoicing, and scheduling in one tool
• You're growing past 5 people and need team management
• Your admin/paperwork burden is as big a problem as scheduling
• You want a mature platform with a large integration ecosystem

There's no wrong answer here. They solve different problems for different stages of business. Many contractors start with Arrively's simplicity and move to Jobber if they outgrow it — or start with Jobber and switch to Arrively when they realize they're paying for features they never open.

See the full breakdown on our Jobber comparison page, or check out Arrively's pricing to see what it would cost for your volume.