A comparison that only flatters us is useless to a buyer, so the rows where the competition wins are here too: six of the sixteen go to them, five depend on your business, five go to us, and the detail behind each of those is spelled out below.
"Typical trade software" means the products British trades actually buy — the field-service, salon, legal, property and accounting packages you will have been quoted for. Prices are on the pricing page rather than in this table, because a price is not a feature.
| The question | Typical trade software | Navigare |
|---|---|---|
| What does the monthly price cover? | Software only, with hosting, backups, support and add-on modules quoted separately. | One monthly price per trade package covers the software, the hosting, the backups, the restore drill and the support; industry add-on packs and migrations are priced separately and shown as such. |
| What happens to the bill when you add staff? | Most plans charge per seat, so the bill rises every time somebody is hired. | There is no per-seat charge, so the same figure covers the whole team. |
| Is the accounting in the same database as the work? | Many trade products stop at invoicing and push the ledger out to a separate accounting package. | The ledger lives in the same database as the jobs, but on Community Edition that means Invoicing rather than the full Accounting app. |
| Statutory filing and regulated money handling? | Xero is recognised by HMRC for MTD VAT today, Sage files payroll RTI and pension auto-enrolment today, and LEAP handles client money for law firms. | MTD VAT with HMRC fraud-prevention headers, CIS300 over the Government Gateway with a real IRmark, RTI payroll, MTD Income Tax, the CT600 with iXBRL accounts and Companies House filings are built and sent from the platform; live filing to HMRC and Companies House is gated in code pending recognition, and the client-account three-way reconciliation with automatic breach records is built, but we are not audited to SRA rules as a vendor. |
| A native mobile app that works without signal? | ServiceM8 ships an offline-first iOS app that keeps working on a job with no signal. | The interface is a responsive browser page and needs a connection, because a native app is not part of Odoo Community Edition. |
| Will the software bring you new customers? | Fresha and Booksy put salons in front of consumers already searching for an appointment, and hospitality channel managers push rooms onto the online travel agents. | We run the diary and the rooms you already fill, and no consumer marketplace or OTA distribution comes with it. |
| Card payments and no-show protection? | Square and Lightspeed take card payments with an offline mode, and the salon platforms hold a card to charge for a missed appointment. | Payments run through a provider you connect yourself, and charging a card on file for a no-show is not built in. |
| How large is the integration marketplace? | Xero lists more than 1,000 connected applications, and the larger trade platforms maintain their own app directories. | Integrations are the Odoo apps plus whatever is written for you, which is a far shorter list than a public marketplace. |
| The certifications an auditor asks for? | Clio publishes SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001, and Xero publishes ISO 27001. | We hold no security certification of any kind, and would rather write that down than let you assume otherwise. |
| When can you get hold of support? | Clio offers phone support 24 hours a day, five days a week, and the payment platforms staff support around the clock. | You e-mail the engineer who built the package and get a reply inside one working day, which beats a script reader and loses to a night shift. |
| Implementation and migration? | Larger vendors field implementation teams that can run several migrations in the same week. | One engineer does the migration, which buys continuity of knowledge and costs you a queue when two clients start together. |
| Getting your data out again? | Export is offered in the formats the vendor chooses to support, and the database itself is usually not on offer. | You export everything yourself at any time, and a full PostgreSQL dump is yours on request. |
| Backups, or proven restores? | Backups are described in the contract and the restores are not published. | A weekly timer restores a live database backup into a throwaway copy and the result is published. One drill has run so far, on 24 July 2026, and it passed; the backup covered the database only until 24 July 2026, when attachments were added. |
| How quickly is a fault noticed? | Fault detection amounts to a status page and a support queue, and you often notice before the vendor does. | Checks run every 60 seconds and every result is recorded, and the repair layer rolls its own change back if the state gets worse — but only a heartbeat and a disk watchdog notify a human today, so a non-fatal fault may sit in the log until the next working morning. |
| How safe is the supplier itself? | These are companies with hundreds or thousands of staff and a business that carries on if one person stops. | This is one engineer and 16 live databases — pilot, internal and pre-revenue deployments, with no paying reference customer yet — so continuity rests on Odoo 19 Community Edition being portable to any other Odoo firm. |
| Can you influence what gets built next? | Your request joins a public roadmap board and competes with thousands of other votes. | You ask the person who writes the code rather than a voting board, and he tells you where it sits in one queue held by one engineer. No date is given until the work is scheduled. |
Each of these is a real advantage held by a real product, with the page it was read on. If one of them is the thing your business turns on, buy theirs.
An offline-first iOS app: the engineer keeps working in a basement with no signal and the job syncs when the phone finds a network again. Our interface is a browser page and needs a connection.
Phone support 24 hours a day, five days a week, alongside published SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. One engineer answering e-mail inside a working day is not the same offer, and no certificate sits behind it.
Legal accounting with client-account handling built for the rules solicitors are audited against, used across more than 2,700 firms. Our client-account ledger runs a scheduled three-way reconciliation and raises a breach record automatically, but we are not audited to SRA rules as a vendor and LEAP is built around that audit.
MTD VAT filing recognised by HMRC today, ISO 27001, and more than 1,000 integrations in a public marketplace. Our MTD VAT submission is built and sends the fraud-prevention headers, but live filing is gated in code pending recognition, and no marketplace of that size sits behind us.
Payroll with RTI submissions and pension auto-enrolment filing, recognised today, which is a long compliance tail somebody has to maintain every tax year. RTI payroll is built here and sent from the platform, with live filing gated in code pending recognition.
Consumer marketplaces: a client searching for a barber or a treatment can find a salon that has never advertised. We manage the diary of the customers you already have and send you nobody new.
Card payments that keep taking money when the connection drops, on hardware they sell, with support staffed around the clock. Payments here run through a provider you connect yourself.
Native integration with IDEXX laboratory and imaging equipment, so results land on the patient record without anybody retyping them. Our veterinary package has no equivalent native path.
Community Edition ships Invoicing rather than the full Accounting app, and the native mobile app is an Enterprise feature. So bank feeds and a native app are things we either build ourselves or go without, and today we go without the app.
Eight advantages, each with the way to test it rather than the way to believe it. All eight are checkable inside the 14-day trial.
One monthly figure per trade package covers the platform and the people using it, so hiring does not change the invoice.
Matters, jobs, treatments, tenancies, patients: the interface uses the words your staff already use, rather than making them translate from generic ERP.
Open-source application, open-source database, and a full export on demand, so the system keeps working after us.
A nightly dump at 02:30, a separate off-site copy at 03:30 held with a different provider, and write-ahead logs so a database can be rolled to a chosen moment rather than to last night. Until 24 July 2026 that backup covered the database only: attachments and uploaded documents were not included. The fix is deployed, the first backup with documents is the night of 24–25 July 2026, and the copies for 21, 22 and 23 July 2026 are missing after a disk-full incident, so the 30-daily target has a three-day gap.
The drill restores a live database backup into a throwaway copy and, on the scheduled timer, each result is published, pass or fail. A weekly timer is scheduled for Sundays 03:30; one drill has run so far, on 24 July 2026, started by hand: 399 tables and about 25,092 rows, from a 19.2-hour-old backup, in 3.8 seconds, passed. There is no earlier history and no published failure, because none has yet occurred.
Streaming replication to one standby machine, asynchronous today, with synchronous mode in preparation: work committed in the last seconds before a failure may not have reached the standby. Promotion is done by a human, so recovery is minutes rather than seconds — stated plainly rather than dressed up as a percentage.
Routine faults are repaired automatically, then verified against the real state of the machine, and the change is rolled back and escalated if the state got worse. Every check result is recorded, but only a heartbeat and a disk watchdog notify a human today, so a non-fatal fault may wait in the log until the next working morning.
Support goes to the person who wrote the trade package, not to a tier-one queue that escalates a ticket back towards him.
Send an export of whatever you run today and the free recoverability review restores it on a throwaway database, reads it, destroys it, and sends you the log: what came through clean, what did not, and how old the copy really was. No charge, and no follow-up call unless you ask for one.