Best Free Field Service Management Software: Plans, Limits and Features Compared

It depends on your job volume, not your headcount. Two people running 30 to 40 jobs a month fit inside Opsler's Budding plan — 2 seats, 1 admin and 1 technician, with 50 jobs per month — and can quote, schedule, invoice and collect without paying anything. Two people running 80 jobs a month do not, and neither ServiceM8's 30-job free plan nor Dusk FSM's 25-completed-job free plan will hold them either. Count your jobs from last month before you choose. If the number is above 50, you are choosing a paid plan and the honest question is which one.

Yes. Budding has no time limit and needs no credit card. It is 2 seats — 1 admin and 1 technician — with 50 jobs per month, unlimited customers, 100 inventory items in 1 inventory location. If your business never outgrows those numbers, you never pay. It is a plan, not a countdown, and it is not a trial in disguise.

You move to Pro at $25 per seat per month with no seat minimum, which lifts the job cap and the inventory limits. Nothing is deleted if you stay on Budding instead — your customers, jobs, estimates and invoices remain, and you carry on inside the free limits. There is also a 14-day Pro trial with no credit card if you want to see the paid features before deciding.

Opsler Budding includes the dispatch board. Dusk FSM's free Launch plan includes scheduling and dispatch. ServiceM8's free plan includes the schedule. Zoho FSM's free edition includes the dispatch console. Connecteam has shift scheduling rather than job dispatch, because it has no work-order record. Contractor+ puts scheduling behind a paid plan. Route optimisation, as distinct from dispatch, is a Pro feature in Opsler and is not on Budding.

No, and the difference is the whole point of this page. A trial is full access for a fixed number of days, after which you pay or lose access. Jobber and Housecall Pro run 14-day trials, Kickserv runs 30 days and Zoho FSM runs 15 days. When the clock stops you are choosing a plan: Jobber's cheapest is Core at $49 a month, and that band exists only while you are the only user — hire one person and Core is withdrawn, so the entry price becomes Connect at $199. Housecall Pro's cheapest is Basic at $79 a month for one user. Kickserv starts at $60 for five. A free plan has no end date and limits you by seats, jobs or features instead. Opsler runs both: Budding is the free plan and it does not expire, and there is a separate 14-day Pro trial with no credit card.

Not in the sense the phrase implies. There is no app-store listing to download Opsler from. You open Opsler in a supported browser on desktop, Android or iPhone and install it to the home screen from there, with no store approval needed. Downloadable, self-hosted field service software does still exist as open-source projects, but you take on the server, the backups and the upgrades along with the license.

Yes, and not as a read-only cache. Opsler is a free field service app that installs straight from a browser, with a Sync for Offline screen that downloads the day's jobs, the parts catalogue, the service catalogue, tax presets, van stock levels and customer history before the technician leaves signal. With no signal at all they can start, pause and complete jobs, tick the checklist, write up the work, take before-and-after photos, capture a signature, raise the invoice and record the payment; all of it queues and syncs itself when connectivity returns. That is on the free plan, not an upgrade. Among the other free plans here, ServiceM8 also documents offline job access. Connecteam's help centre states its app cannot be used offline. Dusk FSM, Zoho FSM and Contractor+ do not publish an offline statement either way.

On Opsler Budding you can export your customer list to CSV. Accounting export is Pro end to end — the invoice and payment export screen is gated, so the free plan cannot produce a QuickBooks-formatted, Xero-formatted or generic accounting file. When you do reach it on Pro, it produces a file for manual import rather than a live sync or connection. Ask every vendor on your shortlist the same question before you put a year of job history into their free tier.

No. Opsler is a hosted platform and the source is not published, so if you need to read, modify or self-host the code, an open-source project is the right category and Opsler is not. What Budding gives you instead is the zero cost without the server, the patching or the backup rota. If that trade-off is the decision you are making, the separate open-source guide sets both sides out properly.