QuoteIQ vs LMN

For most landscapers, yes — QuoteIQ covers more of the business for less money. The honest exception is a company whose single biggest problem is chronic underpricing: LMN’s budget-based estimating with enforced overhead recovery is best-in-class at that specific job, and it is on every LMN tier from $297/month. The second exception is offline field work, which LMN’s crew app handles and QuoteIQ does not.

Everywhere else the comparison favours QuoteIQ. Pro at $149.99/month covers four users with AI Estimator, real-time job costing, ClientHub two-way calling and texting, MapMeasure Pro satellite measurement and event-triggered automations — roughly half the price of LMN Starter, which does not include job costing at all. The dedicated landscaping software page has the full trade-specific breakdown. If you are still working out whether your current pricing clears your true cost per hour, start with the BLS profile for grounds maintenance workers and the free lawn care cost calculator before you evaluate either platform.

LMN publishes three plans. Starter is $297 per month billed monthly and includes one office or crew lead licence plus five crew member licences. Professional is $648 per month billed monthly with three office/crew lead licences and fifteen crew member licences, and it is the tier that carries real-time job costing, Zapier connections, equipment and material costing, and files and photos on documents. Enterprise is quoted by their sales team and starts at 100 users. All three tiers carry a one-time onboarding fee that is not published, and additional licences cost extra — so budget above the headline monthly. These figures were read from LMN’s own pricing page on September 8, 2026.

By comparison, QuoteIQ runs five published tiers with no separate onboarding requirement: Essentials at $29.99, Beginner at $74.99, Pro at $149.99, Elite at $299 and Max at $699 with unlimited users, all with two months free on annual billing. Optional Done-For-You setup is available at $299.99 or $999.99. Third-party review sites frequently list stale competitor pricing, so check the vendor’s own page — the SBA’s guidance on managing operating costs is a good frame for evaluating recurring software spend properly.

Not in the same enforced form, and it is worth being straight about that. QuoteIQ gives you four estimate types — Standard, Quick, Options and Package — with full line-item control over labour rates, material costs, markup and discount, plus a Materials section that links to inventory products. You can absolutely build overhead recovery into that structure by pricing your price book at a rate that already carries overhead and target margin. What QuoteIQ does not do is refuse to let you send a quote until you have entered an overhead recovery percentage. LMN does, and for a team that needs the rails, that difference is the whole product.

The practical answer is to do the arithmetic once and encode it. Use the business calculators — including the Hourly Rate Calculator on Pro and above — to establish your true cost per billable hour, then let Job Costing and Expense Tracking tell you within a month whether the number holds. The IRS small business centre is the right reference for categorising the overhead you are trying to recover.

Yes. Job Costing is included on the Pro plan at $149.99 per month and above. Each job gets a Report tab running total price minus labour minus expenses equals profit, with a profit-margin bar. Labour is pulled automatically from time tracking — each employee’s hourly rate multiplied by clocked hours — and expenses link to the job through Expense Tracking, which is available from Beginner. On Elite, Time Tracker Pro adds GPS clock in and out, so the hours feeding the calculation are verified rather than self-reported.

LMN’s real-time job costing sits on its Professional tier at $648 per month; the $297 Starter tier does not include it. So a four-person crew that wants job costing pays $149.99 on QuoteIQ or $648 on LMN — a difference of roughly 77%. That said, LMN’s implementation goes deeper on equipment costing, vendor bills and subcontractor tracking, which QuoteIQ does not cover. Pair job costing with business analytics to see margin by service and by crew, and check your labour assumptions against the BLS wage data for building and grounds occupations, which put the group median at $36,790 in May 2024.

It depends on which problem is costing you the most money, and there are only really two answers. If you are underpricing jobs and need a system that will not let you quote without recovering overhead, LMN is the specialist and it starts at $297 per month. If your bottleneck is anything else — quotes going out too slowly in spring, missed calls, no review flow, manual scheduling, no visibility on margin — QuoteIQ is the broader platform and starts at $29.99 per month with the full AI suite on every plan.

QuoteIQ is used by 40,000+ contractors and rated 4.7 stars across 4,103 reviews, and it supports the entire green-industry calendar rather than one slice of it: landscaping, lawn care, tree care, irrigation and snow removal, plus 45 more trades if you diversify. Whichever way you lean, evaluate on your own numbers rather than a feature list: the SBA’s manage-your-business guide walks through the operating-cost view that should drive the decision. You can compare QuoteIQ against other platforms on the comparison hub.

Most landscaping companies move in three to seven days of real work, spread over a two to four week overlap. Start a 14-day free trial on the plan that matches your team size, then export your customers, price book and active jobs from LMN as CSV files. AI Smart Import maps the columns automatically, so you are not reformatting spreadsheets by hand, and you can import from phone contacts too. A credit or debit card is required to start.

The pattern that works for a landscaping operation: keep LMN running for jobs already in flight, start every new lead in QuoteIQ, and cut over once the last open job closes. Set up your automation sequences and Review Multiplier during the overlap so the new system is already earning by the time you switch fully, and connect QuickBooks Online before your first month-end. If you would rather not run the migration yourself, Done-For-You setup is available at $299.99 or $999.99 and covers contact import, price book setup and a one-on-one onboarding session. The SBA’s operations guidance on running systems in parallel during a transition is worth reading first.

Yes — QuoteIQ integrates natively with QuickBooks Online, available on the Pro plan at $149.99 per month and above. The sync covers invoices, payments, customers and expense categories, includes duplicate-sync locks so records do not double up, and auto-syncs missing customers before an estimate syncs across. LMN also offers QuickBooks Online on all of its tiers, so on this specific point the two platforms are close.

If your accountant needs data outside that sync, data export is available on every plan and your data is yours. Note that QuoteIQ has no native payroll — hours captured in Time Tracker Pro export to whatever payroll system you already run, and there is no automatic overtime calculation. Pair the accounting sync with Expense Tracking and Job Costing so the numbers in your books and the numbers on your jobs agree. The IRS small business and self-employed centre covers the recordkeeping standards those exports need to satisfy.

Generally no. Running both permanently means duplicate data entry, two versions of the truth on every customer, and a combined bill somewhere between roughly $327 and $950 per month depending on the tiers — a cost very few operations can justify. The one sensible exception is a transition: keep LMN for jobs already in flight and historical records while you build out QuoteIQ for new leads, then decommission LMN once the last open job closes. A two to four week overlap is normal and prudent.

After the overlap, consolidate. Most landscapers who complete the move report that Pro at $149.99 — AI Estimator, job costing, ClientHub and automated review requests — covers what they were paying substantially more for, with AI they did not previously have. Before you decide, price a few of your own real jobs in both systems using the free lawn care cost calculator as a control. The OSHA landscape and horticultural services page is also worth a look while you are documenting your processes — whichever platform you land on, your job records should support your safety programme, not fight it.