Published April 2026 · Updated September 2026
Good/Better/Best project pricing, satellite property measurement, plant and hardscape inventory, per-project job costing, builder and architect pipelines, and AI before-and-after design previews — in one platform built for design-build landscape professionals.
QuoteIQ is the best CRM for landscape design companies in 2026. It is the only platform that combines Good/Better/Best Options Estimates for design tiers, satellite property measurement through MapMeasure Pro, plant and hardscape inventory management, per-project job costing, and builder and architect pipelines in a single subscription. Plans run from $29.99 per month for a single designer to $699 per month for unlimited users, every plan includes a 14-day free trial, and there are no per-seat charges inside the seat count your plan carries.
TL;DR: Landscape design companies lose margin in three places — proposals that show one price instead of three, measurements taken twice, and material costs nobody tracked until the job closed. QuoteIQ closes all three with tiered Options Estimates, satellite measurement, inventory tracking, job costing, 4K photo documentation, AI before-and-after previews, phase scheduling, and builder pipelines. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects landscape architect employment growing 4% from 2025 to 2035, and the U.S. Small Business Administration puts consistent financial systems at the center of managing a growing business. Pricing starts at $29.99 per month.
A design-build landscape company is not a one-visit trade. A single residential project can run a site survey, a concept drawing, an HOA submission, a demolition day, a grading phase, a hardscape build, an irrigation rough-in, a planting day, a lighting walkthrough, and a punch list — often across six weeks and three separate material deliveries. Software written for one-truck, one-visit service calls collapses under that. It has one price per job, one date per job, and no idea that the pallet of pavers sitting on the trailer belongs to the patio you quoted eleven days ago.
That is why landscape professionals end up running four systems at once: a spreadsheet for estimates, a calendar for phases, a photo app for documentation, and an accounting package for the numbers that arrive too late to change anything. Every handoff between those systems is a place where a measurement gets retyped wrong, a material cost never gets attached to a job, or a homeowner asks for a change nobody wrote down. Landscaping management software solves that only when the estimating, scheduling, documentation, and costing layers are actually the same database.
QuoteIQ was built by home service operators for that exact problem. The estimate that a homeowner signs becomes the scheduled work, the work generates the photo record, the photo record and the clocked hours feed the cost report, and the cost report tells you whether the tier you sold actually held its margin. Nothing gets retyped. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration breaks landscape work into the same distinct phases the platform schedules — soil preparation and grading, irrigation, hardscape construction, planting, maintenance, and tree care — which is a useful reminder that a landscape project is a sequence of different jobs, not one job with a long duration.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 162,500 openings a year for grounds maintenance workers over the 2025–2035 decade, with employment growing 5% — faster than the average across all occupations. A workforce that turns over at that rate is a workforce that needs the job record, the plant list, and the site access notes to live in the app rather than in one foreman’s head.
There is a second reason generic tools fail landscape design specifically: the sale is visual and the sale is tiered. A homeowner deciding between a $4,500 planting refresh and a $22,000 outdoor living package is not comparing line items, they are comparing outcomes they cannot yet picture. Software that can only send one flat number per proposal forces your designer to run that conversation on a legal pad. Software that can put three priced tiers and a rendered preview of the finished yard in front of the customer runs it for you. That difference is the whole argument for a purpose-built feature set over a generic work-order tool.
Landscape design is one of the few home service categories where the customer genuinely has three budgets in mind at once. They want the yard fixed, they would love a patio, and they have quietly wondered about a fire feature. A single-price proposal forces them to say yes or no to the middle option you guessed at. Options Estimates put every tier on one document — Basic Plantings, Enhanced Hardscape, Premium Outdoor Living — with its own scope, its own price, and its own photo set. The homeowner taps the tier they want, reviews the total, and signs on their phone. Options Estimates are included on every QuoteIQ plan, starting at $29.99 per month.
Four estimate types ship on every plan, and landscape designers use all four. Standard Estimates carry the full line-item build for a signed design. Quick Estimates handle a mulch-and-cleanup call without a full workup. Package Estimates bundle patio, fire pit, lighting, and beds into one outdoor living package at a single bundled price. And Options Estimates run the tiered consultation. Every type supports photos, notes, terms and conditions, deposit requirements, markup and discount controls, sub-items for parent-child line hierarchies, and one-tap conversion to an invoice.
For a high-end design presentation, QuoteIQ also sends a branded proposal document carrying your company story, service descriptions, a photo gallery, supporting documents, and customer reviews wrapped around the estimate. Proposals are available on every plan and are metered at 100 IQ Credits per send, with sends included at no credit cost during the trial and on the Elite and Max plans. For a residential design-build company presenting a $20,000-plus outdoor living concept, that document does work a bare price sheet cannot.
Three priced design tiers on one estimate, each with its own scope and imagery. The customer selects and signs without a second appointment.
Options Estimates →Patio plus fire feature plus low-voltage lighting plus perennial beds, priced as one complete outdoor living package rather than four separate quotes.
Package Estimates →Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay are available on every plan. The homeowner applies at checkout, you are paid in full upfront, and the provider carries collections.
Consumer Financing →Financing deserves its own note for this trade, because outdoor living is where sticker shock kills otherwise-closed deals. Affirm supports up to $30,000 per job across 3–36 month terms, Klarna offers Pay-in-4 and Pay-in-30, and Afterpay runs Pay-in-4 to roughly $4,000. The customer applies at checkout in about thirty seconds and gets an instant decision, and you are paid in full upfront regardless. That capability is independent of which payment processor your account runs on, and it is on every plan including the trial.
If you are still calibrating what your tiers should cost, QuoteIQ’s free business calculators and trade-specific tools help. A design-build shop that also sells turf can sanity-check a tier against the artificial turf cost calculator, a hardscape-heavy bid against the concrete cost calculator, a border fence add-on against the fence cost calculator, and a maintenance contract against the lawn care cost calculator. Inside the app, the Business Calculators include mulch and paint math plus a National Average Guide covering major home service industries.
The most expensive hour in a landscape design business is the consultation that should never have been booked. MapMeasure Pro measures lot dimensions, lawn square footage, patio and driveway footprints, planting bed perimeters, and fence runs from satellite imagery, with drawing tools for irregular shapes. Measurements save to the customer profile and export straight into the estimate, and a screenshot of the measured area attaches to the proposal as visual proof of scope. MapMeasure Pro is included from the Beginner plan at $74.99 per month upward.
The August 2026 release added a historical aerial imagery timeline, which matters more for landscape than for almost any other trade. You can scroll back through years of photographs of the same property and see what was there before — the tree that was removed, the pool that was filled, the bed line that has crept, the drainage swale that got graded over. On a renovation bid, that history is the difference between quoting a clean install and discovering buried concrete on day two.
A designer running five consultations a week at an hour of drive time each spends roughly 260 hours a year in the truck. At the 2026 IRS business standard mileage rate of 76 cents per mile for July through December, the vehicle cost alone on a 30-mile round trip is about $22.80 before a single minute of labor. Measuring and pre-qualifying from the office is the cheapest sales improvement in the business.
Two companion tools sit alongside it on the same plan tier. Property Street View shows the approach, the grade, the gate width, and whether a skid steer will actually fit down the side yard. Zillow Quick Access pulls the property record so a designer knows lot size and home value before deciding which tier to lead with. Together they let you walk into a first meeting already knowing the site better than the homeowner expects.
Measurement accuracy also feeds material ordering. Square footage from MapMeasure Pro drives paver counts, base tonnage, mulch cubic yards, and sod rolls; those quantities land on the estimate’s materials section — in public beta since April 2026 — and materials link to products in Inventory Management so pricing stays current when your supplier raises stone mid-season. For companies doing drainage-heavy work, the French drain cost calculator and land clearing cost calculator give you a second opinion on site-prep line items before they go out the door.
No other home service trade carries inventory as awkward as landscape design. Pavers move by pallet, natural stone by ton, wall block by course, plant material by species and container size, mulch and gravel by cubic yard, and irrigation fittings by the hundred — and all of it lives in three places at once: the nursery yard, the trailer, and whichever job site had the last delivery. Inventory Management is available on the Elite plan at $299 per month and above, and it is built around five modules that map cleanly onto how a landscape yard actually works.
SKU, category, unit type, cost, and reorder point, with In Stock, Low, and Out indicators. Cost, customer price, and margin are visible directly in the product list.
Nursery yard, each trailer, and each active job site tracked as its own location, so a pallet staged on site is not counted as available stock.
Your stone yard, nursery, irrigation house, and lighting distributor, each tied to the products they supply for faster reordering.
Draft to Confirmed to Received, with receiving automatically creating receipt transactions so the count updates when the truck actually arrives.
Every movement logged as Receipt, Returned, Issued, Damaged, Loss, or Adjustment — including the flat of perennials that did not survive the heat.
Inventory value tracking, usage patterns, and category views, so you can see how much capital is sitting in stone versus plant material.
Stock deducts when the invoice is paid, not when the crew marks the work done. A deposit does not count as paid, so a 30% deposit on a $22,000 outdoor living project leaves your paver count untouched until the balance clears — unless you use the deduct option on that screen. Landscape companies that stage materials weeks ahead of the build need to know exactly that.
Materials placed on an estimate or invoice link back to inventory products, which keeps pricing current as supplier costs move through a season. That link is what turns inventory from a counting exercise into a margin tool: when the stone yard raises pricing in July, the products carrying that cost update, and the next estimate quotes the real number rather than the spring number. Pair that with expense tracking from the Beginner plan up — categorized expenses with receipts attached and linked to specific jobs, searchable and exportable to CSV — and the material side of the business finally has a paper trail.
A landscape design project is a sequence, and the sequence has dependencies that weather breaks constantly. Grading has to finish before base goes down, base before pavers, pavers before the irrigation trench is backfilled near the patio edge, planting after the heavy equipment leaves, lighting last. QuoteIQ scheduling is on every plan and handles this with drag-and-drop across day, week, month, and employee-timeline views, multi-day work rendered as one continuous event rather than seven disconnected blocks, and color-coding by status so a glance tells you what slipped.
Two scheduling behaviors matter specifically for design-build. Schedule Later lets you create the work with no date attached — useful when a contract is signed but the HOA approval or the stone delivery is still pending — and assign the date once the dependency clears. And you can drag a single occurrence of a recurring series without disturbing the rest, so moving one week of a maintenance route around a build day does not blow up the whole season. Completed work shows a green border and badge on the calendar, and from the Beginner plan up, finished visits can be mass-invoiced straight from the calendar view.
A GEO-Schedule map view displays the day’s work geographically on every plan, which is the fastest way to see that your grading crew and your planting crew are forty minutes apart for no good reason. On the Elite plan and above, Route Density shows where work clusters so you can plan a zone day, and Route Optimization sequences the stops within it for minimum drive time — accounting for appointment windows and duration, recalculating when a job is added late, and cutting drive time by 15–30%. The distinction is worth remembering: Density tells you where, Optimization tells you in what order.
Customer-facing communication runs off the same calendar. Automated appointment reminders go out by SMS and email on every plan. On-the-way texts are available from the Pro plan at $149.99 per month, which is the tier most multi-crew landscape companies land on anyway. Two-way Google Calendar sync keeps a designer’s personal calendar aligned with the company one, and Google Reserve lets a homeowner book straight from Google Search or Maps.
Design-build revenue is seasonal almost everywhere. The companies that stay level book recurring maintenance with Invoice Subscriptions for spring cleanups, weekly mowing, seasonal color rotations, and irrigation winterization, then layer in off-season revenue through adjacent trades such as holiday lighting and snow removal, both of which run on the same QuoteIQ account with no additional subscription.
Most landscape design companies discover their real margin in February, when the accountant finishes the year. Job Costing — available from the Pro plan at $149.99 per month — puts a Report tab on every project running the simple equation that actually matters: Total Price minus Labor minus Expenses equals Profit, displayed with a profit-margin bar. Labor pulls automatically from time tracking at each employee’s hourly rate multiplied by clocked hours, and expenses link directly to the job they belong to.
For a design-build operation, that automatic labor pull is the whole point. Hardscape labor is the line item that quietly eats a project — a crew that budgeted three days on a 600-square-foot paver patio and takes four and a half has moved the margin down by several points, and no amount of careful material estimating recovers it. Time Tracker Pro, included with EmployeeHub on the Elite plan and above, handles GPS clock in and out, per-job hours, and break counts and durations in reports and CSV exports, with manual adjustments restricted to admins and a full edit history retained.
| Cost Line | Example: 600 sq ft Paver Patio | Where It Comes From |
|---|---|---|
| Contract price | $18,500 | Signed Options Estimate tier |
| Hardscape materials | $6,200 | Materials linked to inventory products |
| Crew labor | $3,400 | Time Tracker Pro hours × hourly rate |
| Equipment rental | $280 | Expense logged and linked to the job |
| Fuel, dump, delivery | Tracked per receipt | Expense tracking with receipt capture |
| Profit and margin | Calculated live on the Report tab | Price − Labor − Expenses |
The figures above are an illustrative build, not a benchmark — your paver cost and labor rate are your own. What matters is that every one of those lines is captured by the same system that produced the estimate, which is why the report is available while the job is still open rather than after the season closes. An analytics dashboard rolls the same data up across the business: revenue by service, customer, and employee or crew, outstanding versus collected, quotes sent and conversion rate, average ticket, completion rate, and customer repeat rate. Advanced analytics start on the Beginner plan; an Hourly Rate Calculator sits under Business Calculators from Pro upward. For bookkeeping handoff, QuickBooks Online syncs invoices, payments, customers, and expense categories from the Pro plan up, and data export is available on every plan.
Landscape design has a selling problem no other trade shares quite so acutely: you are asking someone to spend five figures on something they cannot picture. Before & After AI generates a realistic rendering of the finished result from the actual photo of the customer’s yard in roughly fifteen to twenty seconds, and the image attaches to any estimate type or invoice. A homeowner looking at a photograph of their bare backyard rendered with a stone patio, a pergola, a fire feature, and ornamental beds is having a different conversation than one looking at a stock gallery. AI features are on every plan and run on IQ Credits; regenerating an image costs credits again.
Three AI tools do three distinct jobs and are worth keeping straight. AI Autopilot is the general manager — conversational control of the whole CRM by voice or text across 55 integrated tools in 13 categories, with real commands like moving today’s work to Friday and texting every affected customer. AI Estimator is the photo-to-quote specialist: it analyzes property photos, asks targeted follow-up questions, and generates line-item pricing calibrated to your local market. And AI Text Generator writes the professional follow-up message in one tap, inside text fields across the app.
A 24/7 AI phone team that answers inbound calls, qualifies leads, filters spam, records and transcribes every call, and sends you a summary — plus outbound and simultaneous call campaigns. It works from a knowledge base and agent personality you configure. Metered at 125 IQ Credits per minute, so call volume is limited by the credit allocation your plan carries.
Virtual Call Team →A dedicated business phone number with two-way calling and texting inside QuoteIQ from phone, tablet, or desktop. Every call and text saves to the customer profile, so the thread about the retaining wall height lives on the job rather than in a designer’s personal messages. Call routing and forwarding send calls by time of day, caller, or availability to a team member, an external number, or the Virtual Call Team.
ClientHub →IQ Credits are included monthly on every plan — 500 on Essentials, 1,500 on Beginner, 3,000 on Pro, 5,000 on Elite, and 8,000 on Max — and reset each billing cycle. There is no separate AI add-on. Every AI action shows its credit cost before it runs and asks for confirmation, so nothing draws silently. Credits carry no cash value and are not refundable once purchased or consumed; the core CRM never requires them.
On the documentation side, QuoteIQ Cam from the Beginner plan up captures photos and video organized by job and date, with before-and-after comparisons, annotations, custom inspection forms and job reports, unlimited 4K cloud storage, and customer-shareable galleries. For a design-build company, that archive is simultaneously a scope-dispute defense, a portfolio, and the raw material for the next proposal. The before-and-after photo editor turns a finished patio into a marketing asset in about a minute.
Landscape design companies rarely have one lead channel. There is the homeowner who found you on Google, the builder who needs a landscape package on every new home, the architect who refers outdoor living work, the property manager with a common-area renovation budget, and the maintenance client who just asked about a fire pit. Treating those as one undifferentiated list is how companies lose track of which relationships are actually carrying the year. Pipelines & Deals — Elite plan and above, where the UI calls them Deals — runs each channel as its own board.
The board carries Kanban and list views, stages with close-probability percentages, and weighted value calculated as amount multiplied by probability, which produces a forecast you can actually staff against rather than a wish list. Six metrics track the whole picture: total value, weighted value, open deals, closed-won, new deals, and average deal age. Deals support multiple assignees, PDF and image attachments, internal notes kept separate from anything the customer sees, and filters by priority, date range, and owner. The Elite plan runs up to five pipelines; Max removes the cap.
Around the pipeline sit the tools that feed it. InstaQuote lets a homeowner build their own quote from your published service library and submit it at eleven at night; InstaSchedule lets them book against your real calendar availability. Both are Elite features. Website contact forms and the Client Portal arrive at the Pro plan — the portal being a branded, per-customer link where a homeowner reviews and approves estimates, pays invoices, sees appointments and inspections, submits requests, and leaves a review, with no app download and no account to create.
Follow-up is where most landscape leads die. Email and text automations from the Pro plan run event-triggered, multi-step sequences with personalization tags, timed anywhere from immediately to twenty-four months out — which is exactly the horizon a “we’ll do the patio next spring” conversation needs. From Elite, mass SMS and email campaigns reach tagged segments, such as every property manager in your database when renovation budgets open. Mass campaigns require you to connect your own Twilio and SendGrid accounts, including A2P 10DLC registration for SMS, and the carrier fees are yours. And Review Multiplier ships two mechanics: an instant post-payment redirect to your review page, and a full email and SMS review-request automation with four event triggers, pointed at Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, or Angi.
Census Bureau Statistics of U.S. Businesses data shows how heavily the landscape sector skews toward small firms. A five-person company cannot afford to chase every channel equally — it has to know which one converts. Separate pipelines with weighted forecasting turn that from a hunch into a number you can act on before spring.
Feature lists are abstract. Here is the same platform described as a working Thursday in a six-person design-build company running two crews and one estimator.
You open the app and read the day. Crew A is in phase two of a 2,400-square-foot paver patio; Crew B starts grading on a backyard renovation. Deals shows a builder package moving into Design Concept, two residential leads due for follow-up, and an HOA renovation waiting on board approval. Route Optimization sequences the estimator’s three site visits. Team Communication pushes assignments, plant lists, and gate-access notes to every crew member’s phone.
Your lead installer uses QuoteIQ Cam to capture base prep, edge restraint placement, and the paver pattern layout in 4K. That record proves the build met spec if a question comes up in October. GPS location tracking shows both crews on their assigned sites while clocked in, and Time Tracker Pro logs the hours that will become the labor line on the cost report.
You meet a homeowner who found you through Google. You already measured the yard with MapMeasure Pro — 1,800 square feet of usable space, an existing slab to demolish, a gentle slope to the rear line — and the historical imagery showed the slab went in around 2014. You show the AI before-and-after preview, then present an Options Estimate with three tiers. She selects the middle tier, adds the fire pit, and signs on her phone at the table.
Walking the patio site, the homeowner asks about lighting along the new beds. You build a Package Estimate bundling path lights, uplighting on three specimen trees, and step lights, and check it against job costing before you quote it, so you know the margin before the number leaves your mouth. If the total gives her pause, financing at checkout takes about thirty seconds to approve.
Back at the office you open the Report tab on the patio that wrapped Tuesday. Contract price, material cost pulled from linked inventory products, labor pulled from clocked hours, and equipment rental logged through expense tracking resolve into a profit figure and a margin bar. You compare it to your target and know whether the tier held.
Final walkthrough photos upload to the job record. Review Multiplier requests a review the moment the final invoice is paid. Business analytics show revenue, average ticket, conversion rate, and revenue by source — the number that tells you whether builder work or Google leads paid for the month.
That entire loop — measure, render, tier, sign, schedule, document, cost, invoice, collect, request the review — runs inside one subscription. No separate estimating spreadsheet, no second photo app, no extra phone line, and no data retyped between systems. Every feature named above is part of QuoteIQ at the plan tier stated beside it, and you can see the full ladder on the pricing page.
A growing design-build company splits naturally into specialized teams, and each needs different visibility. EmployeeHub — available on the Elite plan at $299 per month for up to 10 users — carries the employee database with hourly rates and availability, roles and permissions controlling what each person can open, GPS location tracking, Time Tracker Pro, and Team Communication. The August 2026 release overhauled permissions with clearer gates and separated calendar permissions properly, so an installer can see their own schedule without seeing company financials.
A lead designer-installer plus two hardscape techs running paver patios, retaining walls, outdoor kitchens, fire and water features, and full outdoor living packages. Plate compactors, wet saws, mini excavators, laser levels. This is your highest-value work and needs the tightest phase scheduling so material deliveries land with build progress.
A lead installer plus a helper covering plantings, mulch installs, bed renovations, seasonal color, and maintenance contracts. Steady volume revenue that levels cash flow between large builds — and a standing upsell channel, because the crew is already on the property when a homeowner mentions wanting a new bed or a pathway extension.
Runs homeowner consultations, builder meetings, architect walkthroughs, and HOA presentations, using satellite pre-measurement, tiered Options Estimates, and AI previews, with a Manager-level role for pipeline visibility across every open proposal.
Two boundaries are worth stating plainly so you pick the right plan. Person-to-job assignment is available from the Pro plan. Formal Crew creation, crew tracking, and crew scheduling — with crew-level analytics and routing — are Max plan capabilities, alongside unlimited user seats and the Sales Team Tracker for commission percentages, leaderboards, and year-to-date conversion metrics. A company running three or more named crews with a commissioned sales rep belongs on Max at $699 per month; a company running two crews under 10 seats belongs on Elite.
Two limitations to know before you plan around them: there is no automatic overtime calculation, and there is no native payroll — hours export to whatever payroll system you already run. Location tracking is also deliberately bounded. The live team map shows employees only while they are clocked in, it pauses on breaks, and it stops at clock-out. Clocked-out employees never appear on any map, without exception, which is the right answer both for your crew’s trust and for your exposure.
OSHA’s landscape and horticultural services hazard guidance flags cuts and amputations, electrical exposure, heat and cold stress, lifting injuries, chemical exposure, and slips and falls as the industry’s recurring categories — and singles out overhead power line contact in tree work as potentially fatal. Custom inspection forms turn a pre-work site check into a documented, templated step rather than a conversation in the truck.
Every new home needs a landscape plan, and a builder completing homes on a predictable schedule needs a partner who can hit dates. The appeal of builder work is not the margin — it is the visibility. New home timelines are set months ahead, which lets you allocate crews and order stone with confidence instead of reacting to whoever called Tuesday. Run each builder as its own pipeline from lead through design, permit, build, and closeout, with weighted values that tell you what the relationship is actually worth this quarter rather than what it was worth last year. Contract attachments keep design drawings, plant schedules, material specifications, and scope addendums bound to the estimate they belong to.
A homeowner searching for a landscape designer is a buyer with intent, and the company that responds first sets the frame everyone else gets compared to. Virtual Call Team answers and qualifies inbound calls around the clock during peak season, InstaQuote captures the homeowner who would rather build their own quote at midnight, and InstaSchedule lets them book a consultation against real availability without a phone call. Review volume is what makes that traffic arrive in the first place, and Review Multiplier is the mechanism. Finished residential work also produces the before-and-after portfolio content that drives the next round of consultations.
Homeowner associations, apartment communities, and commercial properties renovate on multi-year cycles, and the contracts are large, scheduled, and referral-driven. Package Estimates bundle common-area plantings, irrigation modernization, and hardscape repair into one renovation scope rather than three competing quotes. Mass SMS and email campaigns to a tagged property-manager segment keep your company in front of the people who control those budgets when approval season arrives. Property managers also trade contractor recommendations across their networks, which is why commercial credibility tends to pull builder and residential work behind it.
Water efficiency is becoming a live selling point in all three channels, particularly anywhere with seasonal restrictions. The EPA’s WaterSense program labels efficient irrigation controllers and certifies irrigation professionals, and a design-build company that can speak credibly to labeled controllers and appropriate plant selection has an argument competitors reading from a plant list do not. If irrigation is a real division for you rather than a line item, the irrigation software page covers that workflow specifically.
Adjacent trades are the fourth channel most design-build companies already have and do not formalize. If you self-perform demolition and site prep, excavation and drainage work is billable on its own. If you build walls and pillars, masonry is a separate service line. Deck and fence work pair naturally with patio builds — see deck building and fence installation — and companies with removals in scope run tree care alongside design. Maintenance contracts sit under lawn care, and all of them run on the same account. You can browse the full set on the industries directory.
The argument for consolidation is not that one login is tidier. It is that when your estimating tool, your scheduling tool, your photo app, and your books are four separate systems, the data that would tell you something useful is split four ways and nobody reconciles it. QuoteIQ covers the whole operational surface of a design-build landscape company in a single subscription, with availability by plan tier rather than by per-seat surcharge inside the seats your plan includes.
A few capabilities are add-ons rather than inclusions, and it is worth being straight about them. The AI Website Builder is a $34.99 per month add-on on every plan except Max, where it is included. Additional businesses under one account are a paid add-on, with four included on Max. Done-For-You setup — contact import, price book build, and a one-on-one onboarding session — runs as a one-time engagement at $299.99 or $999.99 depending on scope. Multi-business support matters if you run a design division and a maintenance division as separate entities.
This is the table to read before you pick a plan. Every row is a capability landscape design companies specifically ask about, matched to the tier where it becomes available. Seat counts are included in the plan price — there is no per-user surcharge inside the seats your plan carries.
| Capability | Available From | What It Does for a Landscape Designer |
|---|---|---|
| Options & Package Estimates | Essentials — $29.99 | Good/Better/Best design tiers and bundled outdoor living packages on one signed document |
| E-signatures | Essentials — $29.99 | Homeowner approves the tier from their phone at the kitchen table |
| Consumer financing | Essentials — $29.99 | Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay at checkout; you are paid in full upfront |
| AI Autopilot, AI Estimator, Before & After AI | Essentials — $29.99 | 55 AI tools across 13 categories, photo-to-quote pricing, rendered design previews |
| Branded proposals | Essentials — $29.99 | Company story, gallery, and reviews wrapped around a high-ticket design estimate |
| MapMeasure Pro + historical imagery | Beginner — $74.99 | Satellite measurement of beds, patios, and lots, plus years of past aerial photos |
| QuoteIQ Cam (4K) & inspection forms | Beginner — $74.99 | Phase-by-phase build documentation, before/after sets, scope-dispute defense |
| Expense tracking & contract attachments | Beginner — $74.99 | Receipts linked to jobs; plant schedules and specs bound to the estimate |
| Job Costing | Pro — $149.99 | Price minus labor minus expenses, live, per project, with a margin bar |
| ClientHub business line & Client Portal | Pro — $149.99 | Dedicated number with calls and texts on the job record; branded customer portal |
| Email & text automations, QuickBooks Online | Pro — $149.99 | Multi-step follow-up out to 24 months; books sync without re-entry |
| Inventory Management | Elite — $299 | Pavers, stone, wall block, plants, mulch, irrigation and lighting across yard, trailer, and site |
| Pipelines & Deals | Elite — $299 | Separate builder, architect, HOA, and residential boards with weighted forecasting (5 pipelines) |
| EmployeeHub, GPS tracking, Time Tracker Pro | Elite — $299 | Clocked-in team map, per-job hours feeding job costing, role-based permissions |
| Route Optimization & Route Density | Elite — $299 | Zone planning plus stop sequencing; cuts drive time 15–30% |
| InstaQuote & InstaSchedule | Elite — $299 | Customer self-quoting and 24/7 self-booking against real availability |
| Crew creation, tracking & scheduling | Max — $699 | Named crews with crew-level analytics and routing for three-plus crew operations |
| Unlimited seats, Sales Team Tracker, AI Website Builder | Max — $699 | Flat-price seats, commission tracking per rep, website builder included |
Landscape design companies shopping for a CRM usually evaluate the same handful of platforms. Competitor pricing changes frequently and plan structures get reorganized without notice, so the figures below were read directly from each vendor’s own published pricing page on 26 September 2026 and are reproduced without interpretation. Always confirm on the vendor’s site before making a decision, and check what is included at each tier — headline prices and seat counts are not comparable line for line.
| Platform | Published Pricing (verified 26 Sep 2026) | Seats at That Tier |
|---|---|---|
| QuoteIQ Pro | $149.99/mo | 4 users included |
| QuoteIQ Elite | $299/mo | 10 users included |
| Jobber | Four published paid tiers with both monthly and annual rates, plus separately priced add-ons. Price and seat count vary together within a tier — see their pricing page for the current ladder | Varies by tier and configuration; additional users charged per seat |
| Housecall Pro | Basic $79/mo · Essentials $189/mo · Max $329/mo, billed monthly; annual rates of $59, $149 and $299 published | 1 · 5 · 8 users; additional Max users $35/mo each |
| ServiceTitan | No public rate card — every tier shows a request-pricing form. See their pricing page for a quote | Not published |
| ResponsiBid | Startup $0 · Scaling $179/mo · Pro $229/mo, each paid plan also carrying a one-time setup fee whose amount is not published on the page | Not published |
Two things are worth reading carefully in that table rather than skimming. The first is seats: a headline monthly price covering one user is a different product from one covering four or ten, and several vendors move price and seat count together within a single named tier, so the entry rate and the rate you would actually pay can differ substantially. The second is add-ons — some platforms price capabilities such as a receptionist service, a pipeline module, or a marketing suite as separate monthly line items, so the tier price is a floor rather than a total. If you want to model a specific configuration before you commit, the ServiceTitan pricing calculator is a useful starting point, and the full side-by-side breakdowns live on the comparison hub.
On capability rather than price, the combination that matters for this trade is specific: satellite property measurement, AI before-and-after design previews, tiered Options Estimates, plant and hardscape inventory, per-project job costing, and separate builder and architect pipelines, all inside one subscription. Photo documentation tools such as CompanyCam are commonly bolted onto other platforms to cover part of that; QuoteIQ Cam is included from the Beginner plan. Evaluate on the full stack you would actually need to assemble, not on the entry-tier headline.
Five plans, published rates, month to month. Every plan includes a 14-day free trial, and annual billing costs ten months rather than twelve. Most growing design-build companies land on Pro for job costing and the business line, or on Elite once inventory, pipelines, and crew tracking become the bottleneck.
A solo designer running weekend consultations starts on Essentials and moves to Beginner the first time satellite measurement saves a wasted site visit. A two-crew company with an estimator belongs on Pro, where job costing turns guesses into numbers. A seven-to-ten person operation carrying real material inventory and multiple referral channels belongs on Elite. A company running three or more named crews with commissioned sales belongs on Max. Upgrades mid-cycle are prorated, credits jump immediately, and annual rates adjust proportionally.
On getting paid: your customers can pay invoices by credit or debit card, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay, and Google Pay online, with cash and check recorded manually in the app. Deposits, partial payments, tips at checkout, and Net 15/30/60/90 terms are supported, and payout and bank details are configured in settings. Invoice Subscriptions handle recurring maintenance billing with full discount, tax, fee, and deposit math. If you are still building out your paperwork, the free landscaping invoice template and contractor invoice template are a reasonable place to start before you move the whole thing into the app.
QuoteIQ is the best CRM for landscape design companies in 2026 because it is the only platform combining six capabilities design-build work actually requires in one subscription: tiered Options Estimates for Good/Better/Best design packages, satellite measurement through MapMeasure Pro, plant and hardscape Inventory Management, per-project Job Costing, AI before-and-after previews, and separate builder and architect pipelines. Plans run $29.99 to $699 per month, 40,000+ contractors use the platform, and it holds a 4.7 rating across 4,103 reviews. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects landscape architect employment growing 4% from 2025 to 2035, so operational efficiency is increasingly what separates companies competing for the same work. Seats are included in each plan rather than surcharged, and every plan is month to month.
QuoteIQ starts at $29.99 per month for Essentials with one user and 500 IQ Credits. Beginner is $74.99 for two users and adds satellite measurement and 4K documentation. Pro is $149.99 for four users and unlocks job costing, a dedicated business line, and QuickBooks Online. Elite is $299 for ten users with inventory, pipelines, routing, and EmployeeHub. Max is $699 for unlimited users with crew scheduling and the AI Website Builder included. Annual billing costs ten months instead of twelve, and there is no per-seat surcharge inside your plan’s seat count. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends settling quoting, scheduling, and invoicing systems early in a company’s growth rather than after the volume arrives. Add-ons priced separately are the AI Website Builder at $34.99 per month on every plan except Max, additional businesses, and one-time Done-For-You setup at $299.99 or $999.99 depending on scope.
Yes. MapMeasure Pro, included from the $74.99 Beginner plan, measures lot dimensions, lawn square footage, patio and driveway footprints, planting bed perimeters, and fence runs from satellite imagery, with drawing tools for irregular shapes. Measurements save to the customer profile and export into the estimate, and a screenshot attaches as visual proof of scope. A historical aerial timeline lets you scroll back years to see what was on the site before a renovation. Companions Property Street View and Zillow Quick Access show site access and property records. Given the 2026 IRS business mileage rate of 76 cents per mile from July onward, every consultation you pre-qualify from the office is measurable money saved. For a second opinion on site prep, try the land clearing calculator. Measured square footage also drives material quantities, so paver counts, base tonnage, mulch cubic yards, and sod rolls carry straight onto the estimate rather than being recalculated by hand.
With Options Estimates, available on every QuoteIQ plan from $29.99 per month. All three tiers — a basic planting refresh, an enhanced hardscape build, and a premium outdoor living package — appear on one document, each with its own scope, price, and photo set. The homeowner selects a tier, reviews the total, and e-signs from their phone. Pair it with an AI before-and-after rendering of their actual yard, add upgrades through a Package Estimate, and offer financing at checkout, where Affirm supports up to $30,000 per job over 3 to 36 months. The National Association of Landscape Professionals is a useful industry resource as you formalize your presentation process. For a high-ticket design, QuoteIQ also sends a branded proposal document carrying your company story, a photo gallery, supporting documents, and customer reviews wrapped around the estimate — available on every plan and metered at 100 IQ Credits per send, with no credit cost during the trial or on the Elite and Max plans.
Yes, from the Elite plan at $299 per month. Inventory Management runs five modules — Products, Locations, Suppliers, Orders, and Transactions — covering pavers by pallet, stone by ton, wall block, plant material by species and container size, mulch and gravel by cubic yard, irrigation fittings, and lighting, tracked separately across your nursery yard, each trailer, and each active site. Products carry SKU, unit, cost, reorder point, and margin. One mechanic matters: stock deducts when the invoice is paid, and a deposit does not count as paid. Materials on an estimate link to products so pricing stays current, and expense tracking plus job costing close the loop. Census Bureau data shows how small most firms in this sector are, which is exactly why tied-up material capital hurts. Inventory analytics track stock value, usage, and category breakdowns so you can see how much capital sits in stone versus plant material.
Through Job Costing, available from the $149.99 Pro plan. Every project gets a Report tab running Total Price minus Labor minus Expenses equals Profit, shown with a margin bar. Labor pulls automatically from Time Tracker Pro at each employee’s hourly rate multiplied by clocked hours, and expenses link directly to the job, so equipment rental, dump runs, and delivery fees land where they belong. An analytics dashboard rolls it up across revenue, conversion rate, average ticket, and completion rate, and QuickBooks Online syncs the books from Pro upward. Remember to account for vehicle cost at the current IRS standard mileage rate when you set your target margin. An Hourly Rate Calculator sits under Business Calculators from the Pro plan upward, and because the report is live rather than retrospective, you can see a hardscape crew running past its budgeted days while the job is still open instead of discovering it when the books close.
Yes. QuoteIQ offers a 14-day free trial with full access to the features of the plan you choose, one trial per person, business and payment method, a credit or debit card is required to start. The trial converts to paid at your selected plan’s rate unless you cancel before it expires, and you can cancel at any point during it. Because access follows the plan you pick, a landscape designer who wants to evaluate inventory or pipelines should trial Elite rather than Essentials. Proposal sends carry no credit cost during the trial. Plans are month to month with no contracts. The SBA’s business management guidance is a good companion while you evaluate, and the full ladder is on the pricing page. A practical way to use the fourteen days is to run one real project end to end — measure it, quote it in three tiers, schedule the phases, document them, and cost it — rather than clicking through features in isolation.
They use a CRM with separate pipelines per channel. Pipelines & Deals, on the Elite plan at $299 per month, runs builder new-construction packages, architect outdoor living referrals, HOA renovation contracts, and residential leads as distinct boards with close-probability stages and weighted forecasting, up to five pipelines on Elite and unlimited on Max. Around it, email and text automations from the Pro plan follow up out to 24 months, mass campaigns reach tagged property managers, and contract attachments keep plant schedules and HOA approval documents bound to the estimate. The National Association of Landscape Professionals is a useful channel for building those professional relationships in the first place. Weighted forecasting — deal amount multiplied by close probability — is what turns a referral channel from an anecdote into a number you can staff and order materials against before the season starts.
A full walkthrough of building an estimate, scheduling the work, and collecting payment inside QuoteIQ.
Watch Video →Four steps take a design-build company from signup to a signed tiered proposal. Most operators complete this in an afternoon; if you would rather hand it off, Done-For-You setup covers contact import, price book build, and a one-on-one onboarding session as a one-time engagement at $299.99 or $999.99 depending on scope.
Load your services and materials with real pricing — pavers by square foot, wall block by face foot, plant material by container size, mulch by cubic yard, lighting by fixture. Group them so a basic planting tier, a hardscape tier, and a premium outdoor living tier can be assembled from stock components rather than rebuilt for every bid. Import existing customers from a CSV or from your phone contacts using AI Smart Import, which maps columns automatically from any prior CRM.
Pick a real address you are bidding. Use MapMeasure Pro to measure the lawn, the proposed patio footprint, and the bed perimeters, then build an Options Estimate with three priced tiers off that measurement. Attach an AI before-and-after rendering generated from a photo of the yard, and send it for e-signature.
Put grading, hardscape, irrigation, planting, and lighting on the calendar as separate phases rather than one long block, and use Schedule Later for phases still waiting on approvals or deliveries. Set the expectation that every crew captures base prep and each completed phase in QuoteIQ Cam. Turn on automated appointment reminders so homeowners know which day the loud work happens.
Enter hourly rates so job costing can pull labor automatically, connect your bank details for online payments, and switch on Review Multiplier so a request fires the moment the final invoice clears. Then open the Report tab on your first completed project and compare the real margin to the one you assumed when you priced the tier.
QuoteIQ was founded on 21 September 2022 in Savannah, Georgia by two home service operators who ran the trades before they built software for them. That background is why the platform prices work in tiers, schedules in phases, and reports margin per project rather than per month.
Two decades in home service operations before co-founding QuoteIQ. His work on estimate speed and follow-up discipline shapes how the platform handles the window between a consultation and a signed proposal.
Insights from Mike Vidan →Co-Founder of QuoteIQ, focused on the operational spine of a service business — how an inquiry becomes a quote, a scheduled job, completed work, and collected payment without a step going undocumented.
Insights from Justin Rogers →“Same day. Not tomorrow morning — same day. Whoever sends a clear, specific estimate first is the one the customer starts comparing everyone else to. That’s a psychological anchor, and it’s real.”
— Mike Vidan, Co-Founder, QuoteIQ · Full insights →
“A job lifecycle doesn’t have to be sophisticated. It’s five steps: how an inquiry comes in, how it gets quoted, how it gets scheduled, how the work gets done, and how payment gets collected. Once those five steps are written down and consistently followed, you have the foundation of a real business.”
— Justin Rogers, Co-Founder, QuoteIQ · Full insights →
QuoteIQ holds a 4.7 rating across 4,103 reviews. These three come from landscape and lawn care operators running the platform day to day.
“Amazing UI and easy to use! I use this for my landscaping company and it makes it very easy to track projects and payments for projects. The built in picture protection is also fantastic. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is thinking about it!”
— Camden Nagg · Google Play“I have a lawncare business, was unorganized, but QuoteIQ changed everything. Estimates, scheduling, billing and invoicing are seamless. Tax prep easier. Best CRM by functionality and price.”
— Elke Staton · App Store“QuoteIQ has already started paying dividends for my new business. The Estimates and Invoices are outstanding, including the ability to add photos. Clearly, lots of entrepreneurial thinking has gone into the design of this CRM! If you’re considering your options, choose QuoteIQ”
— Vance Dickey · Google PlayTiered project pricing, satellite measurement, hardscape and plant inventory, per-project job costing, builder pipelines, and AI design previews. Plans start at $29.99 per month, every plan includes a 14-day free trial, and there are no contracts.
Tell Google that QuoteIQ is a source you trust. One tap unlocks up to 40% off your annual plan. No free trial — billed in full at checkout.
Estimates
Create and send professional estimates.
Invoicing
Send, track and collect invoices.
QuoteIQ Cam
Capture and document every job with ease.
Scheduling
Schedule jobs to your calendar in seconds.
Inspection Forms
Create and complete inspection reports.
MapMeasure Pro
Measure and price properties instantly.
Business Analytics
Real-time insight into your performance.
EmployeeHub
Assign, schedule & pay employees.
Virtual Call Team
Never miss a call with 24/7 AJ, assistant.
ClientHub
Send and keep messages inside QuoteIQ.
InstaQuote
Allow customers to create estimates themselves.
InstaSchedule
Let clients schedule appointments themselves.
Facebook User Group
Connect with and get advice from other QuoteIQ users.
Competitor Comparisons
See how QuoteIQ compares to it’s top competitors.
QuoteIQ Partners
Work with trusted partners that support your growth.
Earn 40% commissions by sharing QuoteIQ with others.
Press & Media
Brand assets and coverage about QuoteIQ’s journey.
