The six platforms integrators usually weigh up against us. What each one does, what it really costs over two years, and where it beats us.
Design and proposals for bigger commercial jobs, built around the engineering.
Strength: 1.6 million products with dealer pricing. Wire path mapping with per-foot costing, and interconnect diagrams, both built into Cloud. Their service management is better than ours.
Gap: No marketing, on any plan. And the $99 Cloud Single price isn't what you'll actually pay — add QuickBooks or Xero and Gold Support and it climbs quickly.
Read the D-Tools alternativeProposals first, with the biggest catalogue in AV and an AI proposal builder.
Strength: 5 million+ products. Their AI Proposal Builder writes a full proposal from a walkthrough you record on your phone, which is genuinely clever. Strong Snap One dealer integration.
Gap: It stops after the proposal. No CRM, no real project management, and invoicing is charged per record. The app is iOS only.
Read the Portal.io alternativeRuns on your own server. Very strong on stock and recurring billing.
Strength: Years of work in multi-location stock control, and recurring invoicing with card details on file. Both are ahead of us.
Gap: You're expected to run a Windows database server. At $60 per user, per month, it adds up fast. No marketing, and no Xero.
Read the iPoint Solutions alternativeThe UK quoting tool, wired straight into the distributors.
Strength: Live trade pricing from 200+ UK distributors and 6,000+ brands, across 3.5 million products, updated daily. That's ahead of us. Their SNAGG app works offline.
Gap: You pay by how many quotes you write, so the bill grows with the work. WorkHub, Procurement and Inventory are Premium-only extras.
Read the WeQuote alternativeProposals first, 3.5 million products, and drawings the AI does for you.
Strength: 3.5 million+ AV and IT products with dealer pricing. Jetbot draws your schematics and rack elevations for you. Proper project registration with the manufacturers.
Gap: Almost everything is an extra. CRM, install, service, stock, the portal and the AI drawings all cost more on top of an Enterprise seat. No marketing on any plan.
Read the Jetbuilt alternativeProjects and service organised by property, for firms looking after a lot of estates.
Strength: Systems are tied to the property rather than the job, which suits ongoing service work. Good stock control with barcode scanning and virtual warehouses.
Gap: It's built to sit alongside two other tools rather than replace them — D-Tools and Portal.io do the rest. No published pricing. No marketing and no CRM.
Read the ProjX360 alternativeMost of the regret we hear about comes down to the same few things. Ask these five before you sit through any demo and the list gets shorter fast.
A modular platform sells you a seat, then charges again for the bits your team turns out to need. CRM. Project management. Service. Stock. The customer portal. AI drawings.
So the number on the pricing page isn't the number you'll pay. Add it all up before you compare — every module a working team needs, every user, every per-record fee. A flat fee looks dearer on day one and usually isn't by month three.
Some platforms still want you running a database server. You set it up, patch it, back it up, and replace it when it dies, on your own Windows hardware.
That's fine if you've got IT in-house and you want the data on a machine you can walk up to. If you haven't, it quietly becomes somebody's second job. Ask whether the cloud version is the standard one or costs extra.
Some platforms go deep on the engineering. D-Tools and Jetbuilt will do your wire calculations, interconnect diagrams and rack elevations properly.
Others go wide instead and run the business around the job: CRM, marketing, the customer portal, invoicing. We're in the second group, and so is part of iPoint. If your work is complex commercial documentation, go deep. If it's running the whole firm, go wide. Getting this one wrong costs months.
Most AV software handles everything after the enquiry and nothing before it. Proposals, projects, invoices, yes. Website, social, SEO, blogs, actually getting the lead in — someone else's problem.
That usually means a few more subscriptions and no clear answer to where the work came from. A couple of platforms include marketing, some sell it a tier up, most don't do it at all. Worth asking early. It's the one people notice last.
Some vendors publish every plan with the features listed. Others quote per deal, usually because the price genuinely does move with team size, modules and contract length.
Both are fair enough, but they're different to buy. Published pricing means you can work out the two-year number before you talk to anyone. Quoted pricing means you can't compare properly until you've sat through a call with all of them. If a vendor won't publish, ask for the rate card early.
Every comparison page is built from the competitor's own pricing page, checked against their public feature list and the pricing emails that turn up after you fill in a contact form. Where one of them doesn't publish pricing, like ProjX360 and parts of iPoint, we say so and leave the cost blank rather than make something up.
Where they beat us, we say that too. Jetbuilt's 3.5 million products. WeQuote's distributor coverage. D-Tools' engineering tools. Our catalogue is smaller than four of the six platforms on this page, and every one of those pages says so.
There's no star rating and no winner badge, because the honest answer depends on your firm. Every page is laid out the same way: why people leave that platform, what moving actually involves, and where it's still the better choice. Read it, then book a demo if you want to see us against a job shaped like yours. If we're not right for you, we'd rather say so on the call.
Competitor features and pricing on this page mirror the individual comparison pages, each verified against that competitor's own published pages on 25 July 2026.
Can't find what you're looking for? We'll come back to you within a few hours.
Contact usThere isn't one right answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The best AV business management software for you depends on how big your team is, how much system design you do, whether you want marketing on the same platform, and whether you're happy running your own server. The six we get compared to most — D-Tools, Portal.io, iPoint Solutions, WeQuote, Jetbuilt and ProjX360 — cover most of the sensible options. Read the page for whichever is closest to what you use now. Each one also says where that platform beats us.
Five questions get you most of the way. Is it a flat fee, or does the price climb as you add modules? Is it properly cloud, or are you running a Windows server? Does it go deep on drawings and wire calcs, or wide across CRM, marketing and the portal? Is marketing included, or is that four more tools? And is the price published, or do you have to ask for it? Every comparison page here scores all six on those, with the two-year maths attached.
The cheapest sticker is about $29 a month for something that only writes proposals, but that's rarely what you end up paying. Add per-record invoicing fees, accounting integrations, portal access, CRM, project management and the marketing tools you'll want as you grow, and most platforms land somewhere between $150 and $450 a month for a small-to-mid team. Those are US dollars, because that's how most of them publish. Our own pricing is on the pricing page in your currency. The entry plan has every feature the bigger plans have — the difference is how many users, not what it does.
Not really. There's no free platform that does proposals, CRM, project management and invoicing properly. A few have a free tier with hard limits — Portal.io Lite caps you at 10 proposals a month — and some run a sponsored free plan through a dealer programme. For something you can actually run the business on, expect to pay monthly. We do a fourteen-day trial with everything switched on and no card required, so you can try it on real jobs first.
Everything that isn't the install itself. Getting leads in and keeping track of them, quotes and proposals, running the projects, work orders and scheduling, invoicing and pushing it through to your accounts, a portal so the client can see what's happening, an app for the engineers, and stock control. On the more complete platforms, the marketing as well — website, SEO, social. The better ones put all of that in one place. The weaker ones do one part well and leave you to bolt the rest on.
One flat fee for the whole thing: proposals, CRM, projects, invoicing, the customer portal, stock, the marketing suite — website, Echo social media, SEO, blogs — and Bob the AI running through all of it. Nothing extra per module, no per-user surcharge, no per-record fees, no server to look after. Every platform on this page beats us somewhere. D-Tools and Jetbuilt on system design. Portal.io, Jetbuilt and WeQuote on catalogue size, where ours is smaller. iPoint on recurring invoicing. ProjX360 on estate work. What's different is the shape: the others either price it in pieces or leave half the business to other tools. Each comparison page lays the trade-off out so you can decide which bit matters to you.
Thirty minutes, side by side with whatever else you're looking at. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so on the call.
