Vento vs Commusoft

The short answer

Commusoft is a well-established job-management and CRM platform used across field-service trades — plumbing, electrical, gas, air conditioning and more. It’s a mature, general-purpose tool for running jobs, scheduling engineers and invoicing customers.

Vento is built specifically for air conditioning and heat pump installers, and starts somewhere else: heat load calculation and system design, not the diary. You survey a room, size the load, select equipment against it, and produce a proposal before you leave site. That design becomes the quote, with no re-keying into a separate system.

This isn’t really admin versus engineering, though. Vento runs the office too — jobs, scheduling, CRM, quoting, invoicing, payments. The honest comparison is general trade admin from Commusoft, against air-con-specific admin plus the design work no general platform attempts.

Where the two products actually differ

The difference that matters is what happens before the quote gets written.

Vento does room-by-room heat load calculation, ties equipment selection to that load, and lets you propose on site — at the kitchen table or in the plant room — rather than going back to the office to build a quote from notes. Design and quote are the same flow, not two separate jobs. For more on how that works, see heat load calculation software.

We haven’t found anything in Commusoft’s own published material describing air-con-specific heat load or Manual J-style sizing built into the platform. That doesn’t mean it’s absent — it means it isn’t something they talk about. If sizing and design matter to how you quote, put the question to them directly: can it calculate room-by-room heat loss, and does that calculation drive the quote, or do you still need a spreadsheet alongside it?

Job management and admin: parity, not a knockout

Commusoft is a genuinely capable job-management and CRM platform, and it’s fair to say so. Where the two overlap, this is parity rather than a case for Vento being better.

Vento covers jobs, scheduling and CRM; quotes and invoicing; branded proposals with e-signature; online payments and deposits; recurring service and maintenance plans with certificates; a full mobile workflow; a drag-and-drop dispatch board; route planning (Professional and up); van and store stock; purchase orders and invoice matching; per-job subcontractor access; lone-worker check-ins; a customer portal; Schedule of Rates pricing from NHF, PSA or your own; and batch billing for maintenance contracts.

That’s the office side handled. Vento doesn’t claim to out-schedule or out-dispatch Commusoft — it claims to do that work to the same standard, while also doing the design work upstream of it. See the full feature list for the complete set.

F-Gas and compliance record-keeping

This is where a lot of installers are quietly nervous about their current system, and it’s worth naming the actual obligation rather than talking around it.

Under the F-Gas Regulation, contractors must keep records for five years covering the quantity and type of fluorinated greenhouse gases installed, refrigerant recovered during servicing, and the results of leak checks and inspections. REFCOM — the UK registration and compliance scheme for F-Gas and refrigerant handling — checks that your company has record-keeping systems in place as part of registration, alongside verifying that individual technicians hold valid F-Gas qualifications.

Vento produces these records as a by-product of the job: refrigerant charge, recovery, leak checks and CO₂ equivalent are captured as part of the workflow you’re doing anyway, rather than a separate form afterwards. More on how that works: F-Gas compliance software.

We can’t confirm from Commusoft’s own published material whether it maintains an equivalent register — refrigerant type, charge, CO₂ equivalent and leak-check history against the five-year requirement. That isn’t a claim that it doesn’t; it’s a gap in what’s publicly stated. Ask them directly whether it logs refrigerant quantities, recovery and leak checks in a form that satisfies the five-year requirement, or whether that still lives in a separate register.

Pricing: flat tiers against per-user

Vento’s core pricing is flat tiers rather than a charge per engineer: plans start at £49 a month, with the Professional plan at £149 a month including 3 seats. Extra seats beyond a plan’s allowance are £25 each, so it isn’t a flat fee regardless of headcount — but the tier, not the headcount, is the main lever. See the full pricing for what each plan includes.

Commusoft is generally described as priced per user with a minimum seat count. We haven’t seen a current published rate card, so we won’t guess a figure — check their current pricing directly.

The structural difference matters more than any specific number. Per-user pricing with a seat minimum means cost stacks with every engineer, and a one-person outfit may still pay for seats it doesn’t use. Whether that favours you depends on your team size and how it’s likely to grow — worth modelling against your own numbers rather than either vendor’s marketing.

Switching from Commusoft

Migration is usually the thing that stalls a switch, so it’s worth being straight about what’s actually established here.

The approach is that you start Vento on your next survey and leave historical jobs where they are — no migration to schedule, and no month running two systems in parallel. Test that against your own record-keeping needs, particularly F-Gas history you may need to keep accessible for the full five years.

Which should you pick?

If you run several trades and want one system across all of them, Commusoft covers ground a single-trade tool doesn’t, and that’s the right trade for you.

If air conditioning and heat pumps are the business, Vento gives you the same job management plus the heat load, design and F-Gas work that sits upstream of it. Compare Vento against the other options, or read our guide to the best air conditioning software in the UK for the wider field.