Vento vs Simpro

Who each tool is actually built for

Simpro is a field-service and project-management platform aimed at commercial trade contractors running complex work — multi-site projects, asset maintenance programmes, and inventory at scale across electrical, plumbing, HVAC and other trades. General platforms are good at being general, and that breadth is a real strength if your business spans several trades.

Vento is built for one job: sizing, selecting and quoting air-conditioning and heat pump systems, then running the business around that work. If you install air conditioning and nothing else, that’s the difference between software adapted to fit your trade and software built for it — by someone who has done the job on the tools.

Neither framing makes the other tool wrong. It’s a question of what you actually do all day.

Heat load, design and quoting: the gap a general platform leaves

The question that matters most if you’re weighing these up: can it size the system?

Room-by-room heat load calculation and equipment sizing aren’t part of what Simpro advertises, as far as their own marketing goes — worth confirming with them directly. It’s a strong scheduling, quoting and invoicing platform, but the engineering still has to happen somewhere: working out the heat loss for each room, matching equipment to that load, producing a design that survives a site survey. Usually that means a spreadsheet, a separate design tool, or a rule of thumb applied on the day.

Vento starts there instead of leaving it for later. You do the room-by-room calculation, select equipment against it, and produce a proposal from that design — at the kitchen table or in the plant room, before you leave site. The quote comes out of the design rather than being re-keyed into a different system afterwards. See everything Vento includes for how that flow works.

F-Gas and refrigerant records

F-Gas record-keeping — refrigerant charge, CO₂ equivalent, leak-check scheduling — is a legal requirement for in-scope work, not a nice-to-have. Whatever software you run, the record has to exist and has to be accurate.

Refrigerant compliance record-keeping isn’t something Simpro’s HVAC marketing addresses specifically. That doesn’t mean it can’t be handled with custom fields or a separate register, but it isn’t part of the core pitch as far as we can establish — ask them what a leak check actually gets recorded against.

In Vento the record is a by-product of doing the job: the equipment you select and the system data you capture feed the F-Gas record without a separate step. See how Vento handles F-Gas record-keeping for the detail.

Admin and operations: parity, not a downgrade

This isn’t a reason to pick Vento on its own, but it is a reason not to rule it out if you assumed a specialist tool means giving up the admin side.

Vento runs jobs, scheduling and CRM, quoting and invoicing, branded proposals with e-signature, online payments and deposits, recurring service and maintenance plans with certificates, and a full mobile workflow. It has a drag-and-drop dispatch board, van and store stock, purchase orders with invoice matching, per-job subcontractor access, lone-worker check-ins, a customer portal, Schedule of Rates pricing you can import from NHF, PSA or your own, and batch billing for maintenance contracts. Route planning is included from the Professional plan up.

That isn’t a claim to out-schedule a platform built for large multi-trade contractors running complex commercial projects — that’s genuinely Simpro’s territory. The narrower claim is the honest one: for an air-conditioning specialist, Vento does the admin to a comparable standard, and does the design and quoting a general platform doesn’t attempt.

Pricing and contract terms

Vento’s pricing is published and flat: plans start at £49 a month, with the Professional plan at £149 a month including 3 seats and extra seats at £25. There’s a 14-day free trial on every plan and no long contract. See the full pricing for what each plan includes.

Simpro prices on a per-seat basis rather than publishing flat tiers, which suits a contractor adding engineers by the dozen more than an owner-operator running two or three vans, where every extra person is another licence. Get current figures from them directly rather than from anything printed on a comparison page.

Two questions worth asking any vendor before you sign, Simpro included: what is the minimum term, and what does onboarding involve before you go live? Get both answers in writing. Vento does not lock installers into multi-year terms.

Switching: what actually moves

We haven’t published a switching timeframe, so we won’t invent one. What a move generally involves is bringing across your customer and job records, and setting up your equipment catalogue and pricing — including any Schedule of Rates you work to.

The part that changes most is the bit that currently sits outside your job-management software. If you’re sizing jobs in a spreadsheet today, that workflow moves into the design tools rather than staying bolted on beside them.

Which should you pick?

If you’re a single-trade air-conditioning or heat pump installer, and heat load calculations and equipment selection currently live in a spreadsheet separate from your job-management software, Vento closes that gap and keeps the F-Gas records in the same workflow.

If you’re a multi-trade or large commercial contractor with complex asset management, multi-site projects or inventory needs well beyond air conditioning, Simpro is built for that scale in a way a specialist tool isn’t trying to match. Compare Vento against the other options, or read our guide to the best air conditioning software in the UK for a wider view.