Tradify vs Bead Board
Tradify is job management for every trade: electricians, plumbers, HVAC, property maintenance, and yes, welders. Bead Board only does welding shops. That difference decides which one you should buy, so here it is laid out straight.
Updated August 2026
Quick answer
Buy Tradify if you run crews across trades and need scheduling, dispatch, and invoices that flow into Xero or QuickBooks. Buy Bead Board if welding is the whole business and you need a job board, quotes with material markup, and an app that keeps working with no signal. Tradify runs $47 to $61 per user per month; Bead Board is $99 flat for the whole shop.
Side by side
Tradify pricing and plan features sourced from tradifyhq.com/pricing in August 2026. USD, monthly billing.
Buy Tradify if this sounds like you
Tradify is a mature product with a lot of shops on it, and for the right kind of business it earns its money:
- You run more than one trade. Welding is a service line next to fabrication-adjacent work like railing installs, HVAC, or general contracting.
- You dispatch crews to job sites and live by the schedule. Tradify does scheduling with calendar sync; Bead Board deliberately does not.
- You want invoices flowing straight into Xero or QuickBooks Online and payments collected inside the tool.
- Timesheets, subcontractors, and job costing across a bigger crew matter more to you than welding-specific anything.
If that is your business, Tradify is the safer buy at tradifyhq.com. Just do the seat math first: five people on the Pro plan is $255 a month, and it grows with every hire.
Buy Bead Board if this sounds like you
- Welding and fab is the whole business. You want software that says "bead" and "fit-up", not "service ticket".
- You are replacing a whiteboard, not building a dispatch operation. Jobs move across columns; that is the schedule.
- Your phone is the office and half your day has no signal: metal buildings, rural sites, under a trailer. Bead Board works offline and syncs later.
- You quote with material markup off a price list, and you want every past line item searchable next time.
- You would rather pay $99 flat and add your whole crew than do per-seat math every time you hire.
About Tradify's welding page
Tradify has a landing page for welding businesses. It is the same product with a welding header on it; the customer stories on that page are HVAC, electrical, and fire-services outfits. That is not a knock — a good generalist tool can run a welding shop. But nothing in it was designed around how welding work actually flows: quote off a cut list, mark up the steel, photos of the joint before and after, hours against the estimate.
Bead Board is the opposite trade-off. It will never schedule your plumbing crew, and it will never try. Every screen exists because a welding shop needed it.
Questions from shops weighing Tradify vs Bead Board
Is Tradify good for welding shops?
It can be, if the shop runs like a field-service business: scheduled site visits, crews to dispatch, invoices into Xero or QuickBooks. Tradify is mature and well-reviewed across the trades. What it is not is welding-specific — quoting off material weight and markup, job photos tied to welds, estimated vs actual hours on the card. If those are the features you would actually use daily, a welding-only tool fits better.
What does Tradify cost for a 5-person shop vs Bead Board?
As of August 2026, Tradify is $47 to $61 per user per month. Five people on the middle Pro plan is $255 a month, $3,060 a year. Bead Board is $99 a month flat for unlimited users, $1,188 a year, and the price does not change when you hire.
Does Bead Board integrate with Xero or QuickBooks?
No. Bead Board generates quote and invoice PDFs and you enter the final number in QuickBooks or hand it to your bookkeeper. Tradify syncs both ways with Xero and pushes to QuickBooks Online. If accounting sync is a hard requirement, that is a real point for Tradify.
Does Tradify work offline?
Tradify is cloud-based and does not publish an offline mode. Bead Board is offline-first on iPhone and Android: the board, photos, hours, and job updates all work with no signal and sync when it returns. If your shop floor or job sites kill cell coverage, this is the difference you will feel daily.
Also worth reading: JobQuote IQ (fab shop software) • Jobber (field services) • QuickBooks for the shop floor • welding spreadsheet • welding shop job tracking software.