PestPro vs Powered Now: Which Pest Control Software Is Right for You?

Powered Now at a Glance

Powered Now is a British-built field service app targeted squarely at the UK trades market. It's particularly well-known among gas engineers, electricians, and similar certified trades — people who need to produce legally-recognised certificates as a core part of their workflow. The invoicing features are clean, the compliance documentation tools are solid, and for the trades it was built around, it genuinely earns its reputation. Starting at around £15 per month, it sits in a sensible price range for a small sole trader or limited company.

Where Powered Now and PestPro Overlap

Both tools are aimed at small UK field service businesses who want to look professional, stay organised, and spend less time doing admin. You can raise invoices, manage job records, and keep customer details in one place with either platform. Both work on mobile, which is the only sensible approach when your office is wherever your van happens to be parked. The general philosophy — reduce paperwork, speed up cash collection, keep clients informed — is shared ground. If you just need basic job management and invoicing, both platforms tick those boxes.

Where They Differ

SMS and Customer Communication

Powered Now's communication features centre on email and in-app notifications. SMS is not a first-class feature built into the core of the platform across all plans — it's more of an afterthought or add-on depending on your tier.

PestPro includes two-way SMS on every plan, starting with the free tier. This might sound like a small thing until you think about what a typical pest control customer interaction actually looks like. Someone calls you about rats in their garage. You book them in. The day before the visit, you send a reminder. They reply to say they'll be out in the morning but home after midday. You adjust. No phone tag, no missed visit, no frustration on either side. That whole conversation happens in your CRM because the SMS is genuinely built in, not bolted on. For a one-person pest control operation juggling six jobs a day, that kind of seamless back-and-forth is worth real money in saved time.

AI Features

Powered Now doesn't offer AI features. It's a solid, straightforward administrative tool — what you see is what you get, and for many trades that's perfectly fine.

PestPro's Claude AI integration is something different. Pest control generates a surprising amount of written output: survey reports, treatment records, customer-facing summaries of findings and recommendations, renewal reminders that actually persuade rather than just notify. Writing all of that from scratch, after a full day treating infestations and driving between sites, is genuinely draining. Having Claude on hand to draft a professional rodent survey report based on your site notes, or to help you write a clear explanation of a German cockroach treatment programme for a nervous restaurant manager, isn't gimmickry — it's the kind of practical support that makes the admin side of pest control feel less like a second job.

Pricing and Free Tier

Powered Now starts at around £15 per month. There's no permanent free plan — you can trial the platform, but after that you're paying monthly.

PestPro's free plan covers up to 15 customers indefinitely. There's no countdown clock, no trial language, no card required to get started. For a technician who's just gone self-employed and is building their client base up from scratch, or for someone who wants to genuinely evaluate a platform over several months before committing, that matters. Fifteen customers is enough to run a part-time pest control operation or to prove out whether the platform suits you before you spend a penny.

Pest Control Focus

Here's the core issue with Powered Now for pest controllers: its compliance and documentation features are built around gas safety certificates, electrical installation condition reports (EICRs), and similar regulated trade documents. Those are real, important compliance requirements — for gas engineers. They have nothing to do with what a pest controller needs to document.

What pest controllers actually need from a compliance perspective is quite different: pesticide application records that meet the requirements of the UK's Code of Practice for using plant protection products, treatment reports that would satisfy a BPCA audit, documentation of bait station locations and check frequencies for commercial rodent contracts, and survey reports that clearly record evidence of pest activity, harbourage, and recommendations. None of that is in Powered Now's DNA because it was never built with pest control in mind.

PestPro is purpose-built for pest control. The templates, the workflows, the terminology — all of it reflects what BPCA members and UK-qualified pest controllers actually do. That alignment reduces the friction of daily admin enormously.

Quick Comparison

The Bottom Line

Powered Now is a fine tool if you're a gas engineer or electrician — it was built with those trades in mind and it shows. For pest controllers, the compliance features are the wrong shape, the SMS story is weaker, and you're paying for functionality designed around a completely different industry. PestPro gives you a platform that actually understands pest control, with better communication tools and a free tier that lets you start without risk.

Switching Is Simple

Moving from Powered Now to PestPro won't cost you a week of your life — bring your customer list across, set up your service templates, and you'll be operational quickly, without losing your historical job records.