Comparison
Taskrol vs Markate for appliance repair
We recommend Taskrol to an appliance repair shop. It is built for equipment that carries a model and a serial number — appliance repair and HVAC service both qualify — and its depth sits in the things a repair day is actually made of: parts stock counted per van down to the shelf and box cell, the appliance recorded on every job by brand, model and serial with the customer's appliances and past jobs on their record, model plates and part numbers read by photographing them, and manufacturer parts diagrams on the job itself.
Markate starts from the opposite end. It calls itself a Service Operations Platform and asks you to run your entire field service business on it. Its own Trades menu lists thirteen trades — pressure washing, carpet and tile cleaning, window cleaning, maid and janitorial, handyman, general contracting, electrical, painting, holiday lighting, snow plowing, landscaping, tree services, and appliance repair, which it files under “Maintenance” beside landscaping and tree work. Neither HVAC nor plumbing has a trade page of its own, though their Kate AI Estimator page names HVAC among the trades it prices for. Markate says more than 25,000 home service pros use it, and positions itself against buying separate point tools rather than against any named competitor.
Markate is strongest on the machinery that produces the next job. Markate mails physical postcards for you, drops ringless voicemails, runs SMS and email blasts and drip sequences off the same customer records used to dispatch, asks for reviews automatically, sells a done-for-you website, and answers the phone with an AI receptionist. On that side Taskrol offers appointment and ETA texts and the AI Agent add-on, which answers the phone. An appliance shop whose revenue is repeat and referral should weigh that before it weighs any parts argument.
The short version
Taskrol is the product we would pick for an appliance repair shop, because there the machine is the job: parts diagrams opened from the work order on every plan, stock counted per van cell, and brand, model and serial on every job and on the customer’s record. A move from Markate is a direct import of customers and work orders in the web app. Markate is built for a business where appliance repair is one of several trades, or whose calendar is filled by marketing to its own customer list — the postcards, voicemail drops, campaigns and review requests running off the same records that dispatch the job are where it leads, and its staffed migration and QuickBooks link make moving in easy. Ask yourself which half of the day costs you more money, the finding of the part or the finding of the next customer, and buy for that half.
What Taskrol costs: Solo $0 forever (1 technician), Basic $29/month (1 user), Pro $129/month (3 users), each extra user $29/month; 7 days of Pro for every new account, no card. Taskrol pricing →
What Markate costs, and what Taskrol costs
Markate: $49.95 a month or $45.95 billed yearly, plus $5 a month per employee; many features are $10-a-month add-ons (Markate’s pricing page, read ).
Taskrol: Solo $0 forever (1 technician), Basic $29/month (1 user), Pro $129/month (3 users), each extra user $29/month; 7 days of Pro for every new account, no card. Basic already carries the reports, the accounting sync and the team tools: all reports, including margin and on-hand inventory, team roles and permissions, technician assignment, van and warehouse inventory, the QuickBooks Online sync, appliance manuals and AI invoices; Pro adds the shared company warehouse. Calls with recording, two-way texts and AI call answering are add-ons on any plan, free Solo included: Voice & SMS from $25 a month and AI Agent packs from $49 a month. Taskrol pricing →
About Markate
Markate is a Scottsdale, Arizona company, founded in 2015 and bootstrapped, that describes itself on its home page as an AI-powered Service Operations Platform connecting CRM, scheduling, dispatch, routing and payments for home service professionals — though its appliance repair page and several page titles still call it Markate CRM. Its published capability catalog covers leads and a sales pipeline, estimates in standard, option and package form, work orders with checklists, photos and e-signature, a drag-and-drop calendar with per-employee colors, a schedule map with live employee locations, invoices including progressive and recurring ones, card payments through Square or PayPal — Square is the partner their pages lead with, and ACH and saved cards on file are described as Square-only — tips, credit notes, consumer financing through Wisetack, job costing across labor, materials and overhead, expenses and mileage, employee clock-in with payroll reports, a reporting group covering profit and loss, sales tax, demographics, closeouts, a sales leaderboard and lead conversions, a branded passwordless customer portal, online booking with ZIP validation and deposits, and an unusually deep marketing side: SMS and email blasts and drips, mailed postcards, ringless voicemail, neighborhood postcard targeting, automated review requests, and a website built by their team. It names twelve integrations including QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Payroll, Square, PayPal, Wisetack, CompanyCam, ResponsiBid, NiceJob, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Twilio and Zapier, publishes a Connect API reference with OAuth 2 and webhooks behind an approval request, and runs on web plus iOS and Android. Its pricing page names two plans, Owner Operator and Team, marks each capability Included or Paid Feature, and describes a 14-day full-access trial with no credit card.
Read from Markate’s own published pages on . Prices and features change; check the current ones on the official Markate website.
Taskrol vs Markate at a glance
| Feature | Taskrol | Markate |
|---|---|---|
| Product focus | Appliance and HVAC equipment repair. The boundary is equipment carrying a model and serial plate, not a trade name. | Thirteen trades on their own Trades menu, mostly cleaning, exterior and seasonal work; appliance repair is grouped under Maintenance with landscaping and tree services. |
| What each one calls itself | Appliance and HVAC equipment repair software, defined by the equipment rather than by a list of trades. | “Service Operations Platform” on the home page and About; “Markate CRM” on the appliance repair page and in page titles. The wording is mixed across their own site. |
| Finding the part | Photograph the data plate, the catalog opens against that model, search returns that unit’s part numbers with van stock beside them. | Their job costing page tracks labor, materials and overhead as cost categories. Separately, their product updates and their public API describe an item list whose entries carry a price, a cost and a Service, Product or Material type. Their pages do not describe parts search, parts ordering or parts stock. |
| Parts diagrams | Parts diagrams are on every plan, including the free Solo plan. On a job whose appliance has a model number, a Diagrams link opens manufacturer exploded views, swipeable with a page counter and pinch zoom, with that page’s part list underneath. | The words “diagram” and “schematic” do not appear on the pages we read. |
| Stock | Per van, down to the shelf and box cell, with a tracked flag per part with one low-stock number per stock owner that drops a low part onto the shopping list, shared by the whole team on Pro. | Their capability list describes no stock levels, counts, minimums or reorder points, and the words parts, inventory and stock do not appear on their home page, their appliance repair page or that list. Their public Connect API reference does publish an Inventory Items resource, but the fields it documents are a name, a description, a price, a purchase cost, a Service, Product or Material type, a tax rate and a discount — no quantity on hand, no location, no reorder point. |
| The unit record | Brand, model and serial on every job, the customer's appliances and past jobs on their record, and on Basic and Pro the manuals for the model one tap away. | History at the customer level — past services, invoices, interactions, notes, groups and comments — and a customer can hold more than one service address; their product updates put the export limit at 200 addresses per customer. No equipment or serial record is described. |
| Scheduling and the map | A column per technician beside the job list, the day as map pins numbered in schedule order with an arrival time on each, and a Ready to install queue for jobs whose parts have landed. | Drag-and-drop calendar by day, week, month or employee; a schedule map showing unscheduled work orders and live employee positions, with per-employee route colors. |
| Routing | The dispatcher plans and optimizes the route on the day’s map: visits are pins numbered in schedule order with arrival times. | Their home page names routing in the sentence that describes the platform and marks a “Routing & Tracking” row Included in its own comparison table, and their Schedule Map announcement says the feature is meant to optimize your route planning. What no page of theirs describes is how a route gets sequenced, and their pricing capability catalog carries no routing row at all. |
| The repair that waits on a part | The job stays In Progress with the part ordered against it, then moves to the install slot when the part arrives. | Work orders can be split into multi-day jobs or set to recur. Their pages do not describe tracking a part on order against the open job, or linking the return visit to it. |
| Customer messages and marketing | Appointment and ETA texts and SMS templates with opt-in consent, on the optional telephony add-on. | SMS and email blasts and drips, mailed postcards, ringless voicemail, neighborhood postcard targeting and automated review requests pointed, on their review management page, at Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, BBB or Yelp. The Marketing rows on their pricing page are marked Paid Feature. |
| AI | On Basic and Pro, AI reads brand, model and serial off the data-plate photo and drafts invoices; the AI Agent is a paid add-on that answers calls and books visits. | AI Agents you “hire”: a call-answering receptionist and an estimator that builds a branded estimate from photos and job details against your own pricing catalog, requested through a form. |
| Accounting | A one-way sync to QuickBooks Online — each job’s customer, invoice, payments, tips, card surcharges and refunds sent as the job is completed and paid, later edits updating the same invoice — and a job-level CSV export, one row per job with revenue, margin, card net received, parts cost, taxes and tips, filterable by period, technician and payment method. | QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Payroll integrations, with payments described as syncing to QuickBooks and customers importable from it. |
| Customer-facing surface | A booking page that reads live availability and ZIP coverage and creates the job, on-my-way texts with the Voice & SMS add-on, and the invoice the customer signs and pays on the spot. | Their customer portal page describes a branded portal each customer reaches by a unique link with no password; their online booking page adds coupon codes, minimum booking amounts and deposits, and a product update adds ZIP-code validation. Both are Paid Feature rows on their pricing page. |
| Warranty returns | A return visit under your own workmanship warranty, created from the completed job in one tap and linked both ways. | Warranty work is described nowhere in their capability catalog or on their appliance repair page. On their site the word turns up only in the legal language of their Terms & Conditions. |
| Integrations | Card payments, business phone and SMS, maps, QuickBooks Online, and the Encompass appliance parts catalog for model lookups, parts lists and parts diagrams, with no Encompass account needed. | Twelve named integrations and a publicly readable Connect API reference with OAuth 2, webhooks, dated versioning and a published request limit — access through a request form on their developer page, reviewed and approved case by case, and an add-on row on their pricing page rather than an included one. No parts distributor is named. |
| Moving your data in | Direct import in the Taskrol web app under Settings → Database import → Markate: upload Markate’s Customers CSV and Work orders CSV, and customers become clients and work orders become jobs. | A staffed migration their pricing page presents as a free expert service covering customer information, job records and financial data, stated at one to three business days, plus a self-serve QuickBooks Online import. |
| How you try it | Solo is free forever for one technician with no card; every new account starts with 7 days of Pro with full access, then stays on Solo unless you subscribe. | 14 days of full access with no credit card, and nothing deleted if the trial lapses before billing details are entered. Their pricing page names two plans and does not describe a free plan. |
Choose Taskrol if
- Every job is a machine with a model and serial plate, and the day is lost between that plate and the right part.
- You want manufacturer exploded views and the service manual on the job, not open in a browser tab on a supplier’s site.
- Parts stock has to be counted per van down to the cell, with tracked parts feeding the shopping list when they run low, one list the whole team buys from on Pro.
- The second technician needs to know what failed last time on this machine, which part went in, and whether this trip is a warranty return.
- You want to test on a real refrigerator call this week rather than through a sales conversation — a 7-day trial with full access, and Solo stays free forever for one technician afterwards.
Choose Markate if
- You do more than appliance repair — cleaning, landscaping, handyman, painting or seasonal work — and want one system for all of it.
- Postcards, ringless voicemail, SMS and email campaigns and automated review requests off your own customer list are how you fill the calendar.
- You want QuickBooks Payroll hours flowing from the same system that dispatches the job, and customers imported from QuickBooks Online.
- A branded customer portal, deposits on booking, consumer financing or option-and-package estimates are on your requirements list.
- You want their team to build and host your website, and to answer your phones with an AI receptionist.
Digging into the differences
Thirteen trades, and which of them are yours
This is the whole comparison in one paragraph, so start here. Markate publishes thirteen trade pages, and the shape of that list tells you who the product was designed around: pressure washing, carpet and tile cleaning, window cleaning, maid and janitorial service, handyman, general contracting, electrical, painting, holiday lighting, snow plowing, landscaping, tree services, and appliance repair. Appliance repair sits in a group they call Maintenance, next to landscaping and tree work — grounds and exterior trades, not mechanical diagnostic ones. HVAC and plumbing have no trade page of their own, though their Kate AI Estimator page names HVAC among the trades it prices for. That is a generalist for home services that added an appliance landing page, and for a shop that mows in summer, plows in winter and fixes a dryer in between, a generalist is exactly right. Taskrol sits on the other side of that line: it models equipment with a model and serial plate. If a meaningful share of your revenue comes from work with no machine in it, Markate is built for that work.
Their appliance repair page does not say “part”
Markate’s appliance repair page works hard at the word appliance — fourteen times in its own copy, plus the title, the meta description and its image filenames — but the capability list under it is general field-service vocabulary: online booking, instant follow-ups, easy upsells, simple scheduling, real-time updates, on-the-spot payments, targeted campaigns, automated communication, job management, customer communication, payment simplification. Its own FAQ adds job costing per repair, SMS and voicemail automation, in-app payment on site and fast setup. Nothing on that page is gated to this trade or built for it. And across their home page, that appliance page and the full capability catalog on their pricing page, the words parts, inventory, stock, supplier and purchase order do not occur — we checked the raw HTML, so rows hidden behind their advanced-features toggle are counted too. What their pages do describe is materials as one of three cost categories inside job costing — labor, materials, overhead — and, separately, an item list whose entries carry a price, a cost, a Service, Product or Material type, a default tax rate and a markup. That is real and it is useful for consumables. We are not going to tell you Markate cannot track a part, because their pages do not say either way; we are telling you that after reading everything they publish for our trade, a shop owner still has no answer to “where is the drain pump, and is one on my truck.”
What the parts diagrams actually are
Here is the plain description, with no adjectives. Open a job whose appliance has a model number and a Diagrams link appears. Tap it and the manufacturer exploded views for that model open inside Taskrol — swipe between pages, a counter tells you which page you are on, pinch to zoom into the corner where the bracket lives. Under each page sits the part list for that page, with the part numbers, so the number you need is read off the manufacturer’s own drawing rather than guessed from a text search. Two practical notes. It needs a model number on the appliance, so the plate has to be read or typed in first. And similar tools exist elsewhere in this category; what matters is that this one opens from the job itself. On Markate’s side the comparison is short: the words diagram and schematic do not appear anywhere on the pages we read.
Markate’s strength: the next job, not the current one
An appliance shop’s economics are repeat and referral, and this is where Markate is strongest. From the same customer records used to dispatch the job, Markate will send an SMS or email blast to everyone, a group, or one person and report opens, clicks and replies — their own words, on their SMS and email marketing page; run drip sequences; physically mail a personalized postcard; drop a recorded ringless voicemail into a lapsed customer’s phone; target promotional postcards at whole neighborhoods you have never served; and ask for a review automatically after the job, pointed at Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, BBB or Yelp, with reminders for non-responders. Their team will also build you a website that feeds leads into the same pipeline, and their AI receptionist answers inbound calls, which for a two-truck shop is the most expensive leak there is. Two things to check before you value it: most of that group sits in the Paid Feature column on their pricing page rather than the Included one, so price the specific rows you would actually switch on, and note that their pages describe opens, clicks and a lead-conversion list but not revenue attributed back to a particular campaign or postcard drop.
Where Markate is strong
Markate publishes a broad back office and customer surface, and a buyer who needs them should weigh that first. It publishes QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Payroll integrations, recurring work orders and recurring invoices, a branded passwordless customer portal, online booking with deposits and coupon codes, SMS and email campaigns, mailed postcards, ringless voicemail, automated review requests, consumer financing through Wisetack, a Connect API reference, and offline viewing of schedules and work orders. It also publishes estimates in option and package form, change orders with approval capture, credit notes, tips, ACH, and a reporting group covering profit and loss, sales tax, closeouts and lead conversions. Choose Markate if your requirements list is mostly the paragraph above. In Taskrol the books are fed by a one-way QuickBooks Online sync — customer, invoice, payments, tips, card surcharges and refunds sent as each job is completed and paid — or by a job-level CSV export, one row per job with revenue, margin, card net received, parts cost, taxes and tips; the warranty feature is the return visit under your own workmanship warranty, linked to the original job; and for reporting, Taskrol’s support team builds any report you ask for at support@taskrol.com.
Moving from Markate: what it takes
Start with the data, because it is the easy part. The Taskrol web app imports Markate directly, under Settings → Database import → Markate. Export two CSV files from Markate — Customers from Sales → Customers, and Work orders from Sales → Work Orders with all time and all statuses — and upload one or both. Customers become Taskrol clients, matching phone numbers are merged, and each work order becomes a job; running the import again skips work orders already brought over. Markate’s export has no payment column, so closed work orders — Invoiced, Completed, Closed — come in recorded as paid. Anything those two files do not carry you can send to support@taskrol.com for our support team to move. Get the files out before you cancel: their pricing page’s cancellation answer tells customers to download their data as CSV or PDF before canceling and says platform access ends if a subscription lapses. Then the customer-facing things, in order: put your Taskrol booking link where Markate’s booking link is today, agree with your bookkeeper on the last month that closes in Markate and the first one fed by Taskrol — connect it to the same QuickBooks Online company with that month as the sync-from date, or hand over the job-level CSV export — and decide what happens to the public profile page markate.com may be hosting for your shop under /business, with its own reviews tab. Finally, budget an afternoon to physically count your trucks, because van stock in Taskrol is built cell by cell from that count.
Frequently asked questions
Is Taskrol a Markate alternative for appliance repair?
Yes, and for a shop that only repairs appliances or HVAC equipment it is our pick. Taskrol covers booking, dispatch, parts search by model number, van and warehouse stock, the appliance recorded on every job, estimates, invoices, card payments, workmanship warranty returns and per-job margin reporting across iOS, Android and web, and manufacturer parts diagrams open on the job. Markate is built for a business that also sells cleaning, landscaping, handyman or seasonal work, or whose calendar is filled by mailed postcards, voicemail drops and campaign blasts.
Can I import my Markate data into Taskrol myself?
Yes. The Taskrol web app imports Markate directly under Settings → Database import → Markate. Export two CSV files from Markate — Customers (Sales → Customers → Export) and Work orders (Sales → Work Orders → Export, all time and all statuses) — and upload one or both. Customers become Taskrol clients with matching phone numbers merged, each work order becomes a job, and running the import again skips work orders already brought over. Markate’s export has no payment column, so closed work orders (Invoiced, Completed, Closed) are recorded as paid. Anything those files do not carry, send to support@taskrol.com and our support team moves it.
Does Markate track parts inventory?
Not as stock. Across their home page, their appliance repair page and the full capability catalog on their pricing page, the words parts, inventory and stock do not appear — materials show up only as a cost category inside job costing. Their public Connect API reference does publish an Inventory Items resource, and the fields it documents are a name, a description, a price, a purchase cost, a Service, Product or Material type, a tax rate and a discount: no quantity on hand, no location, no minimum and no reorder point. So what their published material describes is a priced item catalog, not stock you can count. That is a statement about what they publish, not about what the product can do; ask them directly. Taskrol counts stock per van down to the shelf and box cell, and a tracked part adds itself to the shopping list when its count drops to the low-stock number set for that stock; on Pro the whole team shares one list.
What are Taskrol’s parts diagrams?
On a job whose appliance has a model number, a Diagrams link opens the manufacturer exploded views for that model inside Taskrol: swipe between pages with a page counter, pinch to zoom, and read the part list for the page underneath, with the part numbers. It works on every plan. It needs a model number on the appliance, and similar things exist elsewhere in this category. On Markate’s side, the words diagram and schematic do not appear on the pages we read.
How does each product handle warranty work?
Taskrol has the return visit under your own workmanship warranty: created from the completed job in one tap, customer, address and appliances copied, linked back to the original job, and kept out of paid job counts so a free trip does not look like revenue. No Markate page we read describes warranty work; on their site the word turns up only in the legal language of their Terms & Conditions.
How do the numbers reach the bookkeeper in each product?
Markate publishes QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Payroll integrations, describes payments as syncing to QuickBooks for reconciliation, and can import customers from QuickBooks Online. Taskrol connects to QuickBooks Online and sends each job’s customer, the invoice with its lines, tax and discount, the payments applied to it, a sales receipt for tips and card surcharges, and refund receipts, one way, as the job is completed and paid. It also gives the bookkeeper a job-level CSV export: one row per job with job number, date, status, technician, appliances, ZIP, payment method, revenue, card net received, margin, parts cost, taxes and tips, filterable by period, technician or payment method.
Can Markate plan a technician’s route?
Their pages say yes without saying how, and the distinction matters. Markate’s home page names routing in the sentence that describes the platform and marks a “Routing & Tracking” row Included in its own comparison table; “Utilize Route Planner” is listed on their Why Markate page; and their Schedule Map announcement says the feature streamlines field sales management and optimizes your route planning, plots customer and lead records on the map and shows unscheduled work orders, with per-employee route colors and live employee locations under a Location Tracking capability. What no page of theirs describes is the sequencing itself, and the capability catalog on their pricing page has no routing row at all — so ask them to show it on a real day before you buy for it. In Taskrol the dispatcher plans and optimizes the route on the day’s map: the visits are pins numbered in schedule order with an arrival time on each, beside a column per technician and the job list, and a Ready to install queue holds jobs whose parts have arrived.