How the Stack Builder Scores HVAC Software
Most "best HVAC software" pages are ranked by commission. You can verify that yourself: check whether the top pick changes when the affiliate program does. This page publishes our logic completely, so you can check us the same way.
The scorer never sees who pays
Three of the ten vendors in the roster (FieldEdge, Kickserv, ServiceBox) pay this site nothing and have no usable referral program at all. They are scored by the same code path as everyone else, and the Builder recommends them when they fit. If our recommendations ever skewed toward paying vendors, the fastest way to catch us would be to run the Builder as a 15-tech commercial shop on QuickBooks Desktop and see whether FieldEdge still comes up. Please do.
Where a referral relationship exists, the vendor's profile page says so in plain text. Where it doesn't, the page says that too.
Hard filters run before any scoring
- Accounting is a hard filter, not a preference. If you run QuickBooks Desktop, vendors without a Desktop path are removed, not demoted. Jobber has no Desktop sync; Kickserv's costs $50/mo extra; FieldEdge treats Desktop as a first-class citizen. Those are different answers and the Builder treats them differently.
- Xero routes to exactly one vendor (Jobber), and the Builder tells you the sync is one-way and requires the Connect plan or higher. If that's a dealbreaker, it says so instead of pretending.
- Team size uses the vendor's own fit claims plus seat math. A per-seat product that's cheap solo can cost more at 8 techs than a flat-price product, so size changes the ranking, not just the price shown.
The scoring weights
- Team-size fit: 3 points. The vendor's stated target size matches yours.
- Work-mix fit: 2 points. Commercial-lean shops route toward vendors with service-agreement and equipment-history depth; residential service routes toward dispatch-and-quote speed.
- Must-have features: 2 points each, with gating honesty. If a feature exists but only on a top tier, you get the match and a warning chip, and the price shown is the tier that actually has the feature. Workiz promotes flat-rate pricebooks, service plans and equipment tracking on its HVAC page without mentioning all three are Ultimate-tier only. Our job is to surface exactly that.
- Buying preference: 1 point. If you want to see prices and sign up without a sales call, vendors that publish their pricing get one point and the demo-gated four get a warning chip. Choosing "fine with demos" changes nothing.
- Budget: 1 point. Price bands score against your stated budget. Weakest weight on purpose: a tool that can't do the job is expensive at any price.
- "Not sure" contributes zero. Answering "not sure" never penalizes a vendor and never fakes a preference you didn't state.
Why prices are shown as bands
Vendors publish annual-billed and month-to-month prices, add per-seat overages, and sell unpriced add-ons. So the Builder shows bands with the seat math stated, and the pricing database pairs list prices with what contractors report actually paying. Four of the ten vendors publish no prices at all; we say "unpublished" instead of quoting a directory's guess.
Why GorillaDesk isn't in the roster
GorillaDesk shows up in HVAC software lists constantly. We excluded it and documented why: it's a pest-control product first, bills per route, and its site has no real HVAC content. It was replaced with ServiceBox, which earns us exactly as much (nothing) but is genuinely built for commercial HVAC work, down to RTU and boiler history records. That trade, fit over money, is the whole method in one decision.
What "verified" means on this site
Every fact was checked against the vendor's own pages on 2026-09-05, and each page links its sources. When we can't verify something, the site says "unconfirmed" or "unpublished". When something changes, it lands on the changelog the day we see it. The full dataset, including the gated flags, is public at /data/vendors.json.