For home service companies, attracting organic leads via their own website is a slow process, so online marketplaces like HomeAdvisor can help generate leads for a fee.
However, these leads don’t always turn into actual jobs, often because the same lead was shared with several top competitors. As a result, many contractors look for HomeAdvisor competitors.
But the problem with using online lead generation services is that it’s difficult to know where leads are coming from when calls come in (e.g. from a lead generation service, social media, or a customer referral). To do that, you need software that tracks each marketing activity by revenue, so you know exactly which marketing activities are driving leads and which aren’t.
In addition, there are other ways successful home services businesses can maximize leads, like optimizing customer reviews, running strategic marketing campaigns, and having a call booking system that helps CSRs convert calls into booked jobs.
At ServiceTitan, we help professional home services companies and home improvement professionals grow their businesses, increase leads, and make the most out of every marketing dollar they spend.
In this article, we'll cover:
The pros & cons of HomeAdvisor for contractors and homeowners
How ServiceTitan helps you track reviews & leads from all platforms
Book a demo to find out how ServiceTitan can help make the most of the leads you generate.
The Pros & Cons of HomeAdvisor for Contractors and Homeowners
What is HomeAdvisor?
HomeAdvisor (powered by Angi, formerly Angie's List) is an online home services directory where homeowners can search for electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, landscapers, and other contractors (e.g. roofing).
Sites like HomeAdvisor help homeowners match a particular job with available contractors operating near them — without a fee.
Homeowners can check reviews and recommendations provided by other users for each contractor listed and request quotes for their home improvement projects.
How Does HomeAdvisor Work?
HomeAdvisor’s website collects details of the project from the homeowner and generates a list of best-match local contractors based on availability, service type, and location preferences.
HomeAdvisor then sends that job lead to multiple contractors and charges each of them if they want to connect with the customer — regardless of whether they secure the job or not. The cost per lead ranges from $15–100.
For the homeowner, HomeAdvisor appears to be free, easy, and convenient. They can find local service providers quickly, compare multiple estimates, schedule appointments online, and eliminate the hassle of trying to get pro referrals. HomeAdvisor even says that they screen contractors thoroughly, including criminal background checks.
How Much Does HomeAdvisor Cost?
For homeowners: HomeAdvisor is a “free” digital marketplace, meaning they don’t pay a direct fee for the service. However, HomeAdvisor sells homeowners’ contact information as a potential lead to multiple contractors, who may inundate them with emails and phone calls offering to do the job.
For home service professionals: The cost of doing business often outweighs the benefits. To get listed on HomeAdvisor, contractors pay an annual fee of roughly $350. Then comes the high cost tied to leads (mentioned above), which could result in thousands of dollars spent on jobs that don’t even pan out.
The Importance of Customer Reviews
Anyone in the home services industry knows that customer reviews are critical to your business because consumers put a heavy weight on them when deciding which service provider to go with. This is true on any platform, whether it be HomeAdvisor, Yelp, Angi, or any of the HomeAdvisor competitors we’ve listed below.
Homeowners that use HomeAdvisor are encouraged to leave a customer review. HomeAdvisor has a team that will follow up on all reviews to check authenticity and will post all feedback (whether positive or negative). Professionals are then given the opportunity to respond to the reviews they receive.
In our experience, and that of the thousands of home service businesses that use ServiceTitan, replying to those reviews and managing your reputation on HomeAdvisor or any other popular platform is very important.
The reality, though, is that many business owners and managers don’t have the time to find and respond to each and every review. To help simplify this process, we’ll explain below how ServiceTitan collects reviews from all of your platforms in one place so you can manage and reply in a single location.
First, here’s our line-up of HomeAdvisor competitors & alternatives.
13 Best HomeAdvisor Alternatives
Below, we’ve listed 13 HomeAdvisor competitors including online marketplaces, apps, and listing websites that offer lead generation services.
We then discuss some of the features offered by our software solution, ServiceTitan, that help your business drive leads and book jobs.
Book a demo to find out how ServiceTitan can help make the most of the leads you generate, despite what channel they come from.
1. 1800Remodel
1800Remodel.com vets contractors for home remodel projects so customers can be confident that their home improvement experts have a solid history of quality work.
This HomeAdvisor alternative allows contractors to bid on projects with prequalification approval from 1800Remodel. Covering HVAC, solar, flooring, kitchens, and bathrooms, this app is a total home renovation one-stop shop.
2. Angi
Angi is the parent company of HomeAdvisor and has been around since 1995. It was previously a subscription-based service but is now free while offering paid memberships.
Landscaping, chimney sweeping, garage door repair, and many other services are featured on the site.
Angi boasts that it has real reviews by real customers and offers consumer insights into a variety of industries for small one-off projects and scaling up to full remodels.
ServiceTitan integrates with Angi. Customers browsing Angi for a service contractor can make instant bookings within the platform when the chosen contractor uses ServiceTitan. This makes getting real leads directly from Angi much easier and makes customers more likely to select you above competing contractors using the same marketplace.
3. The Better Business Bureau (BBB)
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a membership organization that helps people find local businesses, brands, and charities they can trust. To become a BBB accredited member, businesses must adhere to the BBB’s standards and be graded by a rating system that focuses on ethics, trust, and customer service. Business owners who sign up for BBB membership hope that their businesses will gain credibility and attract more leads.
Read our full article on whether BBB accreditation is worth it.
4. CraftJack
CraftJack is a lead generation platform for over 50 trades that claims to offer the highest-quality residential and commercial leads in your local area. Leads are verified and backed up with a no-hassle credit policy and are offered to a maximum of four contractors.
Once you receive an alert for a lead, you can contact the homeowner directly and pitch for the job.
5. Google Local Services Ads
Google has its hand in everything, so it’s no surprise that it’s also helping local businesses promote their services through Local Services Ads. You’ll first have to become a Google Guaranteed Provider, but the payoff can be worth the extra step.
Potential customers can click-to-call or send direct messages through the Google Ads that target your desired local audience.
ServiceTitan integrates with Google’s Local Services Ads. Contractors using ServiceTitan can receive instant bookings from potential customers searching for a solution (which is one step further than a lead).
6. Homeflock
Homeflock helps connect customers to contractors in more than a dozen categories by sharing previous project descriptions and providing information on those who have recently completed work in the area.
7. Houzz
Houzz is a one-stop shop for homeowners tackling around-the-house projects, redecorating, or remodeling. This site offers mobile options, lead management tools for Houzz pros, software solutions for contractors, and much more.
8. ImproveNet
This site is powered by CraftJack (above) and features over 40 searchable categories for homeowners. ImproveNet connects home services professionals with quality leads for a monthly fee. Contractors create profiles and get alerts on new leads, shared with up to four competing contractors at a time.
9. Jiffy
Jiffy offers a booking service site for home maintenance projects. The site is free for contractors upfront. Instead of membership services, the app takes a small percentage of each project that contractors book through the site.
10. Porch
Porch is known for helping customers with moving, improving, and pre-sale/purchase home projects. Custom profiles, specific work preferences, payment methods, and other options are available for contractors on the platform. Leads are vetted and generated from partnerships with Lowe’s, Walmart, Liberty Mutual, Consumer Reports, Facebook, and more.
11. Pro Referral by Home Depot
Home Depot offers Pro Referral for a variety of contractor services. The referral program is free for contractors to join and includes discounts on purchases made at Home Depot.
12. ServiceWhale
Simplifying home improvement shopping is ServiceWhale’s main objective. Free leads, a cost per acquisition business model, and instant automatic quoting are a few of the vendor benefits for joining ServiceWhale.
13. Thumbtack
Thumbtack is an app that provides leads to service providers as well as connections that sometimes lead to profitable jobs. Contractors pay for communications, not leads, even if they don’t result in a sale. There are over 1,000 services listed, including HVAC, electrical and plumbing services, but many of the services listed are simple handyman jobs rather than work that requires a highly qualified professional contractor.
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The Challenges of Lead Generation Services
Although these HomeAdvisor competitors all try to help homeowners simplify the process of finding a home service company, there’s no guarantee of quality work. While other sites similar to HomeAdvisor allow contractors to choose which leads to pursue, none seem to offer contractors the option to only pay for leads that turn into actual jobs.
And, as we mentioned at the start of this article, the problem with most of these lead generation channels is that you can’t always track where leads are coming from, unless you have software that tracks and analyzes each one.
Next, we’ll explain how our field service management software, ServiceTitan, does just that and helps your business attract and convert leads in other ways, too.
ServiceTitan: Easily Track Reviews & Leads from All Platforms
ServiceTitan’s software helps home service companies (HVAC, plumbers, electricians, and more) run their businesses — from marketing to business operations, reporting, and payroll.
In terms of marketing, whether you get your leads from HomeAdvisor or one of the alternatives listed above, ServiceTitan helps you:
Measure all of your marketing channels: Track whether HomeAdvisor (or one of its competitors) is effective, and do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.
Optimize customer reviews: Automate review requests, respond to all your reviews in one place, and match reviews to techs and jobs.
Drive more business from existing customers with email marketing: Get more business and referrals from past customers.
Stand out among customers with direct mail postcards: Target specific audience lists with automated postcard and flier campaigns.
Convert more calls into booked jobs: Make call booking systematic to help your CSRs make bookings, regardless of where the lead comes from.
Here’s how it works.
Measure All of Your Marketing Channels
With ServiceTitan's Marketing Scorecard, you can track your marketing campaigns by revenue so you know which incoming calls actually make money for your business. This allows you to double down on campaigns that are bringing you the biggest return.
You can even analyze the metrics to find out the types of jobs each marketing channel is producing so you can keep spending your marketing budget in the right way.
You can also assign a unique phone number to each advertisement to track exactly which ad brought in a specific job.
In addition, contractors can integrate their Google Ads and Google Analytics account with ServiceTitan and set up Dynamic Call Tracking to automate attribution, helping them minimize wasted ad spend.
Being able to understand which of your marketing activities is producing the best results keeps you ahead of competitors using services like HomeAdvisor, who are spending money on leads that don’t convert into real appointments.
Optimize Customer Reviews
We’ve already discussed the importance of customer reviews when potential customers do a Google search for your services. It’s vital that you have plenty of reviews and that they are predominantly positive. But managing and tracking them is tedious so most service businesses just stop doing it after a while.
To more easily stay on top of your reviews, the process needs to be more efficient. Here’s how ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro helps:
Generate more reviews with automated requests: ServiceTitan sends out survey requests via text or email immediately after every job has been completed. This encourages customers to share their experience while it’s still top-of-mind.
Consolidate all your reviews in one place: Set up alerts so you can read and respond to reviews from all your platforms (Yelp, Google Reviews, HomeAdvisor, etc.) — directly from the ServiceTitan dashboard. This speeds up response times because there’s no need to go into each review site separately.
Track & match reviews to specific techs and jobs: Because all your review data is stored centrally within ServiceTitan, you can see exactly what’s working and what’s not, and use these insights to reward or coach team members.
Keep review listings consistent and updated: There’s no need to frequently check and update company listings as ServiceTitan ensures your company details are accurately listed across 60+ business listings sites. This means search engines will correctly attribute them to you and customers can easily find you.
You can try our free listings scan tool here.
Note: We recommend you set up your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) if you haven’t already, especially if you’re a small business — it’s free and it will increase your chances of appearing at the top of Google searches.
Drive More Business with Email Marketing
Sending out regular emails to your customer list keeps your business top-of-mind so you get potential repeat business or referrals, which is much cheaper than generating new leads on HomeAdvisor.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro makes it easy for home service companies to run email marketing campaigns, targeting a specific profile among your existing customers, for example, homeowners who have not responded to an estimate.
You can send out an email blast to that audience segment and include a phone number to call you back. This kind of targeting lets you send specific email campaigns to the customers who are most likely to respond, increasing effectiveness.
Choose from dozens of email templates, simply add your own information, and send to your target audience to generate more opportunities.
Monitor the ROI of each email marketing campaign via ServiceTitan’s marketing scorecard.
Stand Out with Direct Mail
Likewise, ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro allows you to automate direct mail campaigns that attract business in your local area. You can send out a single postcard (or thousands) for a flat fee per item.
All you have to do is:
Select your audience from your customer lists: Create audience lists based on your customer data and prospects. Do you know which customers have out-of-date equipment that may need replacing? Send them a postcard reminding them of your equipment replacement programs.
Upload your chosen postcard design: We offer dozens of premade templates that are easily customizable.
Print and send: Send these off to your chosen audience.
You can monitor the ROI of every postcard you send to potential customers, so you can keep an eye on how much revenue your direct mail campaigns are bringing in.
Convert More Calls into Booked Jobs
Regardless of how your leads contact you, it’s crucial to convert those leads to booked jobs. Even a 10% improvement here is very powerful for your business.
The best way to do this is to make sure CSRs follow the correct process, ask the right questions, and are highly professional on every call.
Our call booking software helps your CSRs provide a polished customer experience from the moment they pick up a call. It shows them who is calling before they even answer the phone and gives them a chance to greet customers by name, setting up the entire call as a friendly and open conversation.
Using customized prompts, CSRs can ask the right questions using a series of drop down menus to ensure they get all the information your techs will need.
There’s also a specific place to record property information, such as age and size of the property, for example, giving techs even more vital information about what they’ll find when they arrive for the job.
Having the correct call booking process in place alongside ServiceTitan’s scheduling and dispatching features helps match the right technician to the right job, ensuring they arrive on time. Delivering outstanding customer service is a sure-fire way to attract customers and grow your business.
Read more about ServiceTitan’s scheduling and dispatching features.
Ready to Try ServiceTitan to Optimize Lead Generation?
Using HomeAdvisor or one of its competitors may be beneficial for some home service businesses. But the downside of using these lead generation services is that you might be paying for leads that don’t turn into actual jobs. It’s also difficult to track which channel your leads are coming from unless you have software that does this for you.
ServiceTitan tracks and measures all of your marketing channels in one place so you can see what’s working and what’s not. Our software also helps your business attract leads by optimizing customer reviews, running effective marketing campaigns, and helping you convert more calls into actual bookings.
Book a demo to find out how ServiceTitan can help make the most of the leads you generate, despite what channel they come from.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
