Yardbook is free or nearly free, is specific to lawn and landscape, and is well known in that world with deep templates for the trade.
Plumline is built around one number most contractors cannot state: what one hour of their own crew actually costs, once labor burden, the truck, the equipment, and overhead are all divided across the hours that are genuinely billable. The Cost Engine computes it from the operator's own figures, every service price derives from it, and the quote screen shows the resulting margin before the quote is sent.
The rest of the category is very good at recording a price the operator already chose. Plumline's claim is narrower and different: it tells the operator whether that price was right, then checks the answer against the crew's real measured time on the job.
The interface is dated, there is no real cost engine, no AI, and no marketplace, and it does not generalize beyond lawn care. An operator running mowing plus pressure washing plus holiday lighting will fight it.
For lawn-only work on a zero budget, Yardbook is hard to argue with. For knowing margin, or for a business running more than one service line, it cannot get there.
Worth stating plainly, because it is true of every comparison on this site. Yardbook has years of production hardening and a large customer base; Plumline is early. The accounting integration ecosystem, QuickBooks in particular, is thinner. Support is founder-led rather than a staffed organization. An operator asking "who else uses this" deserves the honest answer, which today is that he would be early.