Okason vs Yardbook

Yardbook has been around a long time, gives away most of its feature set for free, and has a loyal base of small operators. If your card volume is low and you do your paperwork at a computer, it is hard to argue with free.

The question this page answers is narrower: if you run a 2–5 person crew from the truck, which one fits the way you work?

The real difference: where the product lives

Yardbook’s own pricing page states that all plans include web and desktop access, and Android mobile app access. An iPhone app is documented in their help center as a beta. The Google Play badge is the one on the pricing page.

That is not a knock on the engineering. It is a statement of design intent: Yardbook is a web application that has phone apps. Okason is a phone application that has a web dashboard.

You can hear the difference in their own users. These are public Google Play reviews of the Yardbook app:

“Need the same functions as the website” — 2 stars, 25 September 2024

“No way to create or send invoices from mobile app. I don’t get it.” — 2 stars, 2 March 2024

“App will not let anyone log in. Having to use it on browser.” — 1 star, 1 February 2025

“app has not been syncing with the website for 26 hours now. this is causing significant workload problems.” — 1 star, 3 February 2026

Read enough of them and a pattern shows up: the website is the product, and the app is where people go when they are not at the website. Login failures and app-versus-site gaps are the two most common complaints in the low-star reviews.

Yardbook’s five-star reviews are just as real, and there are far more of them. The point is not that the app is bad. It is that the app is not where the work is expected to happen.

If you do your paperwork in the evening at a laptop, that is fine. If you are trying to bill a customer from their driveway, it is the whole problem.

What phone-first means in Okason

• Build and send an estimate standing in the yard, including Talk-to-Estimate — say the job, get line items priced off your own Price List
• Turn a completed job into an invoice in one tap, on the phone, with nothing retyped
• Record a check or cash payment at the property — any crew member can
• Add a new hire from your phone’s contact list and email them an invite code
• Fix a wrong gate code from the curb

Four things are deliberately web-only and we say so on the pages that cover them: batch rain-day rescheduling, route planning, CSV import and the rendered PDF preview.

“But Yardbook is free”

It is, and that is a genuinely strong offer. Their Starter plan carries customer management, jobs and scheduling, estimates, invoices, routing, expenses, reports, lot measurement, employee access, credit card payments, snow removal and a product catalog — at no subscription cost.

Here is the part worth understanding before you decide.

Free plans in this category are funded by payments. Yardbook’s own pricing page lists “Yardbook Processing Fee Waived” as a benefit of upgrading to a paid tier. Read that in reverse: on the free plan, there is a Yardbook processing fee, charged on top of what the card processor already takes.

We are not going to print their number, or ours. Rates move, and a stale figure on a marketing page is worse than no figure. What does not move is the mechanism:

• A free plan costs you a percentage of every payment your customer makes. The better your season, the more it costs.
• A flat subscription costs the same in June as it does in January.

So do the arithmetic on your own business, once:

1. Take a real month of card volume — a June, not a February
2. Find the surcharge your current app adds on top of the processor’s rate
3. Multiply
4. Compare that against a flat monthly plan plus your processor’s published rate

For a crew with real card volume, that comparison often flips the answer. For a crew collecting mostly cash and checks, it may not. Either way, run it yourself — it takes four minutes and nobody in this market will run it for you.

Okason adds no markup to card payments on any plan. You pay Stripe’s published rate and we take nothing on top of it. See payments and pricing.

Where Okason is stronger

Three roles instead of two

Yardbook gives you Admin and Limited. That is the choice every growing crew hits: your best crew lead either sees your books, or cannot run his own day.

Okason has three fixed roles — Owner, Manager, Crew Member. A Manager runs every crew, assigns jobs, creates estimates and invoices, and moves people between crews, while seeing no billing settings and nobody’s hourly rate. Hourly Rate is visible to the Owner only, not even to the person themselves.

For a Crew Member, the money sections do not render at all — no greyed-out balance to wonder about — and the restriction is enforced on the server, not hidden in the interface. Details on crew management.

Onboarding a new hire without sharing a password

Add the person, click Save & Send Invite, and they get a 6-character code and a download link. They set their own password. Codes expire after seven days and can be reissued without deleting the record.

The shared company login saved on four phones breaks the first time somebody quits. Okason never has one.

Fixed start times survive route optimization

Yardbook’s help documentation states its optimizer does not respect start times, and advises fixing the order by hand afterward.

In Okason, a job marked fixed-start holds its position while the rest of the day is ordered around it by real road drive time — and the setting carries onto every repeat of a recurring job, so your weekly 8:00 AM commercial account doesn’t need marking each week. Drag any stop and your order sticks until someone presses Optimize again.

Be clear on the limits, which we list in full on the route optimization page: planning is on the web, crews don’t see the order in their app, it’s Crew and Crew Pro only, and there’s a 30-stop ceiling per crew-day.

The rained-out Tuesday

Reschedule Day moves a whole day’s scheduled and in-progress jobs to a new date in one action, lists what moved and what was skipped with a reason, and can notify each moved customer — reporting how many were actually reached rather than how many were moved. A 7-day forecast sits on the web calendar’s day headers, right where the decision gets made.

A customer portal with no login

Your customer taps the link in your email and sees the bill under your name and logo. No account, no password, no app. They pay the full balance by card through Stripe Checkout, or approve an estimate with one tap and a confirmation naming the total.

Yardbook’s branded company portal is a top-tier feature. Okason’s customer portal is on every plan, uncapped, and a customer opening a link is never a seat.

Talk-to-Estimate

Nothing else in this comparison does it. Walk the property, say what you’re doing, and the AI returns line items matched against your own Price List with low-confidence rows flagged for review. Your phone transcribes; only text reaches Okason, and no audio is recorded or stored.

Where Yardbook may be the better choice

This is where most comparison pages get quiet. Ours won’t.

If your card volume is genuinely low. Free is free. If you collect mostly cash and checks and bill a handful of customers a month, a subscription buys you a better experience, not a lower bill.

If you want a big feature set at no cost. Lot measurement, snow removal, expenses and reports all sit on their free tier. Okason has no free tier.

If you work at a desk. A mature web application beats a phone app for long sessions, bulk edits and dense screens.

If you need GPS crew tracking. Yardbook sells it on paid tiers. Okason has no live location tracking, and we are not building the “watch your employees” product.

If you run multi-step chemical programs. Yardbook has a dedicated multi-step chemical program feature. Okason stores a chemical license number and expiration on Crew Pro; full chemical tracking is not in this release.

If you need a longer track record. Yardbook has years of operating history behind it. We are newer, and you should weigh that.