Every comparison of these two platforms opens with pricing, and every one of them is guessing.
Here is what the two vendors actually publish, retrieved 10 September 2026 from their own pricing pages:
| What you can learn without a sales call | LMN by Granum | Aspire |
|---|---|---|
| A headline monthly price | Yes. $297 / $648 / quote | No. None published |
| What the price is based on | Licenses (office and crew seats) | "Company size, complexity" |
| User limit | Licenses are counted and billed | No limit on users |
| One-time onboarding fee | Yes, amount not on the pricing page | Implementation included in the fee |
| Price for a 50-person company | Not published, custom above ~30 users | Not published |
Read the bottom row again. A $3.4M maintenance company with 50 employees, which is the single most common profile asking this question, cannot budget either platform from published information. LMN looks transparent and Aspire looks opaque, but at the size where the decision actually gets made, they are equally opaque. Every article telling you LMN is the affordable one is comparing LMN's published small-company price against a number Aspire has never published.
So the pricing argument is a dead end. The costs that decide this are further down.
What does LMN actually cost?
LMN by Granum publishes three tiers, and unlike Aspire it puts real numbers on the page. As of 10 September 2026 its pricing page lists:
| Tier | Price billed monthly | Included licenses | Key unlock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $297/mo | 1 office or crew lead, 5 crew members | Budgeting, estimating, scheduling, invoicing |
| Professional | $648/mo | 3 office or crew lead, 15 crew members | Real-time job costing, equipment and material costing, Zapier |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Starts at 100 users | Multi-location management, launch package |
All three sit behind a one-time onboarding fee, which the pricing page footnotes but does not price.
The line that matters is in the third column. Real-time job costing is a Professional feature. If you are shopping for landscape software because you do not know which properties are making money, the $297 tier does not do the job you are buying it for. Your actual entry price is $648 per month, which is 118% higher than the number that appears in every listicle.
Watch out
Watch the license arithmetic, not the tier price. Professional includes 18 licenses (3 office plus 15 crew). A 50-employee maintenance company needs roughly 50. Additional licenses are "available for a fee" that LMN does not publish, and a hands-on review by Connecteam found LMN's own calculator routes companies past 30 users to custom pricing. Published transparency stops exactly where your company starts.
Does LMN get more expensive as you hire crew?
Less than the marketing on both sides implies. This is the most repeated claim in the category and the evidence points the other way.
Connecteam's reviewer ran LMN's public pricing calculator and recorded the annual-billed cost at different team sizes: 10 users at $317 per month, 20 users at $357 per month. That is $40 for ten additional users, roughly $4 per user per month. They also priced a 5 office plus 25 crew configuration on Starter at $443 per month, against the $297 base for 1 office plus 5 crew.
Crew seats, in other words, are close to free. A crew member license is not what makes LMN expensive. What makes it expensive is the jump to Professional to get job costing, plus the one-time onboarding fee, which the same review recorded at $797 for Starter and $1,497 for Professional, halved if you pay annually.
So the popular framing is backwards on both counts. LMN does not meaningfully punish headcount. And the vendor-side claim that Aspire punishes revenue rests on a number Aspire has never published.
Why does Aspire refuse to publish a price?
Because its fee is negotiated per company, and because publishing it would make the model visible. Aspire's own plans page says pricing "varies based on company size, complexity, and what solution best fits your business," and then says something more revealing:
A single license fee is billed monthly and gives access to all contracted functionality. There is no limit to the number of users.
That single sentence inverts the entire comparison. Aspire does not bill you per seat. Put 50 people or 200 people on it and the fee does not move. The fee covers unlimited user licenses, the full implementation and training programme, post-implementation support, and future upgrades. Electronic payments, payroll and GPS fleet management are quoted separately on top.
Now put that next to who owns it. ServiceTitan announced its acquisition of Aspire on 30 June 2021, and Aspire's growth investor Mainsail Partners confirmed the deal closed on 11 August 2021. ServiceTitan is now a public company, which means it has to describe its business model to the SEC. Its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 31 January 2025 puts it plainly:
As our customers grow their businesses while using our platform, they often hire and add more users to their existing subscription and also complete more transactions through our platform, which both drive more revenue.
By the numbers
In the same filing ServiceTitan reports a gross dollar retention rate of over 95% for each of the fiscal years ended 31 January 2025, 2024 and 2023, and measures its customers by gross transaction volume, defined as the total dollars its customers invoice to end customers through the platform. A vendor that measures success by what you invoice is a vendor whose pricing tracks what you invoice.
That is not an accusation of anything improper. It is a disclosed, structural fact: the parent company's revenue is designed to grow as your company grows. The operator estimate of "around 1% of revenue" that circulates on r/landscaping is consistent with that design, but it is still an estimate from people describing their own quotes. Get yours in writing.
Which pricing model fits my company?
Work it out from revenue per employee, because that is the axis the two models split on.
A licensed model like LMN bills you for people. A flat-fee model like Aspire bills you for company size but hands you unlimited people. So:
- Divide your annual revenue by your total headcount. The r/landscaping owner who kicked off the most-read thread on this question runs $3.4M with about 50 employees, which is roughly $68,000 of revenue per employee. That is a labour-heavy maintenance profile.
- Low revenue per employee means many seats and modest revenue. Unlimited-user pricing is structurally friendlier to you, and per-seat pricing is structurally less friendly, which is the opposite of the usual advice.
- High revenue per employee means few seats and large invoices. Per-seat pricing is structurally friendlier, and a fee scaled to company size is structurally less friendly.
- Then ignore the structure and get both quotes anyway, because at 50 people neither number is published and the structural logic only tells you which way to push in negotiation.
The point of the exercise is not to predict the price. It is to walk into both calls knowing which vendor's model is working against you, so you know which one to press.
If you have run this comparison and concluded that neither platform models how your company actually estimates, schedules and job-costs, that is a legitimate conclusion and a common one. We build custom CRM and field operations systems for trades and green industry businesses that have outgrown packaged software, and that own their data outright.
What does Aspire actually cost to run?
A salary. This is the cost that never appears in a comparison table and the one that most often decides whether the investment works.
The most useful account on r/landscaping comes from an operator who moved from the field into the office in 2022, mid-migration from LMN to Aspire, and ended up running the system:
We wound up getting rid of the consultant we hired for implementation and I took over as system admin. If you don't have at least one employee completely dedicating their time and effort to the software, building out all the modules/lists/items/services/formulas/templates/costbook (and constantly monitoring these), you're not getting any decent value.
That is not a disgruntled review. It is from someone who describes an aptitude for enterprise software, a landscaping background and a successful implementation. His conclusion is that the platform returns value in proportion to the dedicated internal ownership you give it.
Other operators in the same threads corroborate the shape of it. One two-year Aspire customer described support as atrocious and said they were "in too deep to change." Another summarised implementation in one line: doing implementation with Aspire is a brutal process.
Note
Aspire's own plans page states the monthly fee includes the complete implementation and training programme and post-implementation support. Implementation being included in the fee is not the same as implementation being cheap. The expensive part is your team's hours, and those are billed to you by you.
What does LMN actually cost to run?
A finished annual budget, built honestly, before the software can price anything correctly.
LMN's estimating is budget-derived. You build an annual overhead budget, and the system calculates the hourly rates your crews must charge to clear break-even plus your target profit. That methodology is genuinely the best thing about the product and it is why it converts companies whose pricing grew up ad hoc. It is also a dependency. If the budget is wrong, every estimate downstream is confidently, consistently wrong, and it will look rigorous while it happens.
A landscape software consultant on r/landscaping who supports clients across several platforms put the risk precisely:
LMN is fine, I have many clients on it, with mixed success depending on how disciplined they are. It's way more capable than Jobber, but also way easier to make a mess if the setup and processes aren't tight and many companies try to get too big with software before they need to.
Both platforms, then, have the same failure mode wearing different clothes. Aspire fails when nobody owns the costbook. LMN fails when nobody owns the budget. Neither failure shows up on the invoice, and neither sales team will raise it. If you want the underlying discipline first, start with comparing estimated against actual job costs on the jobs you already ran, which costs nothing and tells you whether you have a software problem or a pricing problem.
Where does each one genuinely win?
Set price aside. On capability, the split is real and fairly clean.
| Decision factor | Better fit |
|---|---|
| Commercial maintenance across hundreds of repeating properties | Aspire. Per-property, per-service-line profitability is its centre of gravity |
| Instilling pricing discipline in a company that prices by feel | LMN. Budget-derived rates force the question |
| Large crew count relative to revenue | Aspire. Unlimited users is a structural advantage |
| Small office team, wants to self-administer | LMN. Designed to be run by an owner or ops manager |
| Purchasing, subcontractors and scheduling as one connected system | Aspire. The depth is what the fee buys |
| You need a price you can budget today | LMN. It is the only one of the two that publishes anything |
| Field app quality | Neither confidently. LMN Crew held 2.7 stars on Google Play and 3.3 on the App Store when Connecteam checked in April 2026 |
Neither of these platforms is bad. They are built for different failure modes, and the mistake operators make is buying the one their bigger competitor uses rather than the one matching how their own company is shaped. If you are still earlier in the stack and mostly need work to flow cleanly from enquiry to paid invoice, a full operations platform may be premature; the mechanics of tracking landscaping jobs from lead to invoice matter more than the logo on the login screen.
What should I ask on the demos?
Run the same five questions at both vendors and insist on written answers. Feature grids are designed to be survived; these are not.
- "What is my all-in monthly cost at my actual user count?" Give them your real headcount and office seat count. For LMN that surfaces the unpublished additional-license fee. For Aspire it surfaces the only number that exists.
- "What is the one-time onboarding or implementation fee, and is it discounted annually?" LMN footnotes one without pricing it. Aspire folds it into the monthly fee, so ask what happens to that fee after the first term.
- "Which tier unlocks real-time job costing?" On LMN the answer is Professional, and confirming it in writing stops a Starter quote from becoming your budget.
- "What exactly is in a full data export, and can I see a sample this week?" Job photos, notes and multi-season history are the records that do not travel. Ask during the trial, not during the divorce.
- "How many hours per week do you expect someone at my company to spend administering this?" This is the question that separates the two platforms more than any feature. Compare the answer against the operator accounts above, then price that person.
Tip
Ask question five to a current customer rather than to the sales rep. Both vendors will introduce you to references. Ask the reference who administers the system, what that person did before, and how long the build-out took before the reporting was trustworthy.
The part neither vendor will tell you
Both of these companies were acquired, and neither acquisition was about you.
ServiceTitan bought Aspire in 2021 and has since gone public, which means Aspire's roadmap now answers to quarterly reporting. LMN was folded into Granum on 8 October 2025, a parent brand uniting LMN, SingleOps and Greenius. Consolidation is not automatically bad and both products have improved. But it does mean the pricing you sign is a starting position set by an owner with its own growth targets, and the leverage you have is highest before you migrate three seasons of history into the system.
That is also the honest argument for the third option nobody in this comparison sells you: for some companies the right answer is neither. If your estimating logic, your service mix or your billing model is genuinely unusual, configuring a platform to approximate it can cost more in internal hours than building the workflow you actually run, and you finish the process renting it rather than owning it. That trade-off is worth understanding properly before you commit, and it is the same calculation covered in custom CRM versus off-the-shelf, in the wider question of what a landscaping business actually needs from a CRM, and in how we approach building a custom CRM around an existing operation rather than around a licence count.
The bottom line
Choose Aspire if you run commercial maintenance at scale, your headcount is large relative to revenue, and you can name today the person who will own the costbook full time. Choose LMN if you have a small office team, you want a price you can budget before a sales call, and your real problem is that nobody has ever built the annual budget your pricing should come from.
Then get both quotes in writing at your actual user count, because at the size where this question gets asked, published pricing from either vendor is fiction. The cheapest platform is the one somebody at your company is willing to own, and that person costs more than the subscription either way.