HomeAdvisor has not been a separate product since the Angi merger, so the honest version of this question is Networx against Angi Leads. Both are shared pay-per-lead marketplaces, both sell the same homeowner to several contractors, and both publish a credit policy that refuses the exact complaint you are most likely to have.
The useful difference is not price. It is what happens to your money when the leads are bad, and the two companies have written that down in public documents almost nobody reads.
The short answer
Pick Networx if you want a cheap, cancellable test with a hard spending cap and you are willing to lose the dispute on anything except a fake phone number. Pick Angi Leads if you need volume in a dense metro and you can absorb an annual term. Pick neither if your average ticket is under about $600, because the acquisition math on a shared lead does not clear that on either platform.
That is the recommendation. The rest is the evidence, because the decisions that actually cost contractors money get made after signup, not before.
1. You are not comparing Networx to HomeAdvisor, you are comparing it to Angi
HomeAdvisor, Angie's List and Angi Leads are one company. The pro-facing product is Angi Leads, and the terms you sign live on the HomeAdvisor domain, which is why the two names still appear interchangeably in search results.
This matters more than a branding footnote, because Angi rebuilt the matching model in January 2025 under the name homeowner choice. The old HomeAdvisor behaviour, where a submitted form was blasted to every pro in radius and every one of them was charged, is gone. The homeowner now picks who may contact them.
So every HomeAdvisor review written before 2025 describes a product that no longer exists. Any comparison still treating HomeAdvisor as a separate live platform has not been updated in two years.
2. What each one actually charges, from the source
Both companies publish numbers. Almost no ranking page quotes them.
| Networx | Angi Leads | |
|---|---|---|
| Shared lead price | $10 to $100 and up | About $50 blended, per Angi's CEO |
| Exclusive option | $15 to $120 and up | Not offered on the leads product |
| Membership | None | Annual membership fee |
| Commitment | Prepaid balance, pause anytime | Commonly a 12-month term |
| Published win rate | None | About one in six |
The Networx figures come from its own help centre article on lead prices, which splits the platform into a Pay Per Lead plan and an Exclusive Leads plan. The Angi figure comes from CEO Jeff Kip on the Q2 2026 earnings call, describing the average small pro as paying about $600 a month for 12 leads and winning about two of them.
By the numbers
One company published a win rate and one did not. Angi's CEO put its average small pro at 12 leads a month and two wins, roughly one in six, and said that was an improvement from about one in nine two summers earlier. Networx has never published a comparable figure. When you buy Networx you are buying a cheaper lead with an unknown conversion rate against a more expensive lead with a known bad one.
That is the correct frame for the price gap. Networx undercutting Angi on the sticker only helps if its leads convert at least as well, and neither the company nor any independent dataset says they do.
3. The credit policies, clause by clause
Both platforms publish what they will and will not credit. Put side by side, the deltas are sharp.
| Situation | Networx | Angi Leads |
|---|---|---|
| Disconnected or fake contact details | Credit | Credit |
| Duplicate of an earlier lead | Credit | Credit |
| Service or area you never signed up for | Credit | Credit |
| Wrong job type, correct type is in your profile | Not listed | Partial credit |
| Competitor testing the system | Not listed | Credit |
| Submitter has no authority to hire | Credit | Not listed |
| Submitter is looking for a job, not a service | Credit | Not listed |
| Homeowner never calls back | Not listed | Explicitly refused |
| Homeowner already hired someone | Refused | Refused |
| Homeowner changed their mind | Refused | Refused |
| Homeowner was just shopping | Refused | Refused |
| You quoted and lost | Refused | Refused |
| Dispute window | 14 days | 30 days |
| Charged while paused | Refused inside 1 hour of pausing | Not addressed |
| Form of remedy | Account credit | Store credit, expires in 6 months |
| Appeal a denial | "All lead reviews and resolutions are final" | Not addressed |
Three of those rows are worth stopping on.
Networx credits two categories Angi does not. A submitter with no permission to hire, meaning a tenant or an adult child pricing work on someone else's house, and a submitter who is actually looking for employment. Both are real and both are common. Anyone who has run a hiring ad in the trades knows how often a job seeker lands in a customer form.
Angi gives you twice the clock. Thirty days from the charge against Networx's 14 days from receipt. If you review leads at month end, which most owners do, half your Networx disputes are dead before you open the spreadsheet.
Networx closes the door behind the decision. Its policy states that all lead reviews and resolutions are final and not eligible for a further credit request. Angi's guidelines contain no such sentence, and Angi reserves discretion to issue credits for circumstances it did not list.
Watch out
The one-hour pause rule. Networx's policy explicitly refuses a credit for a lead received within one hour of pausing your account. If you pause on a Friday because the crew is booked solid, anything that lands in the next 60 minutes is yours to pay for. Pause before you need to, not when you need to.
If you are going to fight either policy, the mechanics of winning a dispute matter more than the platform you picked. We wrote up the reason codes and deadlines across five platforms in how to dispute a bad lead credit.
4. What both policies refuse is the same thing, and it is the thing that happens
Read the two refusal lists again. Homeowner already hired someone. Homeowner changed their mind. Homeowner was just shopping. You quoted and lost. Both companies refuse all four, in nearly identical language, and Angi adds the homeowner who never calls back.
That set is not an edge case. It is the modal outcome of a shared lead.
Here is an operator working through it in real time on r/HVAC in February 2025, one week into a $300 Networx budget:
"I got my first lead a few days after I signed up, it was a small kitchen and I'm thinking to myself the lead is $52. I got gas there and back to do the estimate, that's probably another 20, then if I get the job I got gas there and back, that's another 20. Plus time."
He lost that one on scheduling, and the second lead never picked up the phone. Neither is creditable under the Networx policy. The $52 and the fuel are gone, and the account balance does not care.
The mirror image plays out on Angi. A contractor in r/Contractor in January 2026 described being charged $3,300 for leads he says he never saw, getting Angi to acknowledge a platform issue, and then being offered the money back only as advertising credits, which would have meant staying on the platform to use them. He left and ate it. That is exactly what Angi's published guidelines say will happen: credits are store credits applied to future charges, and they expire six months after issue.
A successful dispute on either platform does not get your money out. It keeps your money in.
Both of these platforms sell you a stranger who is simultaneously being sold to your competitors, then refuse a credit when that stranger behaves exactly as you would expect. We build the other kind of pipeline: a conversion page you own, a qualifying form that arrives with the answers already attached, and lead-to-sale tracking so you can see cost per booked job instead of cost per lead.
5. The billing shape is the real decision
Strip away the marketing and the two platforms differ on one structural axis: where your money gets stuck when it stops working.
Angi Leads is a term product. An annual membership plus per-lead charges on an account you have committed to for twelve months. When it stops working, the leads stop but the obligation does not, which is why a contractor in the same r/Contractor thread called Thumbtack "a pay-to-play bazaar" and Angi "a pay-to-leave trap."
Networx is a balance product. You fund a deposit, leads draw it down, you top it up. When it stops working you pause, which sounds strictly better until you want the unspent balance back. From r/HVAC in January 2025:
"They have $500 that belong to us but we cancelled their service due to poor leads. We asked for a refund and they denied. They are supposed to send leads until the $500 runs out but in 3 months they haven't sent anything."
Whether that account was handled correctly is not something an outsider can adjudicate, and other contractors in the same thread report doing well on the platform. The point is structural: on Angi your exposure is the remaining term, on Networx it is the funded balance. Size the first commitment to whatever you would write off entirely.
There is a second Networx-specific mechanic worth knowing before you fund an account. A contractor posting in September 2025 described a $700 balance producing five leads in two weeks, half of which did not qualify, while the dashboard simultaneously offered "8 opportunities" to purchase on top of the budget already sitting there. Prepaid money and upsell prompts in the same interface is a pattern worth watching on your own account in month one.
6. Angi's own filings describe a shrinking pool
This is the part no comparison page covers, and it is public.
On the Q2 2026 earnings call, Angi reported United States service requests down 6% year over year and leads down 13%, with revenue per lead up 1%. Network channel revenue fell 34%. In the prior fiscal Q4, Angi reported revenue of $240.8 million, down 10.1%, driven by a 79% collapse in Network Revenue following the homeowner choice rollout, with revenue per lead down 2%.
Translated into contractor terms: the number of homeowners entering the funnel is falling faster than Angi's revenue, and the price per lead is flat to slightly up. You are paying marginally more for a marginally smaller pool.
That is not automatically a reason to avoid it. Fewer leads spread across fewer pros per request is precisely why the win rate moved from one in nine to one in six. But volume assumptions from a 2023 review will not hold, so if your plan depends on Angi filling a schedule gap in a thin market, model it low. Networx publishes nothing comparable, because it is privately held, and an absence of bad numbers is not the same as good numbers.
7. The regulatory record, and what it does and does not tell you
In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and to stop deceptively marketing its leads. The FTC's complaint alleged that since at least mid-2014 the company made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about lead quality and lead source, including selling leads generated by people who had told HomeAdvisor they were not ready to hire, and selling names purchased from third-party affiliates rather than requests submitted on its own site. The order bars it from misrepresenting conversion rates.
You need both honest readings. A federal regulator found the sales pitch was not supportable, which says something real about how the platform was sold. And an FTC order constrains claims, not lead quality: nothing in it makes the next lead better. Networx has no comparable federal action on record, which is a genuine point in its favour and also not evidence that its leads convert.
Tip
Judge both platforms on the same metric. As one operator put it in r/Contractor in August 2026, track cost per booked job by source for a couple of months rather than cost per lead, "since that's usually where the real picture shows up." A $22 Networx lead at a one in twelve close rate is more expensive than a $50 Angi lead at one in six.
8. If you are in Canada, this comparison does not apply to you
Worth saying plainly, because plenty of the contractors searching this phrase are north of the border and no ranking page mentions it. Networx sells United States leads only. Its homeowner intake form accepts a five-digit US ZIP code and nothing else, which is a hard constraint, not a soft one. Angi's Canadian equivalent is its sister brand HomeStars, a separate signup with its own pricing in Canadian dollars and its own annual terms.
So a contractor in Ontario, Alberta or BC weighing Networx against HomeAdvisor is weighing two products neither of which will sell to them. The live comparison in Canada is HomeStars against Google Local Services Ads against your own lead generation pipeline. We ran the Angi-side numbers by trade in are Angi leads worth it for electrical, including what the same model costs on HomeStars.
9. The four-question test before you fund either account
Answer these in order. A no on any of the first three should stop you.
- Is your average ticket above $600? At a 45% gross margin, a $300 acquisition cost per booked job needs roughly a $670 job to break even on the first visit. Angi's own CEO put its cost per booked job near $300. Networx is cheaper per lead but unproven per job.
- Can you answer inside five minutes, every time, including Saturday? On a shared lead the first credible call usually wins. If the phone rings out to voicemail during a service call, you are funding your competitors' pipeline.
- Do you have genuine idle capacity right now? Marketplace leads are a capacity filler. Buying them while the crew is already booked converts money into windshield time.
- Have you set the kill number and the kill date? Write down the cost per booked job that means stop, and the date you will check it, before the account goes live.
The 30-day test, if you run one
- Fund the smallest balance the platform will accept. On Networx that keeps your total exposure to the deposit.
- One trade category. Not three. Category sprawl is how a $300 test becomes a $900 one.
- Tightest viable radius. Rural and small-metro ZIPs have fewer pros per lead on both platforms.
- Log every lead the day it lands: source, response time in minutes, whether you reached a human, estimate sent, won or lost, job value, gross margin.
- Dispute inside 48 hours, always. Networx's clock is 14 days and its decisions are final, so a batched month-end review loses by default.
- At day 30, divide total spend by booked jobs. Compare that number to what a referral costs you. Then decide, on the number.
What this actually resolves to
Networx is the cheaper and more reversible way to run the experiment. No term, a lower sticker price, a deposit you can size to what you are willing to lose, and a credit policy that covers two junk-lead categories Angi's does not. It costs you half the dispute window and any right of appeal.
Angi Leads is the higher-volume, higher-commitment version with better disclosure. You know the blended lead price, you know the win rate, you know the pool is shrinking, and you get 30 days to dispute. You pay for that with an annual term and store credits that expire.
Neither is a growth channel. Both are capacity fillers, and both are structured so the outcome you hit most often, a homeowner who shops you and goes quiet, is explicitly your cost and not theirs. That is not a scandal. It is the business model, written in plain English on both websites.
The contractors who get off this treadmill do it the same way every time: build one asset that sends a lead nobody else was sold, then measure cost per booked job until the marketplace line is the smallest on the page.
Sources
- Networx Help Centre, How much do leads cost? and Lead Credit Policy
- Angi Leads Pro, Lead Credit Guidelines
- Angi Inc. Q2 2026 earnings call and Q4 fiscal results reporting
- Federal Trade Commission, order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million, January 2023
- r/HVAC and r/Contractor operator threads, January 2025 through August 2026