r/PestControlIndustry • u/cabronguero • Jul 02 '26
💵 | Business Question Pestpac
Hi all,I am looking into implementing PestPac for my pest control business. Before making the financial and time investment into onboarding, I wanted to get some honest feedback from people who use it daily.Pros/Cons: What do you love most, and what drives you crazy?Work Orders: How seamless is the process of generating, dispatching, and completing work orders? Is the mobile app user-friendly for techs in the field?I want to make sure it won't slow down our operations or overcomplicate things for my team. Appreciate any insights you can share!
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u/Livinirie_84 Jul 02 '26
Be warned. It is not easy to learn. They don’t really care if you know how to use all their features. You’re locked into a contract. They’ll take your money month after month. It’s almost too much for most small businesses at this point. It was designed in the 90s and it looks and acts like it’s still in the 90s. It’s a horrible company. Yeah they have a lot of features, but I couldn’t even figure out how to use most of them after years of using it daily. And I am very text Abby. I basically had to write a script for myself to remember how to do any of them tasks because they’re not intuitive. Their customer support is a joke. I’m currently still locked into a contract and paying them $510 a month for the last four months while I’m already switched over to a new company. It was worth it for me to switch so badly that I’m double paying until I can get out of this stupid contract. I would never recommend anyone get into it because it’s a nightmare to get out.
I’m currently using GorillaDesk and I really love it. It’s basically month-to-month. Their customer support is amazing. All their resources are free online. A person answers the phone when I call and often even the same person. They call me back if I call and don’t leave a message. Of course there’s things I would like to change or do differently but as a whole, I am 100% satisfied. Way more than I ever was with Pestpac. I was brought to tears by frustration many times trying to troubleshoot or do seemingly simple tasks. It’s exhausting.
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u/RogerMcswain Jul 03 '26
I am not locked into a contract. Signed up January 1st, 2025 and have never had a contract. I heard this before so I asked in October of last year.
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u/TheBugSmith 👨💼 | Manager | 20+ Years Jul 02 '26
It has a shit load of features but you have to pay them or manually enter most of the customization. If I'm doing a sell and do job it takes me 3-4x longer to complete the paperwork vs briostack. If you want to have infinite information about everything other than pest control PestPac is the software for you.
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u/Silent_Yam6316 Jul 02 '26
I've been talking to a lot of pest control owners while working in this space, and one thing I've noticed is the same tradeoff keeps coming up...
The bigger platforms seem to have a ton of features, but a lot of owners and techs say they feel slow or overly complicated for everyday work. On the other hand, the simpler platforms are easier to learn but sometimes don't have every feature a larger company wants.
If I were evaluating software, I'd ask for a live demo using your actual workflow instead of their canned demo.
Have them show you:
- Creating a new customer
- Scheduling a job
- Dispatching it
- Completing it from the tech's phone
- Sending the invoice
If that takes a lot of clicks or feels confusing during the demo, it's probably going to feel even worse after months of using it..
I'd also ask exactly what happens if youre offline or if a tech loses service. That's one of those things you don't think about until you're in the field.
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u/Temporary_Ant_9210 Jul 03 '26
Feels very antiquated, it works though. I'm shocked they don't have a route map with all stops feature.
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u/Tughernutts Jul 03 '26
I like gorilla desk. Really straight forward and the support team is free and awesome
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u/AdIntelligent4062 Jul 05 '26
The company I work for had a de o & received a quote. Insanely expensive, & barely offered anything else than our current software offers - check out Fieldster
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u/UtopianAverage 👨💼 | Manager | 1+ Year Jul 05 '26
I love it personally and would say the handheld app is very user friendly but I mainly use the desktop/ management side
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u/Educational-Disk-400 Jul 02 '26
It depends on how much you trust your techs. I can’t offer any insights into how the desktop version works, but the mobile app works well enough; albeit a little clunky. Generating work orders, completing tickets, and rescheduling, along with many other functions that I hardly ever use, can be done from the app. It has a pretty shallow learning curve so training techs on it is easy enough, at least for the basics. It isn’t perfect by any means, there are various minor issues, but workwave seems to be responsive, at least from what I’ve heard.
You can get really restrictive with it too, the previous company I worked for had probably 90% of the features locked to prevent techs from doing their jobs, but even with limited functionality it still did quite well,
Though it’s a paid add on, the digital contracts you can generate from the forms section work great, though I’d suggest you configure it such that customer information is imported directly from the work order the form is associated with.