LMN vs. Yardbook: Landscaping Software Compared

string trimmer with LMN and Yardbook logos overlaid

Whether you choose LMN or Yardbook as your software solution, your landscaping business is in good hands. It all boils down to what your priorities are.

We tried out both software programs and found that Yardbook’s lack of features makes it better for startups just breaking into the landscaping or lawn care industry, while LMN’s extensive list of features makes it better suited for established businesses.

We’ll cover the following in this article:

Side-by-Side Comparison
LMN
Yardbook
Buyers Guide
FAQ

LMN vs. Yardbook: Side-by-Side


Starting Price	Free	Free
Free Trial?	✗	✗
Free Version?	✓	✓
Pricing Model	By Features	By Features
Made For	Landscaping	Landscaping
Platform
iOS/Android App	✓	Android only
Web Browser Access	✓	✓
Features
Appointment Scheduling	✓	✓
Billing and Invoicing	✓	✓
Dispatch Management	✓	✓
Work Order Management	✓	✓
Time Tracking	✓	✓
Payroll Management	✓	✗
Quotes/Estimates	✓	✓
Routing	✓	✓
Payment Processing	✗	✓
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)	✓	✓
Inventory Management	✗	✗

Both software programs offer basic functionality like billing and invoicing, customer management, and quoting and estimating.

However, LMN has more features than Yardbook does and is much more expensive, especially as you add more users and features.

LMN

LMN is a business management software designed exclusively for the landscaping industry. From budgeting and estimating to scheduling, time tracking, and invoicing, LMN helps grow your business, increase revenue, and decrease costs.

If you want to know more about its features, see our LMN review.

Scheduling

LMN’s scheduling feature is called Schedule Templates, and it allows you to schedule multiple services for a single job all at once. For example, if you offer a maintenance package that includes mowing, bed maintenance, and pruning, you can create a package with all of those services together.

There are three types of schedules you can create:

Manual: if you know the start and end date
Weekly: if this is a regular recurring visit
Waitlist: if a job is hard to schedule (i.e. you want to do fertilization or fall cleanup, but you don’t know exactly when yet), add it to the waitlist

How to create a template

Time Tracking and Timesheets

LMN’s timesheets and time tracking features help you see how many hours your employees are working and how efficient they are at their jobs.

Creating Timesheets

Creating a timesheet is easy – just click Timesheet List on the left. There are many steps, but as a whole, it’s very straightforward, requiring you to:

Change the date
Punch in an employee
Assign them to a jobsite in your database
Let them know what they will be doing at the jobsite
Provide the date and time

Editing Timesheets

Editing timesheets is no more difficult than creating them. Once you go to Timesheet List and click on the employee below, just edit the fields (job, task, date, and time).

From there, click the green OK button to save the changes and the black Submit button to submit the timesheet.

Editing a timesheet

Customer Portal

LMN’s customer portal lets your customers see where all of their jobs will take place in real time and make online payments anytime, anywhere.

To let your customer access the customer portal, you need to send them an invitation through the CRM tool. Once they gain access, they can register for a new account by clicking Register New Account on the login screen. From there, they can create a username and password and use them to log in.

We weren’t able to access the customer portal, but we watched LMN Academy tutorials to understand how it works.

Jobsites

Jobsites is the first screen your customers will see after they login. There, they can see all their properties that you or your employees have visited in a time frame, marked by several color-coded pins (think Google Maps):

Green = you currently have someone on the jobsite
Light green = you had someone on the jobsite less than 24 hours ago
Orange = you had someone on the jobsite less than 48 hours ago
Red = you had someone on the jobsite more than 48 hours ago
Dark blue = you had someone on the jobsite more than 4 days ago
Gray = you haven’t had anyone on the jobsite at all yet

All the data comes from your employee’s timesheets in LMN.

Hover over the pin to see the property name and the task being worked on.

LMN job site in customer portal — *Jobsites in customer portal*

Dashboard

Customers can get a quick overview of all their properties you or your employees visited by clicking Dashboard on the lefthand menu. They can see all visit details for their property, including pictures.

Customer portal screen — *Dashboard customer portal*

Invoice

If your customer needs to pay an invoice, they can click on the Invoice tab on the lefthand side. There, they’ll see all invoices that you published to the portal. From there, your customer just needs to click on an invoice to start the payment process:

Step 1: The invoice will pop up. They can review all details before clicking the black Checkout button at the bottom.

Step 2: Your customer can pay with a debit card, credit card, or an ACH transfer.

Step 3: Regardless of payment method, your customer just needs to put in their information and click the Save button at the bottom. It’s as easy as ordering something on Amazon.

Step 4: If your customer needs to make a full or partial payment, they can click the pencil icon and put in the amount. Finally, they click Pay Now on the right to finish up. Your customer will recieve an email confirming the payment went through, with all of the details.

LMN Invoicing in customer portal — *Invoicing in the customer portal*

Profile

Your customers can manage their own user profiles by clicking on the Profile tab. There, they can:

Disable email notifications
Change their account password
Delete or edit their existing payment method, e.g. change what credit card they use

Profile in customer portal

Cost

LMN has three pricing plans:

The Free Pro plan for free
The Pro plan for $297 per month
The Pro Plus plan for $394 per month

For a one-time fee of $847, both Pro and Pro Plus offer implementation help, in which LMN’s employees help get you started with the software.

Gro Plan

The only way to access LMN’s mobile app, LMN Pro, is through the Gro Plan. This plan lets you run your landscaping business from your phone for $99 per month (the first month is free), plus five more tiering plans for additional users:

Tier 2: Up to 3 users; $129.99/month
Tier 3: Up to 5 users; $149.99/month
Tier 4: Up to 10 users; $189.99/month
Tier 5: Up to 20 users; $249.99/month
Tier 6: 21+ users; $349.99/month

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✓ Rich in features ✓ Helpful LMN academy training ✓ Clean user interface	✗ Can be hard to set up ✗ All plans after free pro are expensive ✗ Users complain that some features are hard to use

User Reviews

Lots of helpful features: “Every feature of LMN is impactful and has changed the way we do business. We are able to set up estimates quickly and see real-time results for the first time in our business.” – Kali P from GetApp

Can be hard to set up: “Cumbersome to set up at first; even with video tutorials, we needed expert advice, and took the classes. It takes a commitment to get it up and running consistently.” – Laurie M from GetApp

Expensive: “I do consider LMN to be expensive. Before running our startup, we were struggling to afford LMN. It took time to have convenient revenue in order to have LMN.” – Marina V from g2

Yardbook

Compared to LMN, Yardbook isn’t rich in features. However, what it does have is still useful for managing your business.

The following three features are just a few examples of what this software can do. To learn more, read our Yardbook review.

Pro Tip: Yardbook lets you edit the menu on the left. Click the blue button on the top left corner of the dashboard (with the gears) to access the Settings page. Go to the bottom, and you’ll see a list of features you can add to or remove from the menu.

Timesheets

Thanks to Yardbook’s timesheet tracker, you can have employees clock in and out or have them manually create their own timesheets. We’ll go over each option in more detail.

Click Time Clock to get started.

Time Clock

Using the time clock to record your employee’s hours couldn’t be easier.

Step 1: Click Clock In. A set of options will greet you, and you can pick which one to clock into:

General: Any task
Driving: when your employee is en route to their destination
Lunch: when your employee is on a lunch break
Break: when your employee is on a non-lunch break

If you don’t find these options specific enough, you can update the timesheet settings to add new options (see Change Settings below).

Step 2: Click on the option you want. The timesheet will register that you were clocked in to the job/task.

To clock out, just click Clock Out. You’ll see the timesheet entry recorded on the Earlier Today section of the page.

Manually

The other option lets you manually add a timesheet and record the number of hours worked – no time clock needed. However, you can’t track the start and end time using this method like you can with the time clock.

Step 1: Go to the timesheet, but instead of Clock In, click Or, enter manually. You’ll be taken to the timesheet entry page.

Timesheet Manual Entry — *Timesheet entry page*

Step 2: Enter the number of hours, choose the task type or job, and click the green Save button.

Change Settings

As we mentioned above, the options Yardbook gives you for clocking in and out of a job aren’t very specific. However, you can add jobs and tasks depending on what your needs are.

Step 1: Click on the Timesheets menu on the left. You’ll get sent to the Timesheets page. Click on the blue Settings link on the right.

Step 2: You’ll see a text box where you can specify jobs and tasks depending on your business. Separate them with commas and click on the green Save button.

Now, rather than the vague tasks provided, the menu options will change to the tasks you entered. For example, I deleted all of the options above and replaced them with mulching, mowing, and pruning.

Changing tasks on Yardbook — *Changing job options*

Yardbook The Time Clock's Menu Changed — *Time clock with changed job options*

Creating Jobs

Yardbook makes it easy to create jobs. You can create:

One-time job: a “one-and-done” kind of service that only occurs once
Recurring job: a job that repeats on a schedule, such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly

There are two ways to create a job: with the Jobs tab on the lefthand menu or through the Quick Add drop down menu on the top right corner of the screen. Using Quick Add is faster than using the Jobs tab.

Job Creation Process

To create a job, fill in the relevant information. Though Description is the only required field, you can also add:

Address (crucial for routing – see the Routing section below)
Start date
Start time

If this is a recurring job, click the checkbox next to Set to Recurring. From there, you can pick the day of the week and define if the service will occur daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Routing

Creating efficient job routes saves your landscaping business time and money, and Yardbook’s routing feature lets you create routing sheets tailored to the jobs you have in your system. These sheets allow you to:

Optimize your routes
Find the shortest driving time
Configure your route settings

Pro Tip: To use this feature, you need to have at least two customers, both with addresses, in your system. Yardbook takes the addresses from your system, so you can’t just type in a starting point and a destination and hope it will pick it up – this isn’t Google Maps.

Create Routing Sheet

Yardbook create_route — *Job screen, where Yardbook picks up information to create routes*

It’s very easy to create a new route. Just go to the Job screen (pictured above) and click on the Routes link on the top right corner of the screen. Clicking this link takes you to the routing map view, where you’ll see the route with your jobs on the left side of the page.

Add Job to Route

After arriving at the Google Maps-esque route view, you’ll see the jobs on the lower left corner of the screen, in the Not Yet Routed section. Click on the grey Add button to add each job to the route. The jobs will move from the Not Yet Routed section to the Route section.

Configure Your Route

Yardbook’s routing software uses a drag and drop interface, so if you need to make changes to the route, just click the location and move it to where you want it in the Route section.

Optimize Your Route

Yardbook lets you optimize your route based on the shortest distance. Click on the grey Optimize Route link next to the orange Draw Route button. The route will become much shorter, meaning you get to your destination in less time.

One thing to remember is Yardbook doesn’t take start time into consideration, so if you have a job planned for a certain time, you will need to adjust your route to account for it.