Aspire and Janitorial Manager, where they split.

Pick Aspire if you want one platform tying sales, operations, and financials together across a larger or multi-service business, with job costing and dashboards that show margin per account. Pick Janitorial Manager if your work is janitorial and the pain is in the office: estimators pricing the same building different ways, and bids you want loaded against one model. Both sit in the wider market on the all-in-one platform guide next to BrightGo and WinTeam.

Aspire is built to run the whole business from one place. A job moves from prospect record to proposal to schedule to invoice without leaving the platform, estimates come off your own production factors, and job costing plus real-time dashboards give the owner a read on margin across every account. Because it also serves landscape and other field-service lines, it fits a contractor whose cleaning division sits alongside other work.

Janitorial Manager earns its reputation at the bid. The work-loading calculator lets several estimators price jobs the same way against one set of loaded settings, with inspections, scheduling, and timekeeping around it, all specific to cleaning. For a janitorial company that wants consistent estimating and cleaning-native operations without enterprise scope, it is a sound, affordable answer.

Each is built once and configured for every company that buys it. That holds until your edge lives in something neither models, like a labor-burden rule specific to your market or a renewal-risk signal that reads inspection trends per client against the renewal date. When the platform almost fits, the gap becomes a spreadsheet the owner maintains by hand, and the data on one account ends up split between the app and that sheet.

Neither vendor will rebuild itself around one company, which is the correct call for a product serving thousands. It also means the workflow that is uniquely yours stays a manual workaround for as long as you run on the packaged set.

Colby builds the missing piece around your operation and wires it into what you already run, so you keep Aspire or Janitorial Manager or whatever suite works and add only the workflow it cannot cover. You can see the operations side of that on the work-order routing use case, the quoting side on the instant quoting use case, and how a build compares to a packaged suite on the Janitorial Manager alternative page.

Start with the shape of the business. If cleaning is one of several service lines and you want sales, operations, and financials tied together with margin visible per account, Aspire is built for that. If the work is janitorial and the owner wants every bid loaded against one model in a cleaning-native suite, Janitorial Manager is the closer fit.

The signal for a custom build is different. It shows up when the thing that wins your accounts is the thing no packaged product covers, or when the owner has become the integration between tools. Colby starts with a three-week discovery that maps how work moves through your company, then hands you a readout of build options to choose from. You own what gets built, and Colby hosts and maintains it. The quickest read on where you stand is to score your operation or start a quote.