LMN is not a small tool that got expensive. It is a full operations suite for landscaping companies, sold by Granum, on the market since 2009, and the company says more than three thousand North American landscaping businesses run on it. It is rated 4.6 out of 5 across 86 Capterra reviews, which is a strong score for software this broad. Obra is one page per project that keeps the money honest. The comparison worth making is not better versus worse — it is which problem you are trying to buy your way out of.
What LMN is actually selling
Most job costing tools start at the job. LMN starts at the company. You build an annual budget — overhead, equipment, labor burden — and the estimating templates price work so that budget is recovered inside every quote you send. That is the product, and it is the reason established landscapers stay: their prices are wrong in a way they can see and fix. Everything else in the suite feeds it. The CRM and client portal, where customers review and approve estimates, view schedules, submit requests and pay invoices. Drag-and-drop scheduling with route optimization. The LMN Crew app for punch-ins, GPS verification and production tracking. Invoicing with card and ACH payments. A real two-way QuickBooks sync — Online on the entry tier, Online and Desktop above it — which is a straightforward advantage over Obra's exports, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Obra does none of that. No estimating, no scheduling, no routing, no time clock, no CRM, no client approval portal, no live accounting sync. If you have the annual budget problem, the overhead guide is our answer on paper and LMN's is software, and software wins for a company doing this every week.
The line that matters: job costing
On LMN's pricing page, real-time job costing is a Professional feature — the roughly $650 a month tier, sold with three office licenses and fifteen crew licenses, positioned for companies with ten or more employees. Equipment and material costing sit there too, and so do the time efficiency scoreboards that compare estimated against actual hours. The entry tier, about $300 a month, is budgeting, estimating, scheduling, the crew app and invoicing — no costing line at all. It is also capped at one active budget and syncs to QuickBooks Online only.
Obra puts job costing on every plan, including the free one. A budget per category, the recorded cost against it, and a reviewed expected final cost that a person confirms rather than a number that drifts on its own. That is the whole shape of the difference: at LMN, knowing whether a job will be profitable before the last invoice goes out is a tier decision. At Obra it is the product. The job costing apps guide puts both in the wider field.
Who can send a cost
LMN sells license bundles, and everyone who touches the system consumes one — an office license for the estimator, crew licenses for the crew, extra licenses for a fee. That is coherent for a company that wants the crew clocking in and reporting production. It is expensive for a crew of four where the only thing you actually need from the field is the ticket from the supply house.
Obra's submitter role takes no seat at all, and the WhatsApp number takes no login. A foreman photographs the ticket, sends it in Spanish or English from the app already on his phone, and it lands as a draft with the amount, date and vendor read out, for a reviewer to confirm. He never sees the project's margin. The bilingual crew guide walks through the whole loop.
What LMN's own customers say
Two things come up over and over in public reviews, and both are worth knowing before a demo.
The first is the learning curve. SoftwareAdvice and Capterra reviewers describe the software as hard to understand at first and complex to learn in detail; LMN concedes the shape of this by selling a coached onboarding program that runs about two months. The onboarding fee is real, and LMN does not publish it.
The second is the field app. LMN Crew — the app crews are required to use daily — sits at 3.5 stars from 83 ratings on Google Play and 3.2 from 13 ratings on the App Store, read on September 8, 2026. That is a long way below the 4.6 the office product earns on Capterra. Capterra reviewers also call the CRM basic. SoftwareAdvice reviewers name smaller gaps: invoice templates that are hard to format, one file uploadable at a time, invoices that do not sync to QuickBooks automatically, and no two-way customer texting without a paid add-on.
None of that makes LMN a bad product. A 4.6 across 86 reviews with support that customers describe as answering in a minute is a good product with a rough edge on the phone.
Spanish, precisely
Granum's site says crew time and production can be recorded from the LMN mobile app in English and Spanish, and the trade press says the same. That is real and it matters. But it stops there: we found no Spanish office product, no Spanish marketing pages and no Spanish help center. The crew gets a Spanish phone app; the person doing the estimating works in English.
Obra is bilingual the whole way through — the app, WhatsApp replies, the help center, and the emails we send — because on a lot of American job sites the office and the field do not work in the same language, and stranding one of them is not a plan.
Price, plainly, and which one
LMN's entry tier is about $300 a month, billed monthly, for one office license and five crew licenses, plus an unpublished one-time onboarding fee, and the tier with real-time job costing is roughly $650. Enterprise is quote-only. There is no free trial: you book a demo to buy. Obra is free for one active project and $12 per user per month; a crew of three pays $36, with job costing included. Prices checked September 8, 2026.
That gap is not an argument that LMN is overpriced. It buys estimating, scheduling, routing, crew time, a CRM, a client portal and a live QuickBooks sync that Obra deliberately does not have. It is an argument about sequence. LMN is the suite a landscaping company graduates into once the annual budget and the crew calendar are the problem. Obra is what you use while the problem is still whether this job made money — and it is there, free, this afternoon, without a call.