Best Apps and Sites for Hiring a Tradesperson in 2026: Checkatrade vs MyBuilder vs Bark vs Rated People vs Relay

If you’ve searched “best app to find a tradesperson” you’ve probably landed on Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark, Rated People or TrustATrader — the platforms that dominate UK search results for hiring an electrician, plumber, builder or locksmith online. They’re not all the same, and the differences matter for both sides of the booking: what you pay as a customer, and — just as importantly — what the tradesperson turning up at your door is paying to be there.

This is a straight, no-affiliate comparison of how each one actually works, followed by where Relay — hyper-local to Birmingham and built on a different pricing model — fits in.

How to actually compare these platforms

Before the table, the three things that matter most:

1. How the tradesperson pays. This shapes their incentives more than anything else. A pro who paid £30 for your enquiry regardless of whether they win the job has a different relationship with you than one who pays nothing unless the job is completed.
2. How vetting works. “Verified” means very different things depending on the platform — insurance-checked, ID-checked, or just “signed up and paid a subscription.”
3. How local the coverage actually is. A national database of thousands of tradespeople in every category sounds good until you’re trying to find someone available in your specific postcode this week.

The comparison

Platform	How tradespeople pay	Vetting	Coverage	Best for
Checkatrade	Subscription + pay per lead	Insurance/ID checks on paid members; strong review system	National, large database	Browsing lots of reviews before deciding
MyBuilder	Pay per lead (bid/quote model)	Basic sign-up; reviews build trust over time	National	Getting multiple quotes to compare
Bark	Pay per lead (“credits”) across many service categories, not just trades	Light-touch; mostly self-reported	National, broad (not trade-specialist)	One-off, non-urgent jobs across varied services
Rated People	Free to browse, pay to send quotes	Basic sign-up	National	Simple jobs, quick quote requests
TrustATrader	Subscription + vetted-list membership	Reference and insurance checks required	National, smaller pool	Wanting a pre-filtered “vetted list” feel
Relay	Nothing unless the job completes — 0% on a pro’s own clients, 4% on Relay-sourced jobs (customers separately pay a transparent 6% service fee)	Hand-vetted: registration body, insurance and a verification call for every pro	Birmingham only (by design, for now)	Birmingham customers who want a genuinely local, accountable network

What the lead-fee model actually means for you

Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark and Rated People are, at their core, lead-generation businesses: their revenue comes from charging tradespeople for the chance to quote, not from a cut of the completed work. That’s not automatically bad — it funds large review databases and national reach — but it creates a specific dynamic worth understanding:

• A tradesperson may have paid for your enquiry whether or not they win the job, or whether or not the job is even a good fit. That cost gets priced into their rates across their whole business, spread over every customer, whether or not you personally caused it.
• Because the platform is paid on volume of leads, not on completed jobs, its incentive is to maximise the number of enquiries sent out — not necessarily to maximise the number of good matches.
• The best tradespeople, who get plenty of work through repeat customers and word of mouth, often ration or opt out of these platforms because the lead cost eats into thin margins on jobs that were going to come in anyway.

Relay’s model is the opposite shape. Nothing is charged for a quote, an enquiry, or a customer who doesn’t book. The 4% pro commission only applies to a completed, Relay-sourced job — and if a pro brings their own existing customers onto Relay to use its booking, messaging and payment tools, that’s 0%. Customers separately pay a clearly itemised 6% service fee on the job, shown before they approve payment — never hidden, never added after the fact. The platform only earns when the work actually gets done, which is the incentive you actually want it to have.

Vetting: read the fine print

“Verified” is one of the most inconsistently used words in this industry. Before trusting a badge, it’s worth knowing what it actually checked:

• On the national platforms, verification usually means the tradesperson paid to be listed and self-reported insurance/qualifications, sometimes with a document upload, sometimes not independently confirmed for every category.
• Review counts can be inflated by how long a business has been active on the platform, not necessarily by how good they are — a newer, excellent tradesperson can look worse on paper than an established, mediocre one.
• Relay hand-vets every pro before they can accept a booking: a phone verification call, checked registration (Gas Safe, NICEIC-style schemes, etc. where relevant to the trade), and confirmed public liability insurance. It’s a smaller network as a direct result — we’d rather have a shorter list of pros we’ve actually spoken to than a longer one we haven’t. See our guide to spotting a cowboy tradesperson for the checks worth doing yourself on any platform, including this one.

Local coverage: why “national” isn’t always better

The national platforms list tradespeople across the whole of the UK, which is genuinely useful if you live somewhere with thin local supply. But in a city the size of Birmingham, “national database” often just means scrolling past dozens of profiles outside your actual area, or realising the nearest available slot is a 40-minute drive from a pro who doesn’t really know your neighbourhood.

Relay deliberately stays Birmingham-only for now. That’s a trade-off, not an accident: a hyper-local network means every pro on it genuinely covers your area, and it’s small enough that quality control is a phone call, not an algorithm.

Where each platform genuinely makes sense

To be fair to the alternatives:

• Checkatrade is strong if you want to cross-reference a huge volume of historical reviews before deciding, and you’re not in a hurry.
• MyBuilder works well for getting several competing quotes on a well-defined job (an extension, a full rewire) where price comparison matters most.
• Bark is broad rather than trade-specialist — useful if you’re also hiring outside home services.
• Rated People and TrustATrader are reasonable middle grounds if you want a quick quote request without much ceremony.
• Relay is built for Birmingham homeowners and tradespeople who want the incentives aligned — no lead fees, genuine local vetting, and pricing that only takes a cut when work is actually done — and who’d rather book quickly than collect ten competing quotes.

The honest bottom line

None of these platforms is a scam, and the “best” one depends on what you’re optimising for: breadth of choice, speed, price comparison, or trust in a smaller, more accountable network. We built Relay because we kept hearing the same two complaints from opposite sides of the market — customers tired of chasing quotes from people who never called back, and tradespeople tired of paying for leads that went nowhere — and a lead-fee model can’t fully fix either.