Shop Tech Score is an independent review publication for auto repair shop software. We research, score, and compare the platforms that run the business side of a repair shop: estimates, repair orders, digital inspections, parts ordering, scheduling, and payments. The goal is simple. Help shop owners pick the right software without sitting through ten sales demos.
Why this site exists
Search for shop software advice and most of what comes back is either written by the vendors themselves or scraped together by sites that have never looked past a feature list. Prices get quoted from directories that lag a year behind. Best-of lists reorder themselves based on who pays for placement. Shop owners deserve the same quality of research they give their own customers, so we built the publication we kept looking for and could not find.
How the work gets done
Every review starts with real work. We dig into each platform, its pricing structure, its release history, and how it actually holds up in the shops that run it. Every price on this site is verified and dated by our editors, and where a vendor bills both annually and month to month, we publish both rates, because the gap is usually the first surprise on an invoice.
Each platform then goes through the same five-factor scoring system, the STS Score: ease of use, features, pricing value, support, and auto-repair-specific fit. The factors are weighted toward what matters inside a working shop, and a 9.2 means the same thing on every review. When a product raises prices or ships something significant, we re-check and re-score. The comparison chart and the pricing index are built from the same data, so the numbers match everywhere on the site.
What the tiers mean
STS Gold (9.0 and up) is software we would trust to run a shop without hesitation. STS Silver (8.0 to 8.9) is a strong system with real trade-offs we spell out. Anything below that gets an honest accounting of why. Most established platforms land in Silver, and that is not an insult; it means the weaknesses are documented instead of hidden.
What we will not do
No paid placements. No sponsored rankings. No selling your contact information to vendors. Vendors cannot buy a score, improve one, or remove one, and a bigger marketing budget has never moved a number on this site.
Straight answers
When the evidence on a platform is thin or contradictory, we say so in the review instead of papering over it. And when something is unknowable from the outside, like a quote-only vendor’s real-world pricing, we tell you exactly what to nail down on the sales call.
Who writes this
Behind Shop Tech Score is an editorial team that spent 14 years owning and running an independent auto repair shop, living every day with the software this site reviews. That’s why our rubric weights auto-repair fit over feature counts, why we publish both billing rates, and why demo-stage promises never move a score. Reviews run under the Shop Tech Score Team byline: one editorial voice, one scoring rubric, one standard on every page.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we want to know. Send corrections through the contact page. If we got it wrong, we fix it fast, usually within a few business days. Our full standards live in the editorial policy.
Where to start
If you are choosing software right now, take two minutes with Find Your Match, scan the comparison chart, or browse the full review library.