TradieCall vs Johnni.ai: two AI receptionists for tradies, compared honestly.

Pricing transparency.Johnni's homepage banner reads "Everything You Need For $99 A Month", with the currency not labelled on their AU site, and their two tiers (MINI and Advanced Johnni) carry no published prices; you book a demo to find out, as at August 2026. TradieCall publishes the lot: $129 Starter, $249 Pro, $449 Trade Team, NZD including GST, with plan contents listed on the pricing page before you talk to anyone. Neither approach is wrong, but you should know the full number in your currency before you divert your business line.

Where the product lives. Johnni is built in Brisbane, with NZ as an expansion market since August 2025. TradieCall is built in NZ and serves NZ only. In practice that shows up in small things: we publish divert code guides for NZ carriers, the voice is a natural Kiwi accent answering in your business name, and NZ trade calls are the only calls we tune for.

Scope.Johnni serves tradies along with a wider range of small businesses. TradieCall does trades only. A narrower product isn't automatically better, but it does mean every default, prompt and job-sheet field was written for how trade work arrives: urgent, at odd hours, from a caller who'll ring the next number if nobody picks up. See what that looks like for plumbers and electricians.

The table above is thinner than our ReceptionHQ comparison for a reason: Johnni publishes less, so there's less we can fairly claim. When two products are this close on paper, the paper stops being useful. Here's the test plan we'd run in your position, and yes, it can eliminate us too.

Ring both, as a customer.Both offer free trials. Set each up, then have someone call with a real job in a real NZ accent: "hot water cylinder's carked it, we're in Papakura, how soon can someone come?" Listen for how it handles the accent, the address, the urgency, and whether it quotes a price it shouldn't. TradieCall never invents prices; verify the same on any competitor.

Check what the advertised price includes. Get the full tier pricing in writing, in NZD, and confirm what's in each tier versus what costs extra. Our cost guide covers the questions worth asking any receptionist service, human or AI.

Check where support sits. When the divert plays up at 7am before a job, who answers, and in what timezone? Ask each vendor directly.

Check NZ number and divert handling. You're forwarding your actual business line, so confirm the service handles your NZ carrier's divert codes and gives you a local number to forward to. We publish our carrier-by-carrier guides; make sure whoever you pick can walk you through yours. With TradieCall you keep your existing number, set the divert with one code, and the job sheet lands by text and email within a minute of the call ending. Setup is about 10 minutes and there's no lock-in, so trialling us against Johnni for a week costs nothing. How the AI itself works is on our AI receptionist page; how we stack against everything else is on the phone answering comparison.