Both are free or nearly free, both are local, and both have been around long enough that everyone has an opinion. That combination makes them easy to dismiss and easy to overrate.
The useful version is narrower than either camp suggests, and for Facebook it involves a different part of the platform than most people expect.
Craigslist now costs money, and that is the good news
Craigslist used to be free for service businesses. It is not any more. In the United States, every services subcategory now carries a flat $5 fee per post, with listings running on a thirty day cycle. Gig categories run roughly $3 to $10 depending on the city. Outside the US, posting remains free.
Some sources quote $7 to $10 for services rather than $5, so check the price shown at the moment you post, which Craigslist displays before taking payment.
That fee is the most interesting thing about the platform now. The services sections were overwhelmed with spam for years precisely because posting cost nothing, and five dollars is enough friction to remove most of it. A paid ad sits on a less crowded page for longer, and readers treat the section as marginally more legitimate than they used to.
Five dollars a month for a live listing in a local services category is not a serious expense. The question is whether the traffic is worth having.
What Craigslist is actually good for
It works for immediate, price-sensitive, relatively commoditised work. Hauling, moving, junk removal, basic cleaning, handyman jobs, appliance repair, lawn work. Things where the customer knows what they want, wants it soon, and is choosing largely on availability and price.
It works badly for anything trust-heavy or high-ticket. Nobody is selecting a company for a full system replacement or a bathroom remodel from a classified ad, and the tradespeople in forums who dismiss Craigslist are usually the ones doing exactly that kind of work. They are right about their own market and wrong to generalise.
There is also a persistent quality problem in the other direction. The section attracts customers looking for the cheapest possible labour, which is fine if that is your model and corrosive if it is not.
Facebook Marketplace is mostly the wrong part of Facebook
Marketplace is built for goods. It is where people sell sofas and buy lawnmowers, and while service listings exist, the format, the browsing behaviour, and the buyer expectations are all oriented around objects with a price on them.
You can post there and some people do fine with it. But the part of Facebook that actually produces work for local service businesses is somewhere else entirely.
The recommendation thread is the real channel
In every town there is a neighbourhood group, a community page, or a local buy-sell-trade group, and in all of them the same post appears constantly: does anyone know a good plumber, who did your roof, looking for recommendations for a landscaper.
Those threads are the single highest-intent thing on the platform for a business like yours. The person has the problem, is asking publicly, and is going to hire whoever gets recommended by the most people they trust.
Here is the discipline that separates the businesses that benefit from the ones that get muted. Being tagged by a neighbour is worth enormously more than commenting about yourself. A recommendation from a customer carries the credibility of the whole thread. A business owner dropping into somebody else's request to pitch their own company reads as spam, gets fewer responses, and in many groups breaks the rules outright.
So the play is not to monitor those threads and pounce. It is to be the business your past customers name without being asked.
That means asking customers who are active in local groups to mention you if it ever comes up, which most people are happy to do. It means being visibly present in the community rather than only appearing when there is work on offer. And it means, if you do respond directly, answering the actual question usefully rather than posting a phone number.
Both platforms select for the same buyer
Worth saying plainly, because it explains most of the disappointment.
Classified listings and marketplace browsing both attract people comparing on price. That is what those formats are for. If your positioning is that you are cheaper and faster, this is a good match. If your positioning is that you do careful work at a fair price, you will spend a lot of time quoting jobs to people who were never going to hire you.
That is not a flaw in the platforms. It is what they are, and knowing it in advance is the difference between using them deliberately and being annoyed by them.
The time cost nobody counts
Craigslist listings expire on a thirty day cycle, so a live presence means reposting monthly and paying again. Both platforms generate a meaningful volume of enquiries that go nowhere, and answering those takes real time, usually in the evening.
At five dollars a month the cash is irrelevant. The hours are not, and they are the reason most service businesses that try Craigslist quietly stop after a quarter.
The honest read
Craigslist is worth five dollars a month if your work is immediate and reasonably commoditised, and worth nothing if it is not. Try one listing for two months and count the jobs, not the enquiries.
Facebook is worth real effort, but through local groups and the recommendation threads rather than Marketplace listings. That is not a channel you buy, it is a position you earn by doing good work for people who talk to their neighbours.
Neither is a substitute for the things that actually drive local service work: a complete profile, recent reviews, and being findable when somebody searches. Treat both as supplements, keep the time spent honest, and drop either one the moment it stops paying for the hours.