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BuiltUp and Procore do different jobs.
So do BuiltUp and Buildertrend, and so do BuiltUp and the spreadsheet you are pricing in tonight. Here is a straight account of which one fits which problem, with nothing asserted about a competitor that we cannot show you.
Who each tool is for
These tools do different jobs.
If you are comparing them, you are probably deciding whether your problem is running the job or winning it. That is the honest split, and it decides the answer more often than any feature list does.
Procore
Large contractors running a portfolio of jobs.
A construction management platform, built around running work that has already been won: programme, documents, quality, safety and commercial control, across many sites and many people at once. It is priced on annual construction volume rather than per seat, and it does a great deal BuiltUp does not attempt. If your problem is coordinating a job that is already underway, this is the category you are shopping in.
Buildertrend
Homebuilders and remodellers who want one system for the whole job.
Project management, scheduling, client communication and financials in a single product, aimed largely at residential builders. Its centre of gravity is the build, not the tender. It is an American product; UK contractors evaluating it should check how it handles the things that are specific to working here before committing.
A spreadsheet
Almost everyone, right now.
This is the real competitor and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sneer. The spreadsheet is free, you already know it, it never goes down, nobody needs training on it, and it does not auto-renew. Those are genuine advantages and no software pitch cancels them out. What it costs you is elsewhere: re-keying between your client's document and yours, a rate card that quietly goes stale, no record of what you assumed when you priced it, and an evening per tender.
BuiltUp
UK contractors and estimators who need a defensible number out of the door.
Takeoff, scope and estimate, and the client's own schedule of works priced and handed back in their spreadsheet. It is built for the tender end of the job, in pounds, against UK rates. It does not run your programme, and it is not trying to.
If you need enterprise programme management across a portfolio, buy Procore. If you need a defensible number out the door today, that is what we build.
There is no direct connector to Buildertrend, Procore or CoConstruct. Clients, projects and scope items import from a CSV using a template BuiltUp gives you, so moving across means exporting from them and mapping it like any other spreadsheet. Supplier price lists come in from a spreadsheet or straight from a merchant's PDF.
We publish no prices for other people's products on this page. Procore and Buildertrend do not publish list prices, and a number we cannot cite to their own page with a date on it is a number we should not print. Ask them directly, and see our pricing, which is on the page.
The one that actually wins
Most of this work is still priced in Excel, at seven in the evening.
Every vendor in this category writes as though the choice is between their platform and another platform. It usually is not. Pretending otherwise insults the reader, so here are both halves of it.
Where the spreadsheet wins
- It costs nothing and it never expires.
- No licence, no renewal date, no seat count, and nobody to ring when the invoice goes up.
- You already know it.
- No training, no migration, no month of everyone doing it the old way anyway.
- It does exactly what you tell it.
- No opinion about how a job should be structured, and no feature you have to work around.
- It never goes down.
- It is a file. It opens.
Where it costs you
- You type the same job twice.
- Their schedule of works comes in, you rebuild it in yours to price it, then you re-key the numbers back into their layout so it goes out looking like the document they sent.
- The rate card goes stale quietly.
- Nothing tells you the timber figure is from last year. You find out on the job.
- There is no record of what you assumed.
- Six months later, in a variation argument, the cell shows a number and nothing else, not the ceiling height you assumed, not the spec you priced against.
- It takes the evening.
- That is the actual cost, and it is the one nobody puts on the spreadsheet.
BuiltUp does not ask you to leave the spreadsheet. It asks you to stop typing the job twice. You upload the workbook your client sent, it prices every line against your rates, and what comes back is a copy of their file with the rate and total cells filled in. Their sections, their item numbers, their wording, their column widths, their formulas. Read the return against the original and judge it on that.
One real job: a client's 33-item schedule of works came back priced to within about 6% of the figure their own estimator had reached by hand. That is one job, not a benchmark, and we are not going to present it as one.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask.
Accuracy, whose rates, and how this differs from the platforms you are comparing it against.
Got a question we missed? Email support@builtup.io.
Test it against a job you already priced.
You know what the answer should be. That makes it the only test worth running.
No card. One active project free, with no expiry.
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