A No-Nonsense Review of Buildertrend: Features, Pricing, Alternatives, and More!

Buildertrend is a cloud-based construction software solution that automates administrative tasks, streamlines project management processes, enhances client communication and team collaboration, and improves financial management.

Although its tools and features suit any type of contractor, residential companies looking to organize their contacts, projects, and data will find them more advantageous. Its noteworthy features, like the field mobile app, client portal, and custom branding options, can be a time-saver and help build up your name for clients.

But is this comprehensive platform right for your construction business’s specific needs?

In this Buildertrend deep dive review, we’ll take a closer look at its main features to discover its pros and cons. We’ll even offer some great alternatives if it’s not exactly what you’re looking for.

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What Is Buildertrend?

Buildertrend is construction project management software designed for residential construction professionals.

It offers cloud-based solutions to specialty contractors, custom builders, home builders, and remodelers so they can tackle projects efficiently from start to finish.

Buildertrend Overview

Buildertrend has a suite of sales, project, financial, communication, and materials management tools, which includes:

• Construction time clock
• Project schedules
• Team tasks and checklists
• Construction selections and change orders
• In-app chat
• Customer portal
• CRM hub
• Customizable construction proposal templates
• Construction document management
• Invoicing and payment options

Sign-Up and Onboarding

Buildertrend does not offer a free trial so you can explore its features and determine if it’s a good fit for your construction business. However, you can watch a product demo on the website after completing a short form.

Like other similar software, adding or importing data can take some time. But you can save time if you already have relevant job and contact information in Excel spreadsheets. After you import the spreadsheets, you can start adding team members and clients, customizing roles, and setting up notifications for all users.

One of Buildertrend’s big selling points is the ability to brand the platform to make it your own. You can do that straightaway and upload your business logo and tweak the color schemes.

You can also add a login screen so clients, trade partners, and vendors can easily log in to your Buildertrend platform using their accounts.

Start a free trial today Book a demo

The Web App Experience – Organized and Uncomplicated

Buildertend brands everything for your business, from your business name to the logo and color schemes. You can find that on top of the jobs navigation on the left when you log in to your Buildertrend account. All active jobs will be listed here, and you can click on a job to view more information.

Meanwhile, all other Buildertrend features, such as sales, project management, files, messaging, financial, and reports, are on the top menu.

Weather can play a major role in construction projects, so having the weather forecast right in the middle of your dashboard is a neat feature. You can easily view the contact information of project owners and managers and see everything you must accomplish for the day and the week.

Under the Sales tab, you can find Buildertrend’s lead management features, like lead opportunities, lead activities, lead proposals, lead activity calendar, and lead map.

Once your leads pay for your services, they become active jobs, allowing you to access Buildertrend’s project management tools. These include schedules, daily logs, to-dos, change orders, selections, warranty, and the time clock.

Under the Files tab, you can upload unlimited photos, videos, and documents for each job. Go to Messaging to view the history of all client and team messages, comments, and notifications.

Under the Financials tab, you can find bids, estimates, purchase orders, bills, budget, cost inbox, owner invoices, and online payment reports.

Lastly, under Reports, you can find all sales, project management, and work-in-progress reports, and can compare estimates to actual costs.

Overall, Buildertrend becomes easier to use after you enter all your important data – as is often the case with business management software. Features are categorized under tabs, giving you an organized dashboard. However, accessing what you need will require several clicks.

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The Mobile App Experience – Good Like the Web-Based Platform

Buildertrend also brands your construction business’ mobile app. Your subscription includes a free-to-download iOS and Android app compatible with all mobile devices.

The great thing about its mobile app is it has the key features of its web-based platform. Also, once you have all your data into Buildertrend, using the mobile app is easy, making it a handy tool for field construction teams.

The mobile app notifications and dashboard layout are also intuitive. You can access the time clock, schedules, daily logs, to-dos, and files. The mobile app has GPS tracking, so your current location is automatically registered in daily logs.

You can create checklists, take receipt photos, and annotate pictures taken on the app. It’s also easy to communicate tasks and send messages to other team members in the field or the office.

Buildertrend has a clean and well-organized scheduler to help you manage your time and resources effectively. It allows you to see projects in multiple views: calendar, agenda, Gantt, baseline, day, week, month, or workday expectations.

You can also designate the total number of workdays and multiple work activity tiers per scheduled item. Before creating schedules, you must set your business days first.

Once you finish, the days will reflect on that job’s schedule. You can start scheduling items using any scheduling view and add a title, assignee, display color, and start and end times.

An intuitive feature of this scheduler is the ability to put it on online or offline mode. This lets you build schedules and workflows privately while offline and with muted notifications. Once you switch to online mode, your team and clients will receive notifications about their assigned items.

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Buildertrend Key Features

Scheduling

Buildertrend has a clean and well-organized scheduler to help you manage your time and resources effectively. It allows you to see projects in multiple views: calendar, agenda, Gantt, baseline, day, week, month, or workday expectations.

You can also designate the total number of workdays and multiple work activity tiers per scheduled item. Before creating schedules, you must set your business days first.

Once you finish, the days will reflect on that job’s schedule. You can start scheduling items using any scheduling view and add a title, assignee, display color, and start and end times.

An intuitive feature of this scheduler is the ability to put it on online or offline mode. This lets you build schedules and workflows privately while offline and with muted notifications. Once you switch to online mode, your team and clients will receive notifications about their assigned items.

For companies managing large-scale projects with complex timelines, punch list software could be a valuable addition to enhance task management and ensure timely project delivery.

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Customer Portal

Buildertrend’s customer portal simplifies communication with your clients through each phase of the construction process, reducing unnecessary back-and-forths. It’s a centralized system for all progress reports, communications, invoices, and payments, ensuring you keep clients in the loop.

The dashboard gives clients a quick view of weekly schedules and high-level project details. Clients can view your team’s shared progress reports, which include photos, site conditions, and details on the finished tasks. They can also view comments and send or receive messages.

The customer portal also allows customers to check past and current invoices or settle outstanding payments.

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Financial Management

Any construction business needs good tools for creating estimates, managing budgets, tracking real-time costs, and receiving payments. Buildertrend has got that down pat.

Its robust construction financial management features help you stay on top of your estimates, budgets, and payments. But to access these tools, you must be subscribed to the Advanced or Complete plans.

The estimating tool with prebuilt calculations and formulas saves you hours on manual estimates and reduces user errors like double entries, ensuring accurate estimated costs, quantities, and labor hours.

Buildertrend also combines its estimating solutions with built-in online construction takeoff tools. They digitally calculate linear dimensions and item counts, automate material list creation, and sync takeoff parts and assemblies with cost codes.

You can create detailed proposals for clients and customized estimates for materials and labor costs. If you need to access detailed and accurate information about labor rates or material costs, you can always refer to the cost database.

Buildertrend offers clients convenient payment methods so work can proceed as scheduled and everyone is paid on time. They can make secure online payments via credit card and check (digital and physical).

As a Buildertrend customer, you also have exclusive access to Builder’s Risk Insurance from Silverstone Group, LLC, and financing options to protect and scale your business.

With the app’s integrated checking account, digital wallet, and cashback rewards, you receive plenty of support to better manage all company expenses.

Buildertrend’s financial management tools streamline budget tracking, estimate creation, and payment processing. The software integrates seamlessly with job costing software, providing detailed insights into project costs and profitability.

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Integrating Other Business Apps With Buildertrend

One of the app’s most straightforward but powerful integrations is with Microsoft Excel.

Buildertrend makes it easy to import your Excel spreadsheets into the Financials tab of your Buildertrend account and make the necessary adjustments there. All numbers are updated in real time on Buildertrend, ensuring field and office teams are on the same page.

Xero and QuickBooks are also fully integrated with Buildertrend, allowing you to access your job costs and manage expenses whenever needed. This can also streamline communications between your production and accounting teams.

Buildertrend Might be a Good Fit for You If…

• You’re a homebuilder, general or specialty contractor, or remodeler working with trade partners and clients.
• You want a software solution to manage construction leads, projects, sales, payments, and customer communications in one platform.
• You want something customized so clients can quickly recognize your brand.

You Might Not Want to Use Buildertrend If…

• You want a free trial of the product before purchasing.
• Buildertrend only offers product video demos, tutorials, and guides from its extensive knowledge base.
• Although they are helpful references, trying out all features and functionalities yourself is a better way to gauge if it’s right for your business.

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Buildertrend Cost/Pricing

Buildertrend offers a $300 discount on your first month, a pretty big discount to entice you to sign up.

However, after the first month, you’ll pay the regular Buildertrend cost of $499 to $1,099, depending on the plan.

The Essential Plan is Buildertrend’s most affordable plan at $499 per month, after initially discounted pricing of $199 for your first month. It offers essential sales and project management features like schedules, to-dos, proposals, and a customer portal. It’s suited for small construction companies specializing in interior design or minor remodel projects.

The Advanced Plan is the most popular Buildertrend plan. For $799 a month, you can get advanced estimating and financial management features and takeoff and change order tools. You’ll pay $499 on your first month.

The Complete Plan is the most comprehensive and expensive plan, at $1,099 per month, and it is designed for bigger construction companies. In addition to all the features in the lower tier plans, you also get access to selections, warranties, reports, and requests for information. For your first month, you’ll pay $799.

For a more cost-effective alternative, Workkmax (read our detailed guide here: Workmax Review) provides robust tools for construction management without breaking the bank.

Buildertrend Reviews

Buildertrends has favorable online reviews, with over 4,000 reviews and a perfect score on the Google Play Store. It also received a 4.5 score on the App Store and Capterra. But as the reviews below say, this doesn’t mean the app is flawless.

iOS user Construction Manager 1 noted that the app is constantly changing, negatively impacting business operations. One change even forced them to go back to paper contracts after the updates in the estimating feature.

Constant changes ⭐⭐
The app/desktop full site version are in constant change. Every time you get used to a new change, some IT person has to justify their existence and create an extra step or move a box to the other side of the screen, all in the name of making it better. They don’t know their audience or don’t care. Construction workers are about getting the job done and having proven processes that don’t need to change for the sake of change.

I have posted constant feedback to tech support with no results or updates that truly benefit the user. Our company processes are written around Buildertrend, and their need to change or move things on the screen has negatively impacted our business on occasion. We had to shut down and revert back to paper contracts after the estimate updates they made.

Most recent change was on the To-Do. Now, you have to click on another tab to get to the created checklist instead of just scrolling down the screen. There is a delay with the screen loading to the checklist, which creates efficiency issues. Loss of time every time you go to that screen.

Android user Cody Isaacs gave it a two-star rating because the new app updates affect photo uploads.

⭐⭐ 
The new update on the app is no good. The downloading of files and photos is much more difficult. The old version would tell you how many photos you were trying to upload. And as it uploaded them, it would say one of however many photos has been completed. And when they were not completely uploaded properly, it would tell you which photos were not. On the new version, I download 20 to 30 photos a day per job. When I go to upload them, you get a spinning dial that says uploading.”

Janelle B., a customer relations manager, gave it five stars because the software has all the features their business needs, such as the mobile app, quotations, and work orders. It can also be customized for their construction business.

Buildertrend has all the features a construction business might need
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Buildertrend has been a very helpful solution for our construction business. We use it to manage and monitor the activities of our field personnel. We use it for quoting, mobile app, work orders, and more. It works very well and is priced relatively lower than some of the competitors. All in all, it’s been a treat for our operations. I think what separates it from other similar tools is that it’s completely customized for construction. It has estimating and quoting, work orders, task management, field service monitoring, you name it. It saves you from having to buy and use a dozen different software for each thing. But it’s kind of confusing and all over the place in the beginning, and there isn’t a lot of support documentation online. Pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, though.

Our Score (and Why We Chose It)

Buildertrend becomes easier to use once you get past the challenges of setting up your account. Most of its core features are also available in similar software.

But its additional features, like selections, RFIs, and built-in payment processing, can be a game changer for your construction business.

Check out how we rated Buildertrend below.

Top Alternatives to Buildertrend

If you’ve researched Buildertrend reviews, you have probably seen some good Buildertrend alternatives, too.

Check out these Buildertrend alternatives worth considering:

The Bottom Line

It’s easy to see why Buildertrend is such a popular option for construction project management software. It offers comprehensive features for construction companies and custom branding options on the web and mobile apps for a more professional presentation.

It also gives a competitive advantage by offering a digital construction experience for more tech-savvy homeowners. Its real-time communications also simplify collaboration and field operations coordination.

While it boasts many features, it has limited marketing tools and CRM features. Onboarding subcontractors is also challenging, and customer support is only available on weekdays.

While Buildertrend’s pricing plans are considered affordable for all the features it offers, smaller construction businesses may find them relatively high.

Consider Workyard if you’re looking for something easy to set up, learn, and use. It’s workforce management software built for the field and designed to be easy for your distributed workforce.

Workyard offers core construction project management features such as project planning and scheduling, job progress tracking, budget management, and expense tracking. Discover more of Workyard’s features or sign up for a free trial.