Raken review:
What 501 reviews say

Sign-up asks only what it needs: company size, industry and your role. Ours was set to 11-50 employees, Construction Management, Project Manager.

The next screen pushes you into creating your first project, with a shortcut to a sample project instead. That ordering tells you what Raken expects you came for.

You land inside the platform and buy from there. The two published tiers are covered in the pricing section below.

The web app opens on an activity feed rather than a dashboard of numbers. Who submitted what, filtered to the last 30 days, with search and filters above it.

The left-hand menu is the map of the product. Daily logs first, then Production, Safety & QC, Tasks, Forms, Dashboard, Project directory, Compliance, Gallery and Settings.

Time cards are not a top-level item. They sit two levels down, inside Production. Contractors coming from a time-tracking tool told us that ordering takes adjusting to.

Above the menu sits a live weather readout, 69/70 and partly cloudy in our case. Weather is a line item in a delay claim, so it belongs on the daily report.

One caveat on the screenshots that follow. We were on a fresh trial, so most areas show first-run empty states rather than a season's work.

The mobile app opens on your projects with a search bar, and a bottom bar of four things: Projects, Activity, My time and Account.

The Account tab carries Certifications alongside profile and notification settings. Our feature comparison marks that present for Raken and absent for Workyard.

My time is where the clock lives, and it told us something the documentation does not. It shows a timer, Select project, and Set location to clock in.

Under those buttons sits a notice: "Location access is required to use the time clock." Location is not an optional layer on Raken's time tracking. The clock will not run without it.

That is a point in Raken's favour, and it sharpens the real gap. Location is captured at the punch, not across the shift.

Creating a work log asks for a name, a description, attachments, and also Quantity and Hours. Production data is captured in the daily log rather than a separate timesheet.

The Survey tab is the best-designed thing in Raken. It is a standing set of questions attached to every daily report, and the defaults are the ones that matter later.

Out of the box it asks about accidents, schedule delays, weather, visitors, areas that cannot be worked on, and equipment rented. Each takes an answer, a description and attachments.

That is a delay-claim file assembling itself, filled in by whoever is already doing the daily. Workyard does not do this as well. One contractor called Raken's reports "useful for dealing with damages."

Production holds Time cards, Materials, Equipment, Insights and Map. On our trial most were empty, so we can show the structure but not a populated job.

Insights is the screen that matters. It tracks budgeted, actual and remaining hours, percent completed quantity, and projected hours gained or lost.

A Production Trends chart plots actual against projected and budgeted, filterable by cost code. A banner prompts you to set budgets to turn projections on.

Budget-versus-actual labor reporting is documented for Raken and Workyard does not offer it. If you manage labour against a bid, that is a real advantage.

The Map view is where our trial limited us. Our feature comparison and Raken's documentation both confirm a real-time map of where the crew is now.

With no time cards on the account the map returned "No time cards to display", so treat the live crew view as documented rather than something we watched work.

Either way it is a now view, not a history. There is no breadcrumb trail across the shift and no continuous tracking behind it.

Safety & QC splits into Checklists, Toolbox talks, Observations, Incidents and Insights. Checklists carry columns for the responsible person, location, date and observations raised.

Checklists carry columns for the responsible person, location, checklist date and observations raised. Observations and Incidents record what happened on site, with date, assignee, status and attachments.

Toolbox talks arrived populated, because the content library ships with the product. Ours held prepared talks on housekeeping hazards, asbestos, defibrillators and back injuries.

One of them is a Spanish-language version of the back-injury talk. You can upload your own alongside the library.

Writing toolbox talks is the safety job that never gets done. A stocked library in Spanish as well as English is the difference between a safety programme that runs and one that exists on paper.

Workyard has safety checklists and incident reporting but no pre-built content library. This is a clear Raken win.

Tasks lists assignments with due date, status and attachments. Contractors were more lukewarm here than on reporting, and the word that came up was generic.

Our feature comparison still credits Raken with shift confirmation by employees and attendance tracking for no-shows, neither of which Workyard offers.

The Reports menu is the better story. From one dropdown you can generate Daily, Super daily, Manpower, Project summary, Tasks, Time card by worker, Time card violations, Toolbox talks, Production quantities and Equipment reports.

Time card violations is worth noticing on a product whose time tracking is two years old. If your deliverable is a document somebody else reads, this menu is the shortest path to it.

The Forms tab holds your existing forms. You can upload your own or build them from Raken's template library, and contractors praised bringing industry-specific forms in rather than rebuilding them.

Our trial started empty here, so the screenshot shows the first-run state rather than a populated library.

Raken also supports voice input for hands-free field entry and photo annotation, neither of which Workyard has. Workyard pulls ahead on what happens around the form: stamping location and time per question, and triggering a required form when a worker enters a geofence.

The Dashboard shows activity for the last 30 days, filterable by activity type, with a search bar. On a working account this is the office's view of whether the field is filing its paperwork.

The Insights section reports all-time stats for man days, hours, safety incidents, delays, missed dailies and a compliance percentage, with open tasks and top users below.

Ours read zeros on a one-day-old trial. The metric set is the useful part: it tells you what Raken thinks a construction business should watch every week.

Project directory lists team members, workers and collaborators with their EID, email, phone number and role. You can invite people with an optional personal message, and download the directory for export.

It splits into Team members, Workers and Collaborators. The collaborator handling matters if you are a general contractor pulling documentation from subs, since they sit in the directory without being on your payroll.

We have not published a screenshot of this screen. The only row on our trial was the tester's own account, with a live email address and phone number legible in full.

Compliance in Raken means one thing: completed versus missed dailies. It reports project duration, a compliance percentage and a missed count.

Daily reports are filed by year and month in folders and subfolders, which mirrors how an audit would ask for them.

Where dailies are outstanding, a bell icon notifies every assigned party at once. Ours read 100 percent with nothing missed, easy on a one-day-old trial and no guide to a real month.

Contractors kept mentioning long-term records. One told us Raken retains reporting data for around ten years.

The Gallery holds photo attachments, videos, documents and audio uploaded to the account, counted by media type and grouped by month. Thirteen photos under July 2024 on ours, from the sample project.

The export path is better than we expected. "Download all" takes a company type and a date range, including the entire duration of a project, and emails a download link.

Getting your whole jobsite photo history out in bulk is the difference between migrating off a platform and starting over on it. Plenty of tools make that deliberately hard.