A No-Nonsense Review of Raken
Is Raken the best app for your construction business? This in-depth review explores everything you need to make an informed choice!
Raken is construction management software serving general and specialty contractors, subcontractors, and trade businesses. It offers specialized solutions for field workers, including daily progress reporting, time tracking tools, safety and quality tools, and document management.
The tool has garnered a considerable following among construction professionals. Research & Markets’ Global Construction Software Market 2024-2030 report lists Raken as one of the leading vendors alongside Buildertrend, Procure, and Trimble.
In this non-nonsense review, we will take an in-depth look at Raken’s features, user experience, and overall value proposition to help you determine if it’s the right solution for your construction business.
Must contact sales for pricing
Simple signup and onboarding
Extensive daily reporting
Detailed survey for dailies
No dedicated scheduling
Hard to find time cards
No vehicle GPS tracking for the field
What Is Raken?
Raken develops web and mobile app solutions for field workflows in the construction industry, with an emphasis on field reporting. It was founded in 2014 as a daily reporting software and celebrates its 10-year mark this year.
Raken first offered offline mode to its mobile users in 2018, and the company debuted a time-tracking solution in 2023.
Today, the company sells itself as the “all-in-one app for the field.” Let’s take a look at Raken’s core features to assess whether its bolstered toolkit contains all you need to solve key operational challenges in your construction company.
Raken Overview
While Raken made its name as a daily reporting tool, it’s since expanded into several related areas.
Its daily progress reporting encompasses daily reports, collaborator reports, segmented daily reports, photo documentation, and notes and tasks. It also includes messaging for faster communication between field and office.
Its time and production solutions include time tracking, production and materials tracking, equipment and budget management, project management, production insights, and labor management.
Safety and quality solutions include managed checklists, observations, incidents, toolbox talks, dashboards, and insights.
Lastly, document management includes forms and cloud software.
Now, let’s see what it’s like to get started with Raken.
Sign-Up and Onboarding
Signing up with Raken is fairly easy. Simply create an account and provide your business details, along with your business size and company role, to personalize your experience.
Once inside the platform, you can purchase your desired subscription from Raken’s paid tiers.
The Web App Experience
Raken’s platform greets you with a list of your latest activities by project.
Clicking on a project brings you to the Daily Log page where you can view your team’s work logs or time cards. The overhead menu consists of buttons for the main dashboard, your projects, team, and a company page containing your business details.
The web app also provides helpful weather info to keep you mindful of your team out on the field.
The left side menu consists of the platform’s main features, which we will discuss in detail below.
The Mobile Experience
The mobile app opens with a list of your projects and a search bar for specific tasks and jobs. The bottom menu features shortcut buttons for projects, activity, tracking time (My time), and user account.
Under the project tab, you can create projects by clicking the plus button at the bottom right of the screen. You can customize these by adding project name and number, duration period, project groups, and project templates.
The activity tab lets you view the latest activities from your projects and teams. Clicking ‘My Time’ brings you to the mobile clock timer. You can start tracking time, select projects you’re tracking time for, set a location to clock in, and view timesheets.
The ‘Account’ tab houses your user profile and details, including certifications, email preferences, subscription, and photo and video settings for reporting.
More construction companies trust Workyard’s workforce management software
Discover why
Raken Key Features
Raken’s main platform features are:
- Daily logs
- Production
- Safety and QC
- Tasks
- Forms
- Dashboard
- Project directory
- Compliance
- Gallery
Let’s look at these in detail.
What are Raken’s Daily Logs?
The Daily Logs tab displays your work logs and time cards. You can roll over work logs from the previous day and allocate hours according to your project settings.
Click the plus button on the screen to create work logs and time cards. You can customize these by adding descriptions and notes on the day’s events.
You can also add notes and add category details and file attachments. The attachments tab organizes your previous files and allows you to upload new ones.
‘Survey’ shows a list of questions that you can ask field workers to include in their daily progress report. These include on-site accidents, schedule delays, weather conditions, and impact on site, visitors, off-limits areas, and equipment rentals. You may edit these questions according to your requirements.
What is Raken’s Production?
This section tracks your time cards, materials, and equipment. It also includes insights on production stats such as budgeted hours, projected hours gain or loss, and percentage of completed quantity.
Raken’s live map shows team members’ locations via GPS, together with their corresponding time cards. You can search for specific employees to pinpoint where they are on the map.
What is Raken’s Safety and QC?
Safety and quality control are important at Raken. The safety and QC tab houses your checklists, which include details on assignees, checklist items, and observations.
The Toolbox Talks tab shows upcoming safety talks scheduled for specific projects. The Observations and Incidents section documents reported events on site, with details on date, assignees, status, and relevant attachments.
The Insights tab shows your list of safety and quality control checklists. It offers further insights, including your top five checklist deficiencies, most commonly raised issues, and positive versus negative observations.
What is Raken’s Tasks?
The Tasks tab shows a detailed list of assigned tasks with due date, status, and attachments. You can create reports for tasks as well as daily and super daily progress breakdowns, manpower, project summary, time cards, and others.
What is Raken’s Forms?
This tab houses your existing forms. You can upload forms or create them from Raken’s templates.
What in Raken’s Dashboard?
Raken’s Dashboard shows your activity for the last 30 days, which you can further filter by activity type. You can also search for activities using the search bar.
The Insights section of the dashboard shows all-time stats of man days, hours, safety incidents, missed dailies, and compliance percentages. The dashboard visualizes these below, together with your open tasks and top users.
What is Raken’s Project Directory?
Project Directory lists team members, workers, and collaborators’ details including EID, email, phone number, and role.
You can add and invite team members, with the option to add a personal message. You can also download directories for export.
What is Raken’s Compliance?
Compliance in Raken’s platform is equated to the number of completed and missed dailies. You can search for specific dailies and download them for export. The platform organizes daily reports per year and month in folders and subfolders.
You have the option of notifying all assigned parties in case of missed dailies with a click of the bell icon.
What is Raken’s Gallery?
The Gallery houses photo attachments, videos, documents, and audio files uploaded to your account on the platform. You can filter these by date and file type. You can also search for specific files using the search bar.
Raken allows you to download files by batch for export.
Integrating Other Business Apps With Raken
Raken integrates with many external systems including accounting and payroll software like QuickBooks and Sage, project management platforms, and cloud storage solutions.
The app also integrates with reality capture tools, including EarthCam, DroneDeploy, and HoloBuilder.
Raken Might be a Good Fit for You If…
…you’re focused on reporting and bent on safety and quality checks on sites.
There’s no denying Raken offers a hefty set of reporting, compliance, and safety monitoring features on its platform. However, its emphasis might be a little too much on the reporting and compliance end of things.
While there are time-tracking and job-tracking solutions, they are hard to find on the platform and buried under other features.
If you need to get quickly to your team’s schedule or real-time locations, you won’t find a quick way to do so on Raken.
You Might Not Want to Use Raken If…
…you prioritize other areas, such as scheduling and time tracking, above reporting and safety.
Take a look at Raken’s list of platform features. We did not find a dedicated scheduling page or team calendar that you can access at a moment’s notice.
While there are time-tracking and timesheet management solutions available, these are not easy to get to. There appears to be no quick way of calculating mileage for vehicle trips made during work hours.
We also did not find dedicated job costing tools on the platform. If you need these on a daily basis for your field operations, you might be forced to outsource solutions from other apps and platforms instead.
More construction companies trust Workyard’s workforce management software
Discover why
Raken Cost/Pricing
Raken does not publish its prices, but invites visitors to contact sales.
Some sources like SoftwareSuggest estimate Raken’s pricing to be $15 per mo. for its base tier, $37 per mo. for its middle tier, and $46 per mo. for its highest tier. However, these prices are unconfirmed. In addition, Raken invites interested parties to request a quote from its sales, which suggests customized pricing based on business size and needs.
Base Tier |
Top Tier |
|
Base Cost |
Must contact sales |
Must contact sales |
User Cost |
Must contact sales |
Must contact sales |
Offers? |
N/A |
N/A |
Free Trial? |
No |
No |
Raken Reviews
Raken users say the app does a good job on certain areas, but is missing some key features.
iOS user FabShopScott feels the app is easy to use, except when it comes to managing timesheets for his team members:
iOS Review:
Easy time app ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My only issue with it is I’m unable as a user to pull up my guys time individually for the week. We work in a fab shop so we do work for all of the projects, but I have to go back through the individual projects’ time sheets to find their time. You have to have admin permissions to pull it up by name, even though I can go to any job and change anyone’s time, even if they don’t work for me. That’s dumb.
Android user Michael Leipski says the app is alright, but he still misses Procore:
Google Play Review:
⭐⭐⭐
Works OK. I’m still a fan of procore. Raken is getting better. It does do the basics. But as far as everything else it still lacks in my opinion.
Raken user Bret B. says the app works well, but missing key features force them to look elsewhere for solutions:
Capterra Review:
Raken Review ⭐⭐⭐
Works well for the most part besides for a few issues here and there. Your team does a good job being accessible and reaching out to help. Certain features we would like to see implemented that don’t seem to be on your teams’ plans have us looking for solutions elsewhere.Pros: Accessibly and the simple interface makes the integration into using very simple for employees new to online softwares. The surveys are also very helpful and allow for easy to compute data being accessible for everyone to see.
Our Score (and Why We Chose It)
Cons: Isn’t much that can be tailored to our needs specifically. We have discussed with members of your team on certain features or abilities we would like to have available that you are unable to meet.
Based on our sign-up and onboarding experience with the free trial, here’s how we scored Raken:
Top Alternatives to Raken
Raken claims it’s the “All-In-One App for the Field,” but plenty of other software providers offer similar features for field service management.
No trial available.
No trial available.
Demo available upon request
30-day free trial
The Bottom Line
Raken has laid claim to the title of top-rated daily reporting app for construction contractors. Over the last decade, it’s dedicated its team’s time and efforts toward developing and enhancing its daily reporting capabilities for on-site field workers.
However, as our review has shown (and as other users have pointed out), Raken seems to have dedicated unequal attention to other areas of construction management, including its scheduling, timesheet management, and job costing features. Notably, it only debuted a time-tracking solution last year after being in business for nearly 10 years.
While it offers comprehensive features for daily reporting, Raken could be more well-rounded before being seriously considered as the ‘all-in-one app’ for field management.
Construction managers and field workers love the Workyard mobile experience. Our iOS and Android apps are designed around the needs of team managers in the construction business. Our web platform simplifies scheduling, field management, time tracking, and more for construction managers.
Try Workyard free for 14 days and see how we can simplify your field service management and make your business more profitable!
Raken is a comprehensive construction management software that helps contractors improve productivity and profitability. It offers a mobile app for field crews to track progress, fill timecards, upload photos and notes, complete checklists, and log equipment and materials. The data is then combined into branded PDF reports that are automatically sent to the office.
The web dashboard allows office teams to track projects in one place, see what’s happening on each jobsite, and connect Raken’s data to other project management, cloud storage, and accounting software
Raken’s easy-to-use tools are designed for quick adoption and help reduce risks by closely monitoring the jobsite and resolving disputes quickly.
Key features of Raken include:
- Capturing and sharing field data in real-time
- Flexible time tracking with detailed insights
- Checklists and observations to prioritize safety and quality
- Storing important project documentation in one place
- Automated reports and dashboards for actionable insights
Raken’s construction management software is used by contractors of all kinds to improve profitability and productivity.
Raken offers the following pricing plans:
Basic: $15/month per user (or $12/month per user annually)
- Unlimited projects
- Daily reports
- Custom branding
- Task management
- Offline mode
Professional: $37/month per user (or $30/month per user annually)
- All Basic features
- Dashboard insights
- Time cards
- Real-time notifications
- Cloud service integrations
- Customizable surveys
Performance: $46/month per user (or $37/month per user annually)
- All Professional features
- Customizable templates
- Customizable reports
- Free subcontractor access
- Photo management
- Automated daily report emails
Raken also offers a free trial, with no credit card required to sign up. The pricing is based on an annual contract, with a 20% discount compared to month-to-month
Raken is a comprehensive construction management software that helps contractors improve productivity and profitability by providing the following key features:
- Daily Progress Reporting
Capture and share key project data seamlessly through daily reports, collaborator reports, photos, videos, notes, messaging, and tasks
- Time & Production Tracking
Assess project health and manage resources with maximum clarity through time tracking, production tracking, material tracking, equipment tracking, budget management, project management, production insights, and labor management
- Safety & Quality Management
Identify and resolve issues early to keep crews safer and more productive through safety management, quality management, managed checklists, observations, incidents, toolbox talks, and dashboards & insights
- Document Management
Securely store all important project data in one place through forms, document management, and cloud software integration
Raken’s mobile app allows field crews to track progress, fill timecards, upload photos and notes, complete checklists, and log equipment and materials. The data is then combined into branded PDF reports that are automatically sent to the office.
The web dashboard allows office teams to track projects, see what’s happening on each jobsite, and connect Raken’s data to other project management, cloud storage, and accounting software.
Here are the key steps for using Raken, a construction management software:
- Setting Up Projects
- Log in to Raken’s web portal to set up new projects and assign tasks to field crews
- Customize project details, cost codes, checklists, and more to fit your specific needs
- Capturing Field Data
- Download Raken’s mobile app on your smartphone or tablet to access reports, checklists, and more from the jobsite
- Use the app to log hours, take photos, complete checklists, and record notes and observations
- All data syncs in real-time to the web portal for the office to view
- Generating Reports
- Raken automatically generates daily reports in a shareable PDF format based on the data collected in the field
- Customize report templates with your company branding
- Easily send reports to project stakeholders and clients
- Tracking Time & Production
- Use Raken’s flexible time tracking options to log hours worked at a granular level
- Track material and equipment usage alongside labor hours
- View detailed insights on project performance through dashboards
- Managing Safety & Quality
- Keep safety and quality top of mind with managed checklists, observations, and toolbox talks in the app
- Monitor compliance and analyze trends with dynamic safety and quality dashboards
- Accessing Documentation
- Store all important project documents, photos, and videos in one place for easy reference
- Quickly resolve disputes by having a complete record of what happened on the jobsite
Raken’s intuitive tools are designed for easy adoption by both field crews and office staff. The combination of mobile data capture and cloud storage helps contractors collect and share project data in real-time to keep projects on track.
