Site Pal vs CompanyCam: an honest comparison

CompanyCam is a photo documentation app used by a lot of contractors, mostly in the US. Site Pal is a UK site diary and reporting app.

Both start with taking a photo on site. What happens next is where they part company.

What CompanyCam is

CompanyCam is built around the photo. Every picture is automatically tagged with time, date and location, filed against a project, and visible to your whole team straight away. You can annotate them, comment on them, and share galleries with clients.

If your problem is “we’ve got thousands of site photos and nobody can find anything”, CompanyCam solves it properly. That’s a real problem and they’ve built a real answer to it.

CompanyCam’s pricing is built around teams, and that matters if you’re on your own. Their plans include three users as a minimum, with additional users charged at $29 each, billed annually in US dollars. Independent reviews put the entry plan at around $79 a month for those three seats — roughly $950 a year. There is no free plan, though there is a 14-day trial.

So if you’re a sole trader or a two-man outfit, you’re paying for seats you haven’t got. CompanyCam are open that this is deliberate: the product is priced for team use. Check their pricing page for current figures — the reported rates vary depending on where you look.

Their onboarding is genuinely good too — live classes, role-based help guides, a community forum. It’s all built around a company bringing a team on board.

What Site Pal is

Site Pal starts with the photo and then writes the words. Photograph the works and you get a diary entry — activity, operatives, PPE, housekeeping, GPS, weather, timestamp. Walk the job talking and you get a client-ready PDF, one photo per page.

£19 a month, flat, one person, unlimited projects, cancel anytime.

The comparison

Where CompanyCam wins

Photo management, clearly. If you take hundreds of photos a week across many jobs and the problem is finding them again six months later, CompanyCam is better at that than Site Pal and it isn’t close.

Team visibility. Everyone sees everything, immediately. Site Pal is one person’s records, full stop.

Onboarding. They put real effort into getting a team up and running. If you’re bringing eight people onto a system, that matters more than any feature list.

Where Site Pal wins

It writes. CompanyCam gives you a beautifully organised photo. It does not give you a paragraph explaining what the photo shows, what it means, and what happens next. That paragraph is the bit that takes the hour.

Price shape, for one person. An annual commitment up front against £19 a month with no commitment. If you’re a sole trader or a self-employed manager, that difference is most of the decision. Three seats minimum, billed a year at a time, against £19 a month for the one person actually using it.

UK records. Site diaries, daywork, delay records, and NEC and JCT-shaped thinking, in the language a UK site actually uses. CompanyCam is a US product serving a US market well. The same argument applies to the other platforms — I’ve made it at more length in Site Pal vs Dashpivot and Site Pal vs Fieldwire.

Which do you need?

CompanyCam if the pain is photo chaos across a team, and there’s a company card behind it.

Site Pal if the pain is writing, you’re on your own, and it’s your money.

Both, potentially. They genuinely don’t overlap much. Nothing stops you organising photos in one and writing records in the other, though for most one-person operations that’s two subscriptions solving one evening’s work.

If what you actually want is a record that stands up when someone disputes it later, start with what a good site diary looks like and what a delay record needs to include. If you want the smaller paid options side by side, they’re in best site diary apps for solo UK contractors and head-to-head in Site Pal vs Site Audit Pro.