Site Pal vs Procore: an honest comparison

Let me get the obvious out of the way. Procore is an enterprise construction platform used on some of the biggest projects in the world. Site Pal is a £19-a-month app I built in my evenings because I was sick of typing site diaries up at nine at night.

These are not the same product and this is not a fair fight. But people do search for it, usually for one of two reasons: they’ve been quoted for Procore and want to know if there’s something smaller, or they’re a subcontractor on a Procore job wondering whether they need their own thing.

Both are reasonable questions. Here are honest answers.

What Procore is

Procore is a full construction management platform: drawings, RFIs, submittals, daily logs, financials, change orders, document control, subcontractor coordination. It’s built for contractors running whole projects, and it’s very good at that.

Pricing: Procore doesn’t publish it. It’s quote-only, and the model is based on your annual construction volume rather than seats — which means unlimited users, but a price tied to how much work you turn over. Various third-party sites publish estimates. I’m not going to print a figure as though it’s official, because Procore hasn’t published one. If you want to know what it costs you, you have to book a demo and ask.

That pricing model is worth understanding, because it tells you who it’s for. If you turn over tens of millions and have eighty people who need drawing access, unlimited users at a fixed price is a genuinely good deal. If you’re four blokes and a van, the model doesn’t make sense at any price.

What Site Pal is

Site Pal does one narrow thing. Photograph the works and it writes the diary entry — activity, operatives, PPE, housekeeping, GPS, weather, timestamp. Or walk the job talking and it produces a client-ready PDF report before you leave site.

£19 a month, flat, everything included, cancel anytime. One person, any number of projects.

No drawings. No RFIs. No financials. No document control. If you need those, you need something else, and it might well be Procore.

The comparison

The bit that actually matters

Procore has daily logs. So does Field View. So does every platform in this category. What none of them do is write the entry for you.

That’s the whole of Site Pal. It isn’t a smaller Procore. It’s the ninety seconds at the end of a walk where the words appear without you typing them.

If you’re on a Procore job as a subcontractor, you’re probably not on the licence anyway — main contractors rarely hand out seats to every subbie. You’re taking photos on your phone and typing up your own records separately. That’s the gap. The same argument applies to Field View, and I’ve written that comparison separately in Site Pal vs Field View.

When Procore is the right answer

• You’re coordinating multiple trades across whole projects
• You need drawings, RFIs and submittals in one place with an audit trail
• You have the volume to justify the commitment and someone to run it
• Your clients or funders expect an enterprise platform

Don’t buy a £19 app to solve a thirty-thousand-pound problem. It won’t.

When Site Pal is the right answer

• You’re one person and the paperwork is yours to do
• The thing eating your time is writing, not coordinating
• You want a professional record without a procurement process
• You’re self-employed, or a subcontractor, or a manager whose company system doesn’t do reports

And if you need something in between

If you need real project management but Procore is too much, there are mid-market options worth looking at before you settle. Fieldwire, for instance, has a free tier — their own knowledge base sets it at three projects, a hundred sheets and five users, which is a genuine offer rather than a crippled demo.

Site Pal isn’t one of those options. It does one thing. If what you want is a written record that stands up six months later, it’s worth reading what a good site diary looks like and what a delay record needs to include, then deciding whether the writing is actually your problem.

And if you’ve already decided you want something small and paid for out of your own pocket, I’ve compared the realistic options in best site diary apps for solo UK contractors.