Site Pal vs Site Audit Pro: an honest comparison (2026)

I asked the subcontractors on my site what they use to write their daily reports. Every single one of them said Site Audit Pro.

Not the system the main contractor makes them use. Their own app, on their own phone, paid for out of their own pocket — running quietly alongside whatever corporate platform they're forced to log into.

That's worth sitting with, because it tells you two things. One: there are a lot of people on sites doing their own paperwork on their own account, because the company system is too heavy for a quick daily record. Two: Site Audit Pro is the product they landed on. Reported at around 455,000 downloads, it's the incumbent, and it earned that fairly — it's cheap, it's in the app stores, and it does exactly what it says.

I built Site Pal. So read this knowing that. But I'm not going to pretend Site Audit Pro is bad software, because it isn't. It's good software built on an assumption I think is now out of date.

They sell a better form. Site Pal deletes the form.

The prices, from their own pricing page

Checked 6 August 2026 at siteauditpro.com:

Two things worth pulling out of that.

The £12.90 isn't the price, it's the entry fee. There's a genuinely free tier, but it requires the one-off purchase first, and the useful features sit behind the subscription on top: £6.99 a month or £59.99 a year, per device, on iOS.

Per device matters more than it sounds. Phone on site, tablet in the cabin? That's two lots. Site Pal is £19 flat for as many devices and as many projects as you like.

And the platform line is the one I'd check before you buy. Their own pricing page lists the subscription as requiring iOS, with Android under development. Site Pal runs in whatever browser is already on your phone, whichever phone that is.

What Site Audit Pro gets right

Credit where it's due, because if you're using it you'll recognise all of this from their own feature list:

• Cheap to start. Low entry cost, and for a lot of people that's decisive.
• It's in the app stores. Search "site report," download, done. That's how most of my subbies found it, and it's a real advantage.
• Photo annotation. Arrows, circles, text on a photo. Fast and useful.
• Signatures. You can sign off a project in the app — as can Site Pal now, so this one's a level playing field.
• Offline projects. Works with no signal.
• Proper project management around the issues — cloud sync, web access, folders, multiple photos per issue, due dates, mark-as-complete, custom report themes and colours.
• It's mature. Stable, tested, hundreds of thousands of users.

If you want a cheap, reliable, app-store tool for producing photo reports with your own words in them, it's a sound choice and I'd tell you so.

The assumption I think is out of date

Site Audit Pro was built around a straightforward idea: paperwork is slow because the paper is bad, so give people a better form on a phone.

That was right in 2015, and nearly every construction reporting tool on the market is still built on it.

But here's the thing. The form was never the slow bit. The typing was.

You're standing in a stairwell at half four with fourteen things to record. With a form-based app you tap through fields and type descriptions — activity, trade, operatives, PPE, housekeeping — fourteen times. A well-designed form makes that less painful. It doesn't make it fast.

Site Pal takes a photo and writes the entry. Activity, number of operatives, PPE observations, housekeeping, GPS, weather, timestamp. About thirty seconds, and your job is to read it and correct anything wrong. You're editing, not authoring.

Look down Site Audit Pro's own feature list and you'll see issues, themes, folders, storage, due dates. All good things. Nothing on it writes the entry for you. That's not a criticism of their execution — it's the category they're in.

Where the ten-industry menu costs you

This is the part that matters most if you're actually on a construction site, and it's structural rather than a bug.

Site Audit Pro serves around ten industries. Breadth has a price: nothing in it knows what you're looking at. It can't tell a brick from a block. It doesn't know a secant piled wall is a thing. It doesn't know that "housekeeping" on a site means something specific and legally useful rather than tidiness in general. It can't read the chalk on a wall.

Site Pal is construction and nothing else. It knows those words because I've fed thousands of them into it over eleven years in fit-out. And when it isn't sure whether something is a brick or a block, it says "masonry unit" rather than guessing — because in a record that might end up in a dispute, a confident wrong word is worse than an honest vague one.

That isn't a feature you bolt onto a ten-industry app. It's the whole architecture.

Where Site Audit Pro beats Site Pal

Two things, and they're real:

It's an app store download. Site Pal runs in your browser. On iPhone you add it to your home screen and it opens full screen with no address bar, exactly like an app — but there's no App Store listing, and for some people that matters.

Excel export. They have it. Site Pal is PDF only for now.

If either of those two is the thing you need this week, buy Site Audit Pro. I'd rather tell you that than take £19 for something that doesn't fit.

The gap neither of them filled — until one did

There's a category of record that costs real money and almost nothing on the market handles: the delay.

Something stops. Wrong materials, no access, no power, rain, another trade in your way. Six months later there's an argument about who owned that week, and the answer is whatever was written down at the time.

Site Pal has a programme upload and commercial delays register. Upload the programme, and a delay is recorded against the actual programme activity and date — not buried in a diary you'd have to go and find. Contemporaneous, dated, and attached to the thing it affected.

Site Audit Pro doesn't do this. Neither does anything else at this price. If you asked me what Site Pal is really for, this is what I'd point at.

Alongside, not instead

One last thing, because it's the objection I get most.

"We have to use Field View." Or ISETIA, or Procore, or whatever the main contractor mandates. Fair enough — and it isn't an objection, it's the reason this whole category exists.

Those systems are built for a project, not for you. They're heavy, they're slow to open, and nobody's using them to jot down what happened in the stairwell at half four. That's exactly why hundreds of thousands of people pay for their own app on the side.

Site Pal isn't asking you to replace the company system. It's the quick record you keep for yourself — the one you can produce in a meeting six months later, dated, GPS'd and weather-logged, while everyone else is trying to remember what the weather did in March.

That's what Site Audit Pro has been used for all along. I've built the version that writes it for you.

Straight answer

Buy Site Audit Pro if: you need Excel today, you want the cheapest possible entry point, or you want an app store download and nothing else will do.

Buy Site Pal if: you're one person, you're sick of typing, you want the diary written off a photo, you want delays recorded against a real programme, you want reports signed off on site with the name, time and GPS locked in, and £19 a month flat for any number of devices reads better than paying per device.

Try both. Site Pal has a 14-day trial with no card. Site Audit Pro is cheap to start. You'll know inside a week which one you actually open.

Site Audit Pro pricing and features checked 6 August 2026 at siteauditpro.com. Download figure is their own reported number. If anything here is wrong or out of date, email sitepalapp@outlook.com and I'll correct it — including the parts that don't flatter me.

Changelog

• 22 August 2026 — Site Pal now works offline for diary and walkthroughs; offline removed from the list of gaps.
• 8 August 2026 — Site Pal added on-site signature capture; signatures removed from the list of gaps.
• 6 August 2026 — first published