For construction businesses, tracking project costs, managing team and client communication, monitoring project budgets and financials, assigning and monitoring tasks, managing calendar invites, documents, and so forth can be challenging and time-consuming when done on spreadsheets and email.

Buildertrend is a popular construction project management system for everyone.

In this article, we look for Builder Trend’s best-in-class alternatives, widely popular and used by construction contractors, tech teams, project management agencies, etc. 

From the seven potential solutions reviewed, you’ll find the suitable Buildertrend alternative to grow your business.

#1 Best for project cost control and forecasting: Planyard

Planyard is cloud-based construction accounting software designed by project managers and finance teams to eliminate spreadsheets and duplicate data entries, simplify project financial management, and ensure accurate, real-time project cost control and profitability tracking.

Planyard works in several pricing sets, as the professional package is ideal for small contractors who can streamline project financial processes. The ultimate package feature set is perfect for main contractors and developers to standardize procurement, vendor and subcontractor bidding, payment applications, communication with site teams, etc.

Planyard’s key features:

• Real-time budget management: As your team processes purchase orders, invoices, and change orders or variations, Planyard automatically updates the budget. So, at any given time, the budget is updated and ready for analysis by all the relevant stakeholders.
• Live CVR & P&L reporting and accurate forecasting—the easy-to-follow budget notifications help you immediately envision the riskiest items for over-expenditure when you raise the commitments. This means you’ll have the time to plan your budget before the invoices arrive.
• The whole team works in one place—your project managers, quantity surveyors, purchasing managers, financial team, and site engineers all work on the same system with carefully designed and optimal workflows. So, there is no need to spend time preparing spreadsheets, reports, and back-and-forth emailing.
• A single point of data entry updates the whole process. Whenever you approve an invoice, the system automatically updates the budget, relevant purchase order, and change order, stores the invoice and automatically creates a prefilled purchase invoice in the accounting system, such as Xero, Quickbooks, Sage, and MYOB.
• On Planyard, you can upload your starting project budget, raise purchase orders, process invoices, and hold your monthly project cost control meeting. Then, follow the Planyard user manual to explore the features and contact our support team using the knowledgebase. You can get started in hours, and there is no need to spend time with IT support or sales professionals.

Where is Planyard headed?

Planyard is on a mission to make project financial management seamless. Some construction professionals estimate that budget management, invoice processing, and profitability reports management take up to a week every month. The managers are still unhappy with the late invoices that show up and the reduction of margins. 

We want to make this process a breeze, so you don’t waste time on spreadsheets updating and duplicate data entry and have a real-time overview of project costs, can visualize the risks for expenditure way before the invoices arrive, and have the focus on delivering profits and growing the business.

What’s Planyard pricing?

• Free project cost estimating and quoting
• $18 essential package to streamline invoice processing and track budget estimates against actual costs.
• $79 Professional package, which, in addition to the previous pricing tier, allows streamlining the purchaser orders and change change-orders and lets you track the commitments against the project estimates
• $190 Ultimate, in addition to the earlier options, with the ultimate pricing package, you can automate subcontractor bidding and payment applications

#2 Flexible tool to manage schedules and team tasks: Asana

Asana is an easy-to-use and flexible tool for managing the way your team works. It’s a tool that construction teams worldwide use to manage projects.

Asana provides several features for project management, including project task management, scheduling, mobile apps for team communications, time tracking, and more.

The great thing is that it’s online, and everyone in the team, and you can also include your external stakeholder, can track their tasks and progress in real-time.

For this reason, it’s ideal also for project management in the construction industry.

Asana’s key features

• Task management has the flexibility and functionality to help you finish the work. Its functionality also allows you to improve how things are done constantly.
• Time-line features – allows you to break your project into clear stages, break it down into tasks, assign tasks to your team members, and have a clear and visual overview of your project schedule, which is very much identical to a Gantt chart that you can also convert over to a tasks management dashboard where you have tasks and stages such as planned, WIP and completed.
• You can use the industry-specific templates, making it easy to get started and improve how you and your teamwork. The reports include punch list reports, project management templates, project tracking templates, and so forth.
• Options for customizing. The custom field, apps ready to integrate into the app store, switching to a more advanced feature set, etc., means you can constantly optimize your processes and get more value out of the tool.

How much does Asana cost?

• The free Asana personal package allows you to collaborate with up to 10 teammates, unlimited tasks, projects, and messages.
• Starter – starting at $10.99 per month/user with features such as timeline view, Gantt chart, workflow Builder, project dashboards, start dates and times, custom project templates, and more
• Advanced – starting at $24.99. The tools include goals, 20 Portfolios, workload management, approvals, advanced reporting, time tracking, and more

#3 Scoro

Scoro is an end-to-end work management system that allows you to manage the whole project lifecycle in one platform.

Some teams use tools like Spreadsheets, Asana, Float, Harvest, Procore, Pipedrive, and Trello. Scoro users enjoy having just one system that allows them to use one system. All their essential information is accessible by a click, and there is no need to navigate between different systems.

Scoro’s key features

• Project management: You can manage projects from quote to cash in one system, with all the critical information accessible to all team members.
• Quoting and budgeting—This is one place to create quotes, track the progress of winning quotes, and monitor the budget. You have an overview of your project’s profitability at a glance.
• Invoicing automation—You can automate fixed-fee invoicing, bill time, and material projects, as well as manage retainer invoices and forecast billing. You can also speed up payment collection, track financial reports, issue customized invoices, and more.
• Time tracking – track your team productivity and workload, use time-billing, 
• Purchase orders and vendor and subcontractor agreements. Have a clear overview of your commitments and payment summaries to prevent overbilling.
• Team scheduling and time-tracking. 

What you’ll love about Scoro:

• It syncs with your favorite finance tools such as Sage, Xero, and Quickbooks. Exact and more
• In-depth knowledge of your projects, from budgeting and quotes to forecasting and team scheduling.
• The whole team works in one place: the site managers, administrative team, project managers, accountants, and managers.
• One place for team collaboration and one source of insights for the entire team with comments and discussions under projects, tasks, etc.

Scoro’s pricing

• Essential: $26 per user/month
• Standard $37 per user/month
• Pro $63 per user/month
• Ultimate Custom

#4 Trello

Trello is a simple team project management system that helps you implement the widely popular Kanban project management methodology for your construction business and have a clear and visual pipeline of your project’s performance.

Trello can share access to all team members so everyone can access their boards, projects, cards, tasks, and to-do lists via desktop or mobile app.

Trello has room for endless customization and personalization. You can implement a simple task management process for personal tasks or a comprehensive board for the whole team to track task progress and responsibilities, deadlines, checklists, priority cards, roles, integrations, and more.

Trello’s key features

• Boards can be understood as a dashboard for a project or to-do list. You can share the boards with your internal and external stakeholders.
• Lists that you can identify as project stages. You can have lists like Planned for the month, Planned for the week, Work in Progres, Completed, etc. 
• Cards are the tasks or subprojects you can drag from one list to another. Dragging the cards mimics dragging sticker notes on the wall from one stage to another. So once you have completed, let’s say, contract negotiations, you can drag the task to “Completed.” So, you’ll list your tasks as cards on the left and process them to the right when they are completed.
• Card features include Members, Checklists, Notes, Attachments, Comments, Dates, Custom fields, etc.
• A mobile app that allows you to track your tasks, take notes, add attachments or photos to your cards, comment on WIP, and more.

Trello’s pricing:

• FREE Free for your whole team
• STANDARD $5 For small teams that need to manage work and scale collaboration
• PREMIUM $10 For teams that need to track and visualize multiple projects in several ways, including boards, timelines, calendars, etc.
• ENTERPRISE $17.50 For organizations that need to connect work across teams with more security and controls.

#5 Slack

Slack is a widely popular team communication tool across industries and various teams.

Slack is flexible enough to keep the team, subcontractors, and even clients’ communication organized and accessible, and it uses innovative ways to ensure the message is received.

The communication tool provides a whole new level of organization for team communication through calls, mobile chat, online calls, or Huddle, as Slack calls it, and desktop chat. It has various customization options, so the message follows through to your smartwatch, mobile notifications, and more.

Slack’s key features:

• Workspaces allow you to create stakeholder groups and organize all relevant communication in one place. For example, you may have a workspace for office communication and another to manage all your currency ongoing project internal and external stakeholders‘ communications in one place.
• Use the channels within the workspace to break the communication on relevant topics. One could organize all foundation works-related communication, the other regarding urgent issues. There are various options for making channels public so everyone within the workspace can see it, or instead private.
• Slack messages allow you to communicate via traditional text chats or add images or photos to your message,  add emojis,  record video clips, or take pictures, which makes the app ideal for daily site team progress reporting.
• Slacks‘ powerful apps, such as Zoom integration, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, and more, allow you to optimize your operations further.
• Communication is stored and easy to find. The threads and communication are organized in one place, and a Slack search allows you to find relevant communication from past projects to team meetings quickly.

Slack’s pricing:

• Free The quickest and easiest way to try Slack
• Pro $7.25 For small teams that need to manage work and scale collaboration
• Business + $12.50 For teams that need to track and visualize multiple projects in several ways, including boards, timelines, calendars, etc, to stay in sync.
• Enterprise Grid: You need to contact sales for pricing. The productivity platform for enterprises: tools to standardize, automate, and measure large-scale cross-functional work in a secure environment

#6 Google Workspace

Google Workspace is a toolset for business streamlining and collaboration. It consists of widely popular and interlinked tools that stand out with their user-friendly features.

The Google Workspace tools include Gmail, Google, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more.

The toolset provides a whole new level of organization of workdays. Such as quick and easy calendar event booking, invites sending, meeting links, and email notifications that work on mobile and desktop. You can negotiate contracts and track budgets and dashboards with version history online, with everyone having real-time access to the latest version of the documents.

The best thing is that if you use Google Chrome to browse the internet, you can navigate between the tools without going back and forth between logins and logouts.  

Google Wokspace’s key features:

• Gmail is a simple and intuitive tool for organizing e-mail communications. It has a mobile app and browser access. The best thing is that it interlinks with the Calendar and Meet.
• Google Drive provides a cloud-based option to store your documents. The system works in well-known folders, which users with access rights can access via the web browser or mobile devices.
• Google Calendar helps you seamlessly track and organize your calendar. So you can, in a couple of clicks, send a new meet invite via mobile or track your calendar via a web browser. The best part is that you can integrate your calendar with your team calendars or, instead, with widely popular modern software tools, such as Pipedrive, Slack, Trello, etc.
• Google Meet allows you to run your online meetings efficiently. Everyone can join the meeting with multiple participants. There are all familiar screen-sharing options, meeting recording, and so forth. The best part is that it interlinks with the calendar, so when sending a calendar invite, you can add the meeting link to it with one click without having to log in to another system.
• Docs and Sheets are well-known files we use daily, but they are now available online through Google Workspaces. With Docs, you can quickly negotiate the contracts online with all the stakeholders, having access to all the versions and history. With Docs, you may share an online spreadsheet dashboard with your team.

Google Workspace’s pricing:

• Business Starter: USD 6 per user/month
• Business Standard: $12 per user/month
• Business Plus: $18 per user/month
• Enterprise, but you’ll have to contact the sales for pricing

#7 HubSpot

Every entrepreneur knows the importance of maintaining client relationships, closing deals, and winning projects. HubSpot’s industry-leading and robust sales, marketing, and service software helps you elevate these processes.

HubSpot offers a free CRM (customer relationship management) plan for those who want to simplify their sales process. The plan works across different feature sets, such as mobile, desktop, calendar, scheduling web meetings, and email apps. 

You’ll have a simple overview of your sales tasks, such as when and whom you need to follow up and how your deals are progressing through the sales pipeline via the clear and visual sales pipeline.

As your team grows and the contracts base grows, you can utilize marketing products such as customizable forms for registering new contacts and sending newsletters.

HubSpot’s key features include:

• HubSpot CRM provides an interlinked system to organize and track sales deals, tasks, contracts, and more when and where needed. You can use the mobile while on the go or instead follow your sales via the web application while at the office. All the tools are interlinked, meaning that with just a couple of clicks while on the site, you can create a new deal, send a calendar invite with the meeting link, and have the meeting on your calendar.
• The marketing system allows you to automate marketing communication. This is where you store your marketing contacts lists, send newsletters, and follow up with marketing contracts. There are several ways to automate the contracts management in the database so that whenever someone sends an email, they are automatically included in your marketing contacts list.
• The HubSpot visual deals pipeline helps the whole team track the sales process on a simple dashboard that works according to the familiar Kanban methodology. This enables you to answer questions such as whether we are working on enough new prospects‘ jobs, following up on our offers sent, how much money is stuck at each sales stage, and whether we know the probability of winning the offers. We can also analyze the financial number of projects we will likely win.

HubSpot’s pricing:

• Started CRM is free
• Various pricing options and tools are available to upgrade your customer relationships management process.