Managing construction projects without the right software feels like building a skyscraper with a toolbox missing half the tools. That’s where platforms like Buildertrend and Procore that aim to improve efficiency, communication, and project visibility in the construction industry come into play.
While both are industry leaders, many professionals struggle to choose between the two. In this blog, we’ll explore the distinct features and benefits of Buildertrend and Procore, while also addressing the perspective that they may not fully cater to the unique challenges faced by local or specialized construction teams.
We’ll introduce ClickUp, a solution designed to meet the everyday demands of your projects. Discover why ClickUp could be the solid foundation your construction efforts need. 🚀
Buildertrend vs Procore: Which Construction Management Tool is Better?
What Is Buildertrend?
Buildertrend is a cloud-based construction management software tailored for residential, remodelers, and specialty contractors. Its primary purpose is simplifying complex workflows and improving communication across teams, clients, and subcontractors.
Fundamentally, the platform consolidates construction project management, financial tracking, and client relationship tools into a single platform.
One of Buildertrend’s standout features is its scheduling tool, which allows contractors to create accurate timelines, make adjustments, and ensure no jobs overlap. Financial tracking tools provide detailed insights into budgets and expenses, helping businesses make informed decisions and protect profit margins.
Buildertrend features
Buildertrend provides tools that simplify construction management, from project planning to financial tracking and client communication. Let’s look at its features and how they can help you stay organized, save time, and deliver:
1. Project management tools
Buildertrend’s project management features empower you to manage every detail of your projects in one place. Tools like scheduling allow you to plan and adjust accurate timelines in real time, while daily logs keep you informed about progress and on-site conditions.
Buildertrend also connects your team, clients, and subcontractors through its communication management features. The platform offers a centralized chat tool for instant messaging, a customer portal for real-time project updates, and file storage to keep all documents organized and accessible.
With Buildertrend’s construction project management software, project managers can:
- Create daily logs to track project updates, weather conditions, and photos
- Use electronic signatures to simplify approvals for change orders
- Manage warranties efficiently, giving your clients peace of mind after project completion
- Keep clients updated with a personalized dashboard where they view progress, send messages, and sign contracts electronically
🔎 Did You Know? The construction software market will reach $21.04 billion by 2032. This reflects contractors’ and construction firms’ rapid adoption of digital tools to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance project outcomes. 📈
2. Financial management
Buildertrend provides financial tools to manage budgets and cash flow. From creating detailed estimates to managing bids and purchase orders, the platform ensures that every financial aspect of your projects is handled accurately. Tools like takeoff simplify material calculations, while online payment options speed up transactions.
The budget tracking system compares estimated and actual costs, giving you complete visibility into your financial project performance. With Buildertrend’s financial management tools:
- Streamline your bidding process by creating, sending, and tracking bid requests
- Build professional estimates using pre-built construction budget templates and cost catalogs
- Generate accurate material needs and costs with takeoff tools
- Compare budgets with real-time actual costs to make informed decisions and improve profitability
💡 Pro Tip: Adopt cloud-based tools to reduce operational costs and improve collaboration. By moving to cloud solutions, teams eliminate the need for expensive servers and access project information from anywhere, ensuring project transparency. 🛠️
3. Materials/resource management
Buildertrend’s materials management tools streamline purchasing and provide access to exclusive discounts and rebates from leading brands. The platform enables builders to manage all material costs in one place, helping to expand profit margins and improve purchasing decisions.
Suppliers benefit from visibility to thousands of contractors, creating a direct connection with potential customers. By leveraging Buildertrend’s tools, you improve construction efficiency, manage material costs, and secure better deals to support your projects.
- Access exclusive discounts and rebates through established brand partnerships
- Centralize materials purchasing to save time and reduce manual tracking
- Gain accurate, real-time data on material costs to make smarter purchasing decisions
- Promote your brand and sell products to a vast network of builders and contractors
Buildertrend pricing
- Essential: $499/month
- Advanced: $799/month
- Complete: $1099/month
➡️ Read More: How to Find and Retain Clients for Construction Business
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Procore?
Procore is an all-in-one construction management platform designed to improve efficiency, collaboration, and decision-making across every stage of construction projects.
Built to handle the complexities of civil and infrastructure projects, Procore combines tools for project planning, financial tracking, quality management, and communication into a unified platform.
Procore serves a variety of industries, including heavy civil, transportation, utilities, aviation, and marine construction. Offering real-time data, automation, and seamless communication empowers contractors to stay on schedule, reduce risks, and deliver high-quality results while protecting profit margins.
Procore features
Procore offers a comprehensive suite of tools catering to every construction lifecycle stage. From pre-construction planning to project execution and financial tracking, let’s look at Procore’s features:
1. Project management software
Procore simplifies project execution by centralizing all activities, documents, and communication. Its tools help you manage budgets, enforce quality and safety standards, and track real-time design updates.
Procore’s preconstruction tools unify planning, bidding, and estimating into a single solution, enabling precision and efficiency in project preparation. Integrating bid management, quantity takeoffs, and estimating tools reduces manual workflows and simplifies the transition from planning to execution.
The platform provides field teams with access to up-to-date drawings and BIM models, ensuring accurate coordination and minimizing rework:
- Monitor budgets and financial health in real-time
- Enforce consistent quality and safety processes across all projects
- Connect field teams to the latest design documents and BIM models
- Create and manage bid packages, compare proposals, and convert bids into subcontracts seamlessly
- Perform accurate takeoffs and estimates to improve bidding speed and accuracy
2. Financial management
The financial management solution from Procore ensures transparency and control over project costs. Integrating estimating, budgeting, and invoicing with real-time field data provides accurate insights into financial performance.
Tools like invoice management and cost forecasting enable you to document changes, track expenses, and protect profit margins in the construction business. With Procore’s financial management tools:
- Track budgets and costs in real time to avoid financial surprises
- Integrate project management software with your accounting system for seamless workflows
- Streamline payment processes with automated invoice tracking and compliance checklists
- Generate comprehensive financial reports to support strategic decision-making
🧠 Fun Fact: A 2023 report from McKinsey estimated that Gen AI and other AI tools will unlock value of up to $18 billion for home builders, equivalent to almost 10% of construction industry revenues.
3. Resource management
Procore’s resource management tools optimize workforce and equipment allocation, ensuring your projects remain efficient and profitable. The platform centralizes scheduling and provides insights into workforce availability, skill sets, and proximity to job sites.
It helps you track productivity and equipment usage in real time, making it easier to manage resources effectively. With Procore’s resource management tools:
- Assign the right people to the right tasks based on skills and location
- Track labor and equipment productivity to stay on schedule and budget
- Forecast resource needs to improve planning and prevent shortages
- Centralize communication and scheduling for seamless team collaboration
Procore pricing
- Custom pricing
💡 Pro Tip: Procore’s extensive features suit large-scale projects, but its high cost and difficult learning curve may sometimes overwhelm smaller teams. That’s why exploring Procore alternatives is essential for finding a more affordable, flexible, and user-friendly solution.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuildertrend vs. Procore: Features Compared
When evaluating Buildertrend and Procore, the decision comes down to your construction projects’ specific needs and scale. Let’s compare their key features and explore which tool is better suited for different scenarios.
Feature #1: Project execution and management
Buildertrend works best for residential contractors and smaller teams, offering simple tools like real-time scheduling and daily logs. Moreover, it is strong in client communication and ideal for customer-facing projects.
Procore excels at managing large-scale, complex projects in heavy civil and utilities industries. Its advanced features, including BIM integration and real-time collaboration, effectively handle intricate workflows.
🏆 Winner: While Buildertrend suits smaller-scale operations, Procore wins out for large, multifaceted projects.
Feature #2: Financial management
Buildertrend’s straightforward interface is great for managing budgets, bids, and payments for small to mid-sized businesses. Features like takeoff and online payments boost efficiency.
Procore excels with advanced cost tracking, real-time field data integration, and robust forecasting, making it ideal for larger projects with complex financial needs.
🏆 Winner: Procore for sophisticated financial management; Buildertrend for simpler, cost-saving operations.
Feature #3: Resource and materials management
Buildertrend simplifies materials management for small and medium contractors, offering exclusive rebates and efficient supplier management.
Procore offers a broader suite of tools, including workforce and equipment tracking, ensuring real-time resource optimization for large-scale projects.
🏆 Winner: Procore is great for comprehensive resource management, while Buildertrend is suitable for cost-focused material tracking.
📚 Also Read: Learn how a robust construction CRM helps you manage clients, leads, and projects smoothly and efficiently.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuildertrend vs. Procore on Reddit
We took to Reddit to see where users land on Buildertrend vs. Procore. In various subreddits and comment threads, many users highlighted how suitability varies based on project type and size.
Most Redditors agree that Buildertrend is better suited for small-scale projects, with u/mariaclaraa1 saying:
For larger, complex commercial projects, Procore is the preferred choice due to its advanced capabilities. However, some users caution against Procore’s pricing model for smaller-scale projects. Reddit user u/hello_world45 says:
Summarize this article for me pleaseMeet ClickUp — The Best Alternative to Buildertrend vs. Procore
ClickUp is the everything app for work designed to centralize and simplify construction project management. With tools for task management, time tracking, collaboration, reporting, and strong data security, ClickUp helps construction teams capture data and plan, execute, and deliver projects efficiently.
Whether managing timelines, tracking budgets, or collaborating on designs, ClickUp brings every project phase into a unified platform to ensure teams stay aligned and projects remain on schedule and within budget.
ClickUp’s one-up #1: Comprehensive construction management
The ClickUp Construction Project Management Software helps manage every aspect of a construction project, from scheduling tasks to monitoring contractor performance. The platform’s flexibility allows teams to switch between multiple views, like Gantt charts and Kanban boards, to visualize and adjust workflows effortlessly.
Built-in automation removes repetitive manual tasks, letting teams focus on delivering quality work while meeting deadlines. With ClickUp, you can:
- Manage schedules, tasks, and resources with 15+ customizable views, including Calendar, List, and Timeline
- Assign tasks, set dependencies, and monitor progress in real-time
- Automate repetitive workflows, such as task assignments and approvals
- Track time for teams with detailed reports on resource allocation and billable hours
🎁 Bonus: Optimize your bidding process with ClickUp’s construction bid templates. Create professional proposals, track approvals, and win projects faster—all in one place!
ClickUp’s one-up #2: Ready-to-use construction templates
ClickUp offers pre-built templates for construction management, making it easy to streamline your process from pre-sales to project completion. The ClickUp Construction Template allows you to manage schedules, align resources, and track progress with minimal setup. Customizable views and fields allow teams to adapt templates to any project’s needs.
- Plan construction timelines by using Gantt Charts and Calendar in ClickUp
- Organize workflows with Lists and drag-and-drop Kanban Boards
- Track budgets, milestones, and goals with ClickUp Custom Fields
- Collaborate on build specifications with Docs, featuring rich formatting and real-time updates
🎁 Bonus: No one wants to struggle with avoidable extra work. That’s why many construction professionals are turning to ClickUp’s ready-to-use construction management templates. These templates simplify project planning, track milestones, and keep your team organized—all in one place!
ClickUp’s one-up #3: Dashboards, insights, and custom views
ClickUp Dashboards offer a customizable, high-level view of your project’s progress. These dashboards enable teams to track resource utilization, monitor task completion, and visualize project data using charts and graphs.
AI-powered insights answer complex questions instantly, helping teams identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency.
Besides, ClickUp Views lets you customize how you visualize and manage your workflows. Its 15+ views, like Timeline, Map, and Box, make it easy to adapt to the needs of your project or team. With these features:
- Monitor team workloads to prevent burnout or underutilization
- Track time and billable hours with ClickUp’s Time Tracking features
- Use client portals for real-time updates and collaboration with stakeholders
- Brainstorm ideas and outline processes visually using ClickUp Mind Maps
- Map view for managing location-based workflows, like job sites and deliveries
Here’s what Giuliano Peressini, CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at construction company Casagrande, had to say about using ClickUp:
Pro Tip: Track labor and equipment productivity to avoid overspending. Real-time monitoring of workforce and equipment usage ensures teams remain on schedule and within budget, improving overall efficiency. ⏱️
ClickUp’s one-up #4: Project management and collaboration features
ClickUp revolutionizes collaboration with features that bring teams together, whether in the office or on-site. ClickUp Docs allows seamless communication and documentation, from project proposals to daily logs.
On the other hand, the AI-powered ClickUp Brain enhances workflows by generating subtasks, summarizing comment threads, and offering actionable insights, helping teams work smarter and faster.
- Collaborate on project documentation with real-time editing in Docs
- Turn ideas into actionable tasks directly from ClickUp Whiteboards
- Use built-in chat to tag team members, share updates, and link tasks
- Generate project summaries, subtasks, and status updates
📚 Also Read: Learn how AI is revolutionizing construction workflows and boosting project efficiency.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuild Smarter, Not Harder with ClickUp
Choosing the right construction management software isn’t just about features—it’s about finding a tool that adapts to your unique workflows. Buildertrend excels at simplifying residential and remodeler needs, while Procore dominates large-scale, complex projects. But what if there were a solution offering the perfect balance of simplicity and power for all project types?
Enter ClickUp: the everything app for work that redefines construction management. With tools for scheduling, financial tracking, and collaboration, it transforms how teams plan, communicate, and execute projects. Plus, features like customizable templates, Dashboards, and AI-powered insights ensure efficiency at every stage.
Start managing construction smarter by getting started with ClickUp today and experience a better way to build. 🚀
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
