Review
Construction Daily Log Apps Compared 2026: BuildBook vs Fieldwire vs Buildertrend
A 2026 comparison of construction daily log apps: Fieldwire's $39/$64/$89 per user/month bands, BuildBook's $79/$149/$249 package pricing, and Buildertrend's quote-only model, plus which one survives a jobsite with no signal.
BuildBookFieldwireBuildertrend
A daily log is the least glamorous object in construction software and the one that decides whether you win the argument six months later. A photo of a cracked slab taken on the right date, a written note that the framing sub left at noon, an inspector’s sign-off attached to the right unit — that is what a change order or a delay claim is built from. Nothing else in your stack does that job.
So the question is not “which construction app has a daily log”. All three tools in this comparison have one. The question is which daily log actually gets filled in by a superintendent standing in the mud with one bar of signal, and what that costs per year at your headcount.
This comparison covers Fieldwire by Hilti, BuildBook, and Buildertrend, with verified 2026 pricing for the first two, and an explicit statement of what we could not verify for the third. For the wider field, see best PM software for construction, best PM software for home builders, and our single-product reviews of BuildBook and Fieldwire.
TL;DR
- Fieldwire publishes every tier: Basic $0 (5 users, 3 projects, 100 sheets), Pro $39 per user/month billed annually, Business $64, Business Plus $89. Daily-log-adjacent work — tasks with photos, plan viewing, checklists — starts on the free tier. Reports and exports start at Pro.
- BuildBook prices in packages, not seats: Solo $79/mo (annual; $99 monthly, one user), Team $149/mo (annual; $186 monthly, 2–9 users), Business from $249/mo (annual, 6–8 users in the annual band; $279/mo on the monthly band’s 10+ user package), and $20/month or $200/year per additional user past eight.
- Buildertrend does not publish prices. Its pricing page returned HTTP 403 to every request we made on 2026-10-31, and we are not going to guess a number for it. Treat Buildertrend as a quote-only purchase.
- At a 6-person field team, Fieldwire Business Plus costs $534/month and BuildBook Team costs $149/month. At a 20-person team, Fieldwire Pro costs $780/month and BuildBook Business plus 12 extra users totals $489/month. The two vendors are selling different things: per-seat field licences versus a company-wide package.
- Best for: residential remodellers and home builders who want a daily log plus client-facing updates → BuildBook. Commercial and specialty contractors whose daily log is really a plan-and-task record with punch items → Fieldwire at Pro or Business. Large builders who need estimating, selections and job costing under one roof and can absorb a sales process → Buildertrend.
- Skip all three if your only requirement is a timestamped photo note: a shared drive with a naming convention costs $0 and will be obeyed just as often.
What a construction daily log actually has to capture
Before comparing products, define the object. On a real jobsite a daily log is five things stitched together:
- Who was on site — subcontractors by trade, headcount, and hours, because that is the basis of both the pay application and any acceleration claim.
- What was done — narrative progress by location, ideally tied to a schedule activity.
- What was observed — weather, delays, inspections, safety events, and the photo evidence that makes each one provable.
- What was asked and answered — an RFI that got resolved verbally on site and never written down is the most common source of dispute.
- Who signed off — the owner’s rep, the inspector, or the client, on that date.
A tool that captures items 1–3 is a log. A tool that captures 1–5 is a record. The difference in price between those two outcomes is exactly what this comparison is about.
Fieldwire: priced per user, gated by tier
Fieldwire’s pricing page publishes four named plans with exact prices and an explicit feature comparison matrix underneath them. Here is what it says.
| Plan | Price | Users | Projects | Sheets | What unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 per user/month | 5 | 3 | 100 | Plan viewing, task management, specifications, files and photos, checklists |
| Pro | $39 per user/month billed annually | Pay per user | Unlimited | Unlimited | All Basic plus reports and exports, sheet compare, project templates, custom task statuses |
| Business | $64 per user/month billed annually | Pay per user | Unlimited | Unlimited | All Pro plus custom forms, app integrations, BIM viewer, custom task fields |
| Business Plus | $89 per user/month billed annually | Pay per user | Unlimited | Unlimited | All Business plus RFIs, Submittals, Change Orders, Budget |
| Custom contracts | Contact sales | Unlimited options | — | — | Tailored training, dedicated success team, API access, SSO |
Two things stand out for anyone buying a daily log.
The free tier is a real tier, not a demo. Five users, three projects, 100 sheets, and checklists are included. A small specialty contractor running two jobs can log daily work for $0 per month and mean it. The cap you will hit first is projects, at three — not users, not features.
The expensive features are the ones that turn a log into a record. Reports and exports are the Pro gate at $39 per user/month. RFIs, submittals, change orders and budget are the Business Plus gate at $89. If your intent for the daily log is to feed change orders and pay applications, you are not buying the $39 tier — you are buying the $89 tier, and the free tier is a demo of the shape of the product rather than a viable end state.
Verified against Fieldwire’s official pricing page on 2026-10-31. Note that Fieldwire’s page defaults to annual billing; the per-seat figures above are the annual rates displayed.
Cost at real headcounts
| Field team size | Basic | Pro | Business | Business Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $0 | $195/mo | $320/mo | $445/mo |
| 6 | — (5-user cap) | $234/mo | $384/mo | $534/mo |
| 10 | — | $390/mo | $640/mo | $890/mo |
| 20 | — | $780/mo | $1,280/mo | $1,780/mo |
The 6-user row is the one to stare at. Crossing from five users to six on Business Plus costs $534/month, or $6,408 per year, for a tool whose free tier does the same core job for a crew of five. That is not a criticism of Fieldwire — per-seat pricing is honest about what it is — it is a reminder that the headcount boundary matters more than the tier boundary when you are sizing this purchase.
BuildBook: priced in packages, not seats
BuildBook inverts the model. You buy a package sized to a user range, and the price barely moves when you move up.
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | Users included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo | $79/mo | $99/mo | 1 user |
| Team | $149/mo | $186/mo (annual band) / $179/mo (monthly band) | 2–9 users (annual) / 2–5 users (monthly) |
| Business | from $249/mo | from $299/mo | 6–8 users (annual) / 10+ users (monthly band) |
| Extra users | $20/mo or $200/yr each | — | Beyond 8 users, by arrangement |
Every tier includes unlimited projects, unlimited clients and subs, and — this is the vendor’s claim — every feature. There is no feature gate ladder; the only variable is how many people need a login. Past eight users the vendor asks you to book a call and charges $20 per user per month or $200 per user per year for each additional seat.
Verified against BuildBook’s official pricing page on 2026-10-31. The page shows two package bands that differ by billing cadence (the annual band lists Team at 2–9 users and Business at 6–8 users; the monthly band lists 2–5 and 10+). We reproduce both rather than merging them, because the discrepancy is on the vendor’s page, not ours.
What that costs against Fieldwire
| Team size | BuildBook | Fieldwire (nearest workable tier) |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Team $149/mo | Pro $195/mo |
| 6 | Team $149/mo | Business Plus $534/mo |
| 10 | Business + 2 extra users, $289/mo | Business $640/mo |
| 20 | Business + 12 extra users, $489/mo | Pro $780/mo |
The shape of the curve is the story. BuildBook flattens; Fieldwire compounds. At five people they are within $50 of each other. At twenty, BuildBook is $291/month cheaper, or about $3,500 a year, and the gap widens from there.
That does not make BuildBook the better tool. It means the two products are priced for different buying units: Fieldwire sells a licence to each person who touches a job, BuildBook sells a system to the company.
Buildertrend: the quote you cannot get from a web page
We attempted Buildertrend’s pricing page repeatedly on 2026-10-31 using a standard HTTP client and again with a current desktop browser string. Every request returned HTTP 403 Forbidden. Independent builders’ forums also report that Buildertrend moved to a sales-quoted model and that published list prices no longer exist.
We are therefore stating plainly: Buildertrend’s 2026 pricing is not publicly published, and this article does not contain a Buildertrend price. If a vendor does not publish a number, any figure a comparison site shows you for it is either stale or invented. Ask for a written quote covering: base plan, per-user rate, the annual discount, implementation fee, and the notice period on renewal.
What is publicly known is the product shape: Buildertrend bundles sales/CRM, estimating, project scheduling, daily logs, selections and allowances, financials and a client portal into one platform for residential builders. That breadth is why it competes on a different axis entirely — you are not buying a daily log, you are buying the system the daily log lives inside.
Where the daily log itself differs
Feature matrices do not answer the question a superintendent asks: “will I finish this entry before my gloves get muddy?”
Photo capture and annotation. Fieldwire’s core flow is plan-centric: you open a sheet, drop a task or a punch item on a location, attach photos, and the record is anchored to a place on the drawing. For commercial work where the daily log has to reference sheet A-201, revision 3, that anchoring is the whole value. BuildBook’s flow is job-centric: photos attach to a phase or a task inside the job, and the same media flows into client updates. For a remodeller whose client wants to see progress, that direction is more useful than drawing coordinates.
Offline behaviour. Basements, tilt-up shells and new-construction lots are where the log gets written, and they are where signal dies. Every vendor in this category claims offline support. What differs is what works offline: Fieldwire’s plan viewing and task capture are designed around cached sheets, which is the harder engineering problem and the one that matters on a 20-sheet commercial set. BuildBook’s offline story is narrower. Test this on your worst jobsite during the trial, not on office Wi-Fi — it is the single field test most likely to change your decision.
Who the log is for. Here the tools genuinely diverge, and it is not a features question. Fieldwire’s record is for the project team and, secondarily, the owner — it is evidence. BuildBook’s record is deliberately readable by a homeowner: the client sees progress photos, schedule status and selections. If your daily log has a client-facing audience, that is a product difference no comparison table will show you.
Real users on the parts nobody prices
Community evidence for construction software is thin, and we would rather say so than dress up a vendor testimonial as a user complaint. Two things we could verify honestly:
Construction teams do run their project management in general-purpose tools, and they report what breaks. A long-running Asana Community thread, “About the use of Asana in architecture, construction, and civil engineering”, collects cases from AEC firms using Asana. One reply from a consultant with a 20-year architecture background describes what he replaced: “the chaos of working with just email, WhatsApp … and dozens of elaborate excel sheets that were static and disconnected from our work.” That is the real baseline a daily log app competes against — not another app, but WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. It is also the honest test for any of these three tools: if adoption requires a training session and a champion, your crew will keep using WhatsApp.
Subtask-level capture is where general tools quietly fail. In “How do we pull Actual Time data for each Parent Task, for weekly labor reports?”, a cabinetry firm explains that designers clock in and out on sub-subtasks and needs weekly payroll totals per job; the answer offered in the thread is that reporting at that level needs third-party automation or the API. Translate that to a daily log: the moment your record lives below the top-level object, native reporting stops working. Fieldwire’s Pro tier gates reports and exports at $39 for exactly this reason, and it is the feature that decides whether a log is auditable.
Neither thread is about BuildBook, Fieldwire or Buildertrend. We are not claiming these are their failures — only that the failure modes are structural to construction workflows generally, and worth verifying against your own process before you commit twelve months of licences.
Who should buy which
A residential remodeller with 3–8 field staff and homeowner clients → BuildBook. At $149/month for up to nine users, the annual cost is $1,788, the client-facing updates come for free, and you are not paying per superintendent. The whole package costs less than four Fieldwire Business Plus seats.
A specialty or commercial contractor whose log must reference drawings → Fieldwire, and budget for Pro or Business Plus. At six users, Business Plus is $534/month. If you genuinely need RFIs and change orders in the same system as the field record, that is the price of the record being complete — and it is cheaper than losing one change-order dispute a year. If you only need the log and the photos, the $0 Basic tier covers three projects and five users, which is a legitimate way to run two concurrent jobs without a subscription.
A production home builder running 20+ houses a year with estimating and selections in the mix → Buildertrend, on a written quote, after you have compared it against BuildBook’s Business tier at $249/month plus $20 per extra user. Get both numbers in writing on the same day and compare them as annual totals, not monthly rates.
Do not buy any of them for a one-crew operation with one project. A phone camera, a shared folder and a daily email will outperform a half-configured subscription, and it is what most one-crew outfits already do successfully.
How this content was prepared
This article is based on the vendors’ official pricing pages (linked above, verified on 2026-10-31), publicly available plan comparison documentation, community threads we read in full and link to, and our editorial analysis. It is not sponsored, and no vendor paid for or influenced the recommendations.
We do not claim to have independently tested every tool end-to-end. Where a verdict reflects operator judgment, it draws on public documentation and editorial analysis, not comparative hands-on trials. Buildertrend’s pricing is not published and this article contains no Buildertrend price; any figure you see elsewhere for that vendor should be treated as unverified. Pricing and feature details are dated in the metadata above — the published figures are the ones shown on each vendor’s pricing page on the linked verification date.