Short-term planning for major infrastructure, with a diary attached to the plan.
Aphex is a genuinely good planning product. Lookaheads, weekly work plans, resource planning and staging diagrams sit on one connected plan, updates flow across it automatically, and it has earned its place on serious infrastructure programmes: rail, metro, energy, nuclear. If your planners currently live in a spreadsheet, Aphex is a large upgrade and we would not argue against it.
It also carries a daily diary, which is where people start comparing it to us. The important detail is what that diary is anchored to. In Aphex the record is captured against planned work: here is the activity, here is what happened to it. That is exactly right if your question is how delivery is tracking against the plan.
It is the wrong shape if your question is what happened today. The events that cost contractors money are almost never on the lookahead: the verbal instruction at the gate, the late delivery, the design query nobody raised formally, the two hours lost to another trade. Those have no planned activity to attach to, so a plan-anchored diary has nowhere to put them.
Construction Metric records the day as the day actually went, from the WhatsApp traffic the team is already generating, whether or not any of it appeared on a programme. The two are complementary: Aphex for how the plan is going, us for what really happened underneath it.
What Aphex is best at
Short-interval planning done properly: lookaheads, weekly work plans, resource planning and staging diagrams all drawing on one connected plan, with real credibility on rail, metro, energy and nuclear programmes.
Choose Aphex if
Short-term planning is the problem you are solving, and you want daily records tied directly to the planned activity they belong to.
Choose Construction Metric if
You need what actually happened, including everything that was never on any plan, which is usually where the delay and the money live.
Side by side
Aphex
Construction Metric
Core strength
Short-interval planning and lookaheads
The complete daily record, captured passively
What the diary is anchored to
Planned activities
The day itself, planned or not
Unplanned events
No planned activity to attach them to
Captured the same as everything else
How an entry is created
Someone records against the plan
Automatically, from what the team already sent
WhatsApp capture
Not published
The primary capture route
Meetings
Daily huddles and briefings in-app
Recorded and transcribed, with speakers told apart
Typical customer
Major infrastructure programmes
UK SME and mid-size contractors
Pricing model
Per user, free trial available
Per site, unlimited users, from £199
Every line is taken from each vendor’s own public materials, checked August 2026. If Aphex ships something that changes a line here, tell us and we will correct it.
Common questions
Does Construction Metric replace Aphex?
No. We do not do short-interval planning and we are not trying to. If you need lookaheads, weekly work plans and staging diagrams, you need a planning tool, and Aphex is one of the better ones. We sit underneath whatever plan you run and keep the record of what actually occurred.
Can I run both?
Yes, and on an infrastructure job that is the sensible arrangement: Aphex for the plan and the weekly cycle, Construction Metric for the daily record, the meetings and the conversation. Because we price per site rather than per user, adding the record layer does not scale with how many planners and engineers you have.
We are a small contractor. Is Aphex overkill?
Possibly, and that is a fair thing to work out before you compare features. Aphex is built around the planning discipline of major programmes, which assumes you have planners. Many SME contractors do not, and for them the binding problem is usually the record rather than the plan.
The quickest way to settle a comparison is to run it on a real site. One month, setup fee only: give us a site name and a mobile number and the first diary lands the same evening. Read a sample diary first if you want to see the output before you start.
