Raken is a good product with a clear idea of the job: give field teams a fast, structured daily report on their phone, and send a branded PDF to the office every evening. It is one of the most polished daily reporting apps in the category, it publishes its pricing, and in the United States it is close to the default answer for construction daily reports.
The honest question is not which product is better in the abstract. It is whether your team will open an app and complete a form every single day, for the whole job, including the days when it rains and the ones when everything goes wrong. Raken depends on that happening. If it happens on your sites, Raken does the job well.
Construction Metric starts from the assumption that it will not happen reliably, because on most UK SME sites it does not. The team is already sending messages, photos and voice notes to a WhatsApp group all day. So we take that stream as the input and write the daily site diary from it, in the evening, without anyone being asked to fill anything in.
What Raken is best at
Polished daily reports: field staff fill structured dailies on their phones and branded PDFs go out automatically.
Choose Raken if
Your field teams will reliably fill in a daily report app and US-style dailies are the deliverable.
Choose Construction Metric if
Your dailies should write themselves from what the team already said, with the original evidence attached to every line.
Side by side
Raken
Construction Metric
What the team does
Opens the app and completes a daily report
Nothing new: keeps using the site WhatsApp group
Where the content comes from
Typed by the person filling the form
Messages, photos, voice notes and emails already sent
If nobody fills it in
No daily report that day
The diary is still written from the day’s traffic
Voice notes
Not the primary input
Transcribed and used as diary content
Meetings
Not covered
Recorded and transcribed on the Record tier
Pricing model
Published, per user
Published, per site with unlimited users
Primary market
United States field teams
UK contractors, JCT and NEC aware
Contract awareness
Daily reporting focus
JCT and NEC notice context on the Contract tier
Every line is taken from each vendor’s own public materials, checked July 2026. If Raken ships something that changes a line here, tell us and we will correct it.
Common questions
Is Construction Metric a Raken alternative?
It solves the same underlying problem, the daily record, by a different route. Raken gives your team a better form to fill in. Construction Metric removes the form and builds the diary from what the team already sends to WhatsApp. If your crews reliably complete dailies, Raken is a strong choice. If your dailies are patchy, or written up days later from memory, the passive approach is likely to produce a more complete record.
Which is better for UK contractors?
Raken was built around United States field reporting practice. Construction Metric is built for UK delivery: JCT and NEC vocabulary, Building Safety Act golden thread evidence, and the reality that the UK site conversation happens in WhatsApp. That is a fit question rather than a quality judgement.
Can I use both?
Yes. Some teams keep a structured daily report app for a client who requires that specific format, and run passive capture underneath it so nothing said in the group is lost. Construction Metric exports everything, so it does not trap your record.
Try it on one live job
The quickest way to settle a comparison is to run it on a real site. Thirty days free, no card: 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.
