A focused UK site diary app: custom forms, photos, time-stamped entries.
Site Diary does the obvious thing well. It is a dedicated diary app with a strong custom form builder, ready-made templates, time-stamped entries, photo capture and exportable reports, and it has built a large UK base doing exactly that. If what you want is a good diary form on a phone, this is a sensible, focused choice with no enterprise baggage attached.
Everything then rests on one assumption, and it is the same assumption every diary app makes: that somebody opens it and completes an entry, every day, for the length of the job. On the good days that happens. The problem is that the days when the record matters most are the bad ones, and those are precisely the days when nobody has ten minutes at 5pm to fill in a form.
That is the gap Construction Metric was built for. Your team is already reporting the day, in real time, with photos and voice notes, in the site WhatsApp group. We take that stream and write the diary from it in the evening. There is no form, no app for the crew to open, and no dependency on anyone remembering.
The trade is real and worth stating: a form gives you exactly the fields you designed, and Site Diary gives you good control over those fields. A passive record gives you what actually got said. We think the second is worth more when the record is challenged, but if you need a specific client-mandated form layout, say so and we will tell you honestly whether we fit.
What Site Diary is best at
Doing one job and doing it directly: a flexible custom form builder with ready-made templates, time-stamped entries with photos, and exportable diary reports, used by a large base of UK contractors and trades.
Choose Site Diary if
You want a straightforward diary app your team will fill in, and form flexibility matters more to you than capture.
Choose Construction Metric if
The diary keeps not getting filled in, and you would rather it wrote itself from the group chat the team already uses.
Side by side
Site Diary
Construction Metric
What the team does
Opens the app and completes a diary entry
Nothing new: keeps using the site WhatsApp group
If nobody fills it in
No diary entry that day
The diary is still written from the day’s traffic
Custom form fields
Strong: a core feature
Fixed diary structure, evidence attached per line
Voice notes
Not the primary input
Transcribed and used as diary content
Meetings
Not covered
Recorded and transcribed on the Record tier
Contract awareness
General diary use
JCT and NEC notice context on the Contract tier
Building Safety Act golden thread
Not published
Built for it
Pricing model
Per user
Per site, unlimited users, from £199
Every line is taken from each vendor’s own public materials, checked August 2026. If Site Diary ships something that changes a line here, tell us and we will correct it.
Common questions
Why would I pay more than a simple diary app?
Only if the completion problem is real for you. If your diaries genuinely get filled in every day, a focused app like Site Diary is good value and you should use it. Most contractors who talk to us have a folder of diaries that are patchy, written up on Friday from memory, or stop entirely three months into the job. A cheap record with holes in it is worth nothing at adjudication, which is where the comparison actually gets settled.
Can I still have custom fields?
Not to the degree Site Diary offers, and that is a genuine advantage of theirs. Our diary has a fixed structure with the original evidence attached to each line, because the output has to be consistent enough to hold up as a contemporaneous record. If a client mandates a specific form layout, tell us before you buy and we will give you a straight answer.
Do we have to stop using our current app?
No. Some teams keep a diary app for a client who requires that exact format and run passive capture underneath so nothing said in the group is lost. We export everything, so we never trap your record.
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.
