WhatsApp-based site communication and documentation, made in Germany.
Valoon is the one platform in this comparison that starts where we start. The crew keeps using WhatsApp, nobody installs anything, and the office gets a structured record out of the other end. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not going to claim the idea is ours alone: Valoon reached the same conclusion we did, and got there in its own market first.
What each of us built on top of that shared idea is where the two products separate. Valoon built operations: digital timesheets, job and deployment scheduling, a project server for plans, automatic translation across more than 50 languages, DATEV integration and German servers. It is a project management platform whose input happens to be WhatsApp, and for a German contractor with a multilingual workforce that is a strong combination.
Construction Metric built the contractual record. The same WhatsApp stream becomes a dated site diary written in the vocabulary of UK delivery: JCT and NEC notice context, Building Safety Act golden thread evidence, files named to ISO 19650 so they drop into a CDE. The question we are answering is not "what happened on site today" but "can you prove what happened on site eleven months ago, to an adjudicator".
So the honest split is geography and purpose rather than quality. If you are building in Germany, Valoon is likely the better fit and we would say so. If you are building in the UK and the record may one day have to defend a claim, that is the job we built for.
What Valoon is best at
The same core insight we built on, executed well for the German market: the crew never leaves WhatsApp, the office gets structure out of it, and WhatsApp users are free no matter how many there are. Automatic translation across 50-plus languages is genuinely strong for multilingual crews.
Choose Valoon if
You operate in Germany or the DACH region, you need German data residency and DATEV, or your crews work across many languages daily.
Choose Construction Metric if
You are delivering UK work and the record has to stand up contractually: JCT and NEC notices, Building Safety Act golden thread evidence, ISO 19650 naming.
No: we are the record layer, not a resourcing tool
Meetings
Speech-to-report AI
Recorded and transcribed, with speakers told apart
JCT and NEC awareness
Not published
Notice context on the Contract tier
Building Safety Act golden thread
Not published
Built for it
Accounting integration
DATEV, for the German market
Export first, UK stack
Pricing model
Tiered per user, with WhatsApp users free
Per site, unlimited users, from £199
Every line is taken from each vendor’s own public materials, checked August 2026. If Valoon ships something that changes a line here, tell us and we will correct it.
Common questions
Is WhatsApp site capture unique to Construction Metric?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. Valoon does it too, and does it well. For several years we could accurately say that no platform we had checked published WhatsApp capture; that stopped being true, so we changed the claim rather than leave it standing. What is still uncommon is turning that stream into a UK contractual record: a dated diary with the original message, photo or voice note attached to each line, written with JCT and NEC vocabulary and Building Safety Act evidence in mind.
Which should a UK contractor choose?
Ours, and we would expect a German contractor to reach the opposite conclusion about Valoon for the same reasons. The record only earns its money when it is read by someone who is not on your side: an adjudicator, a client quantity surveyor, a Building Safety Regulator gateway reviewer. That reader works in UK terms. A platform built around DATEV, German data residency and German documentation practice is built for a different reader.
Valoon makes WhatsApp users free. Is Construction Metric more expensive?
It depends entirely on your shape, and Valoon has a genuinely good model here. Their office seats are per user and their WhatsApp users are free, so a firm with a large crew and one or two office staff may well pay less with them. We charge per site with unlimited users of any kind, from £199 a month, so our cost tracks live jobs rather than headcount. Run both against your own numbers: a five-site contractor with a big office team usually lands on ours, and a one-site firm with two people in the office may not.
Do you translate messages like Valoon does?
Not to their standard, and we would not claim to. Automatic translation across 50-plus languages is a serious piece of engineering and it is one of the best things about their product. If your crews work across many languages every day, weigh that heavily.
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.
