Why We Show You Where Our Competitors Win

If you read our comparison pages, you'll notice something unusual for a software company: they contain sentences like these.

From our Matterport page: if you need dimensions, as-builts or BIM exports, buy Matterport — BRCKS has no measurement capability and never credibly will.

From our Procore page: £50M commercial towers with 200 subcontractors are Procore's home turf, and it's excellent there.

From our Fieldwire page: if you're a tiny crew with no budget, Fieldwire's free tier is honestly hard to argue with.

And from our CoConstruct migration guide: if you're a US custom-home builder, JobTread is probably your best move — a flat recommendation of a competitor, on our own website.

This isn't a stunt, and it isn't modesty. It's a deliberate decision about how to sell software to builders, and we think it's worth explaining — partly because the reasoning might be useful if you sell anything yourself.

Builders can smell a rigged table

The standard vendor comparison page has a table where the vendor gets fourteen green ticks and the competitor gets fourteen red crosses. Everyone has seen these. Nobody has ever believed one.

Our customers are people who spend their working lives around subcontractor quotes, merchant price lists and "trust me, mate" — professionally sceptical, because scepticism is what keeps a building business solvent. Show a builder a comparison where the author wins every row and you haven't made a sale; you've made a disclosure: this company thinks I'm daft.

So our comparison pages follow rules we wrote down before drafting a word of copy:

1. Every table must contain rows the competitor wins. Not filler rows — real ones. Offline mode on Fieldwire. Estimating on Buildertrend and Buildxact. 3D models, measurements and floor plans on Matterport. Unlimited users and a 400-app ecosystem on Procore.
2. Every price must carry its provenance — published, last published (with date), reported, or quote only. If we can't source a number, we don't print it.
3. Every page must send at least one kind of reader to the competitor, by name, with a plain recommendation.
4. Every page carries the same footer: prices dated, and an email address to tell us if we've got something wrong — because we will, eventually, and we'd rather hear it.

The confidence argument

Here's the thing about conceding: only a company that's sure of its ground can afford to.

We can say "buy Matterport if you need floor plans" because we know that the builder who needs weekly progress records, snagging and client updates — the actual job most builders are hiring a tour tool for — is better served by a 5-minute walk than a 40-minute scan. We can say "Procore is excellent at enterprise scale" because we know a 10-house development doesn't need submittal chains, and that the builder running one will feel that within a week of a Procore trial.

If we thought BRCKS only won when the alternatives were hidden from view, we'd have to hide them. We don't, so we don't. A comparison page that concedes honestly is the most confident thing a company can publish — it says we've looked at this market from every angle and we know exactly which part of it is ours.

Ours is: UK residential builders, roughly 2 to 20 staff, whose trades live on WhatsApp. For that builder, we'll put BRCKS against anything. For a £50M commercial contractor, a US custom-home builder who needs selections, or a surveyor who needs a point cloud — we'll tell you who to call instead, and we do, in writing, on the pages above.

The boring commercial truth

We'd love to claim this is pure principle. It's also just better business, three ways:

Wrong-fit customers are expensive. A commercial contractor who buys BRCKS because our Procore page oversold them will churn in three months, tell their network we didn't deliver, and cost us more than the subscription earned. The same firm, told honestly to use Procore, remembers who told them — and mentions us to the residential builder down the road who is our customer. In an industry that runs on word of mouth, honesty compounds.

Honest pages get read, kept and shared. A builder can forward our CoConstruct guide to their boss whichever tool they end up choosing — which is precisely why it gets forwarded. Rigged tables get closed.

The whole industry has a pricing-opacity problem, and transparency is how we position against it. Two of the biggest names in construction software no longer publish prices at all — you tell them your annual construction volume, and they tell you what you'll pay. We think builders deserve better than software priced like a fitted kitchen. Our price is £40 a seat, it's on the website, and our comparison pages print our competitors' real numbers next to it, sourced and dated. If that comparison didn't favour us, we'd be in the wrong business — publishing it is how we prove we're not.

Hold us to it

If you find a claim on any BRCKS comparison page that's out of date or unfair — a price that's moved, a feature we've undersold, a concession we should be making and aren't — email [email protected] and we'll fix it. That's not a PR line; stale claims cost us exactly the credibility this whole approach is built on.

And if you're weighing us against something specific, start where we're weakest: read the "where they win" sections first — Procore, Buildertrend, Fieldwire, Buildxact, Matterport, or the full list. If BRCKS still looks right after that, the 14-day trial is free and doesn't need a card.

FAQ

Do you really recommend competitors on your own website? Yes, by name. Our CoConstruct guide recommends JobTread for US builders; our Matterport page tells you to buy Matterport if you need measurements or floor plans; our Fieldwire page points tiny crews at Fieldwire's free tier. Each recommendation is there because it's true.

Isn't that just reverse psychology? No — the recommendations are real, and following them will genuinely serve you better if you're the reader they're aimed at. The commercial logic is simply that wrong-fit customers churn, and honest pages earn trust with right-fit ones.

How do you decide what to concede? We research each competitor properly — live pricing pages, archived pricing history, review-site sentiment, feature documentation — and write down where they win before we write anything else. If a table doesn't have rows the competitor wins, it doesn't ship.

What if a competitor's pricing changes after you publish? Every page is stamped with the date its prices were verified, and we re-check when we update. If you spot something stale before we do, email [email protected] and we'll correct it.

Where is BRCKS genuinely the wrong choice? Enterprise commercial work (use Procore), estimating-led businesses (Buildxact, or Buildertrend in the US), measurable 3D capture (Matterport), heavy offline drawing work (Fieldwire), and US custom homes with client selections (JobTread or Buildertrend). We're built for UK residential builders of roughly 2–20 staff who run on WhatsApp — and for them, we're very hard to beat.

How BRCKS can help

BRCKS is a UK-built construction platform that captures site activity through the tools your trades already use. Photos, updates and time on site flow in from WhatsApp, the site diary writes itself, and the office side — RFIs, variations, snagging, drawings and a free client portal — sits in one place. See what's inside on the BRCKS home page, or read the full breakdown of how it helps across your week.

Sources

• BRCKS — construction management built for UK builders