Dashpivot vs the SitesAI App for small civil crews

Dashpivot, by Sydney's Sitemate, is one of the best-regarded pieces of construction software to come out of Australia, and it is on most shortlists in this market for good reason. It is also solving a different problem from us, which makes this a more useful comparison than most.

Figures below come from Dashpivot's Australian directory listings on the date shown. Sitemate's own pricing page would not load for us that day, so we have cited the listings instead of guessing.

The actual difference

Dashpivot digitises the paperwork. The SitesAI App models the job.

Dashpivot starts from the form. You take the site diary, the permit, the prestart, the JSA you already use, and turn it into something that gets filled in on a phone, standardised, searched and analysed. It is very good at this, and their template library means you start from something rather than a blank page.

We start from the job. There is a lead, it becomes a quote, the quote is accepted, the lead becomes the job, the job has a site, the site has crew and shifts and dockets and compliance requirements, and the work recorded rolls up to a scope of work and a progress claim. Forms are not the unit; records are.

Neither is the right answer in the abstract. They suit different problems:

• "Our paperwork is a mess and we fill in the same forms on paper every day" is a Dashpivot problem.
• "I cannot tell you what job cost what, or what I can claim this month" is ours.

Where Dashpivot wins

The template library. Hundreds of ready-made forms — site diaries, permits, excavation JSAs, prestarts. You start from something a professional wrote. We have no equivalent gallery, and for a business with no documented procedures that is a real head start.

Form design. If you need a specific layout, with specific fields, that prints in a specific way because a head contractor demands it, a form builder is the right tool and we are not one.

Maturity and reach. Founded 2015, used in over 100 countries, 4.7 out of 5 across 76 reviews on its Australian listings. Years of polish we do not have.

Analysis across forms. Their model turns filled-in forms into data you can chart across projects. Ours answers questions about jobs, not about form fields.

Where the SitesAI App wins

A free tier that covers a real crew. Ten licences, every feature, no card. Their listings show a free version too, but the paid tier starts from around A$32 per user — so a crew of six is a meaningful monthly bill there and nothing here.

A licence is not always a person. It can be a site, or a client with a portal login. You spend the pool the way your business is shaped.

The commercial half exists. Leads, quotes accepted by a typed name on a link, scope of work, variations the client approves, progress claims that freeze what they report. Dashpivot does not attempt this.

Purpose-built records instead of forms that resemble them. A docket is a docket: one per truck, signed by the customer on their own phone via QR, out as a branded A4 PDF with the lines frozen at signature. A timesheet is a shift with photos, geofence, tags and two signatures, queued offline and replayed with the server refereeing every event. Those behave in ways a form cannot.

An AI over the whole business. 142 tools plus a REST API, flat $38 a month for the company. You can ask which inductions expire this fortnight and get an answer.

What does the SitesAI App not do?

• No general form builder and no public template library.
• No invoicing, no payments, no accounting ledger, no Xero or MYOB.
• No cross-project form analytics.

Should you pick Dashpivot or the SitesAI App?

Pick Dashpivot if your problem is paper — forms, permits, diaries, inspections — and you want a mature tool with a library to start from.

Pick the SitesAI App if your problem is the job — quoting it, staffing it, recording what was done, and claiming for it — and you would rather have ten free licences than a per-user bill.

Plenty of businesses could sensibly run both. They overlap less than the category page suggests.

Start free

Ten licences, every feature, no call to book. Sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple at app.sitesai.net, or read The site diary: what to record daily to see how we handle the thing Dashpivot is best known for.