The Buildertrend alternative for commercial GCs, mechanical, electrical, and specialty trades.

Honestly, yes — for custom homes specifically. Buildertrend's client-portal, selections, and warranty workflows are stronger if you're building 5-50 custom homes a year. Field PM is overkill for that workflow and you'd be paying for productivity and weld-mapping features you'll never use.

Field PM handles both, with the lean toward commercial. A mid-size GC running custom homes alongside light-commercial / TI work usually finds Field PM's daily-report and budget tracking does the heavy lifting. Buildertrend's residential-only feature depth would be wasted.

Yes — Field PM is heavily used by mechanical, piping, electrical, and specialty trade contractors. The productivity-by-cost-code tracking is the killer feature for trades that bill on installed quantity (linear feet, fixtures set, terminations made).

Yes — a basic customer portal is included for sharing daily reports, invoices, and service-call status. It's not as feature-rich as Buildertrend's homeowner portal (selections, change-order approval flows). For commercial / industrial customers it's a fine fit; for premium custom-home work, Buildertrend's client experience is more polished.

Buildertrend lets you export projects, contacts, daily logs, and cost data to CSV. Field PM imports CSV for projects, employees, cost codes, customers, RFIs, and change orders. Plan for an afternoon of mapping + a follow-up week of verifying numbers.

Field PM's entry tier is $99/mo (5 office seats, unlimited foremen/QAQC/safety/subs). Buildertrend's entry tier is $199/mo for 1 user. By the time you scale to 5-10 office seats, the gap widens further. Procore starts at $375+/mo with annual contracts — that's where the "half the cost" framing is most accurate.