Comparison
HandsHQ alternatives, compared by the reason people actually leave
Last reviewed
Almost everybody who searches this has the same three months behind them. The document count went up, the plan didn’t stretch, and somebody sent an invoice that made you open a browser tab.
So before the table, one question, because it decides which of these you should buy and for a fair few readers the answer won’t be us.
Why are you leaving?
There are three real reasons, and they point at three different products.
You’re writing more RAMS than your plan covers. Volume, plain and simple. Same work, more of it. You want the same job done cheaper.
You want more than RAMS in one place. Toolbox talks, COSHH, inductions, permits, the CPP. You’re paying for one thing and doing four in spreadsheets.
Your paperwork changed shape. This is the quiet one. Somebody sent you a specification and asked for an inspection and test plan before you set foot on site. Hold points. Witness points. Acceptance criteria against clause numbers. Suddenly RAMS isn’t the hard part of your week.
We make one of the products below. We’d rather tell you which reason you have than pretend there’s one answer.
What HandsHQ actually costs, and why the count matters
HandsHQ prices by the document. On their individual plans, £44 a month buys one RAMS, £99 buys three, £190 buys six, all excluding VAT. Annually it’s £440, £990 and £2,000. Their Training Register is a separate product, and Teams and Enterprise are quoted bespoke. [handshq.com/rams/pricing-individual, checked 17 August 2026]
That model is honest and it’s easy to understand. It also means your bill is a function of how busy you are, and it steps rather than slopes. Write a seventh RAMS in a good month and you’re having a conversation.
That’s the pressure that puts people on this page.
The four alternatives, one line each
swiftRMS. AI-generated RAMS, unlimited, £49 a month on their Pro plan or £499 a year, with a 14-day free trial. Permits to work sit on their £149 Business plan. Built for the volume problem specifically. [swiftrms.co.uk/pricing, checked 17 August 2026]
The Site Book. A broader compliance kit for small UK builders. Free Starter tier covering one project, Pro at £39 a month or £360 a year, Business at £199 a month. RAMS plus construction phase plans, COSHH, inductions, certificates, inspections, permits and a site diary. [thesitebook.co.uk/pricing, checked 17 August 2026]
Pay-per-document tools. Several UK tools sell RAMS one at a time with no subscription — RAMS AI, for instance, publishes pay-as-you-go from £24.97 a pack alongside a £39.97 monthly plan. Genuinely the right answer for occasional use. Prices in this corner of the market move constantly and we’ve seen them quoted differently on different sites, so check the vendor’s own page rather than anyone’s comparison, including this one. [ramsai.co.uk/handshq-alternative, checked 17 August 2026]
Stathia. The compliance and commercial system for a subcontractor. Safety documents, quality records, competence, timesheets and payment applications on the same data, with AI drafting the first version from your scope, specification and drawings. Priced per project: £490, £990 or £3,490 a year.
The comparison
| HandsHQ | swiftRMS | The Site Book | Stathia | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price basis | Per document | Flat, unlimited RAMS | Per plan | Per project |
| Entry price | £44/mo (1 RAMS) | £49/mo, unlimited RAMS | £0 | £490/yr (£49/mo), unlimited AI documents on one project |
| RAMS | Yes, template library | Yes, AI | Yes | Yes, AI |
| COSHH | On the higher plans | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Permits to work | No | On the £149 plan | Yes | Yes |
| Lift plans | No | No | No | Yes |
| ITP built from your specification | No | No | No | Yes |
| Hold and witness points, signed on site | No | No | No | Yes |
| NCRs, observations, snagging | No | No | Inspections | Yes |
| Competence and card expiry | Separate product | No | Yes | Yes |
| Payment applications and retention | No | No | No | Yes |
| Carbon reporting and a PPN 006 plan | No | No | No | On the £3,490 plan |
| Evidence index mapped to the SSIP Core Criteria | No | No | Audit-ready pack | Yes — for competent review, not a certificate |
Rows are drawn from each company’s own public pages on 17 August 2026. Where a row says No, it means we could not find the capability advertised, not that it can’t be done another way.
If your reason is volume
Buy swiftRMS, or stay where you are and move up a HandsHQ plan.
We’re not going to argue with £49 a month for unlimited RAMS. If your paperwork is RAMS and the problem is that there’s more of it, that is the cheapest sensible answer on this page and Stathia is not it.
Worth being blunt about the collision, because you’d find it in about ninety seconds anyway. Our entry plan is the same £49 a month. They give you unlimited RAMS; we give you unlimited AI drafting on one project — the ITPs, the permits, the inspections and the payment applications included, not just the one document type. Same money, different shape. If all you’ll ever write is RAMS, theirs is the simpler buy and we’d rather say so.
There’s also a free tier of this now. Several AI generators will write you a RAMS for nothing, and for routine repeat work they’ll do. We wrote about where they stop, honestly, here. If free is genuinely the choice you’re weighing, start on that page instead of this one.
If your reason is breadth
Look hard at The Site Book before you look at us.
Free to start, £39 a month for Pro, and it covers RAMS, construction phase plans, COSHH, inductions, certificates and worker sign-off. For a builder of twenty or thirty people whose problem is that the compliance admin is scattered rather than deep, that’s a lot of ground for the money and it’ll be live by Friday.
Stathia is the better buy at the point where the commercial side is bleeding too. If the same fortnight you’re chasing an application for payment, arguing a variation and looking for the retention release, the case changes, because those live on the same data here.
If your reason is that an ITP turned up
Then none of the tools above solve it, including the one you’re leaving, and this is worth two minutes.
An inspection and test plan is the one document you can’t write from memory. Every line in it comes out of a specification somebody sent you: this test, against this clause, to this acceptance criterion, at this frequency, signed by this party, with work stopped at these points until they attend. A RAMS tool can’t help, because a RAMS tool starts from a text box asking you to describe the job. Describing the job is exactly the part an ITP won’t let you do.
That’s why every free AI generator can afford to be free. It carries none of your project.
Stathia’s AI ITP author reads the specification you were sent and drafts the plan from it, and it will pull an ITP out of an existing document if you’ve been handed one. It’s a draft. A competent person reviews it, corrects it and signs it, and it says so on its face. What comes off your week is the transcription, not the judgement.
We’ve written the long version, without a sales pitch in it: inspection and test plans, for the people who actually do the work.
Where HandsHQ still wins
Their content library. Years of pre-written task content, curated and maintained, in a good editor. If you like assembling a method statement from known-good blocks rather than reviewing something a machine drafted, that is a real preference and it’s well served there.
Their Training Register is a mature separate product with a following.
And if you write one or two RAMS a month and the rest of your paperwork is genuinely under control, £44 a month is a fair price and changing systems will cost you more in a fortnight of faff than you’ll save in a year. Stay.
What Stathia doesn’t do
No BIM. The model lives in your designer’s software and your main contractor’s.
No programme. Your programme belongs where your client is already looking at it.
No main-contractor project controls. No portfolio cost-value reconciliation, no supply-chain dashboards, no procurement suite. That software is built for the company above you. This one is yours.
All three are out on purpose. A product that does everything for everybody does the paperwork badly, and the paperwork is the part that costs you the job.
What it costs here
Per project, and every module is on every plan.
£490 a year for one project and up to ten active workers. £990 for three projects and up to thirty. £3,490 for up to ten projects and unlimited workers, with payroll, carbon reporting and the PPN 006 plan on top. Annual billing works out at two months free against monthly.
Everyone on the job is covered. That’s deliberate: per-user pricing charges you for doing the right thing, which is putting your whole crew on the system, and then you don’t, and then the records have holes in them.
Where these numbers came from
HandsHQ prices from handshq.com/rams/pricing-individual, checked 17 August 2026, excluding VAT: £44/month for 1 RAMS, £99 for 3, £190 for 6; annual £440, £990 and £2,000. Training Register is a separate product; Teams and Enterprise are quoted bespoke.
swiftRMS prices from swiftrms.co.uk/pricing, checked 17 August 2026: Pro £49/month or £499/year, Business £149/month or £1,490/year, Enterprise custom, all described as unlimited RAMS, COSHH, SSOW, manual handling and HAVs, with a 14-day free trial.
The Site Book prices from thesitebook.co.uk/pricing, checked 17 August 2026: Starter free, Pro £39/month or £360/year, Business £199/month, Site Control £675 per site per month with a one-off setup fee.
Stathia’s own prices are on our pricing page and include every module on every plan.
Everybody’s prices move. Check theirs before you decide anything, including ours.
Questions people actually ask
Is there a free alternative to HandsHQ?
Yes. Several UK tools generate a RAMS free, either on a limited monthly allowance or a free tier, and The Site Book has a free Starter plan. For routine, repeating work they are often enough. They stop being enough when the document has to reflect a specific site, a specific specification or a specific main contractor’s requirements, because they start from what you type rather than from what you were sent.
What's the cheapest HandsHQ alternative?
On published prices in August 2026, a free tier or a pay-per-document tool is cheapest for occasional use, and swiftRMS at £49 a month is the cheapest unlimited-RAMS option we found. Cheapest and right are different questions, and the answer depends on whether your problem is document volume or document type.
Does HandsHQ do ITPs?
Not on the RAMS product as advertised. HandsHQ is risk assessments and method statements, with a separate training register. An inspection and test plan is a quality document rather than a safety one, built from a specification, and it isn’t part of what that product sets out to do.
Can AI write an inspection and test plan?
It can write the draft. Stathia’s AI ITP author builds an ITP from a specification and can extract one from an existing document. A competent person then reviews, corrects and signs it. What it removes is the hours spent transcribing a specification into a spreadsheet, not the professional judgement about whether the plan is right.
Is it hard to move off HandsHQ?
The documents you’ve already issued stay valid; they’re issued records, not live ones, and you keep them. What moves is your template and content set, and however you do it that’s a job of a few evenings rather than a few minutes. Any vendor telling you migration is instant is selling you a problem.
Why does Stathia charge per project instead of per user?
Because headcount moves week to week and projects don’t. Per-user pricing means every operative you add costs you money, so the honest thing (putting the whole crew on the system) becomes the expensive thing, and the records end up with holes where the people you left off should be.
Look round it before you talk to anyone
The demo is a full account with real projects in it. You can draft a document inside it before you tell us a thing about yourself. Or take seven days on a real job, every module open, no card.
Explore the demo