Stathia, HandsHQ and PlanRadar: what each one is actually for

These three get compared because they turn up in the same search, not because they do the same job. It’s worth ten minutes to see the shape of each, because the wrong one costs you either money or evenings, and you’ll know which within a month of buying it.

We make one of them. The prices below are theirs, taken from their own pricing pages on 17 August 2026, and the recommendations further down include the cases where you should buy somebody else.

In one line each

HandsHQ is RAMS software. A large library of pre-written task content you assemble a method statement from, priced by how many documents you write each month. They also sell a training register and a POWRA tool as separate products.

PlanRadar is a site management and defect platform. Plans, tickets, snags, forms and photographs against a drawing, priced per user. Strong on defects and on visual record-keeping, used widely by main contractors.

Stathia is the compliance and commercial system for a subcontractor. The safety documents, the quality records, the competence, the timesheets and the payment applications on the same data, with AI drafting the first version of the documents from your scope, specification and drawings. Priced per project.

The comparison

There’s a fourth option this leaves out

The free AI RAMS generators. They’re real, several are genuinely free, and for a routine job they’ll do. They’re a different kind of thing rather than a cheaper version of one, and we wrote about where they stop here. If that’s the choice you’re actually weighing up, start there instead of here.

What that costs for a ten-person firm running three jobs

HandsHQ prices its RAMS product by the document: £44 a month for one RAMS, £99 for three, £190 for six, excluding VAT. Write a seventh in a busy month and you’re on the next plan. The training register is priced separately.

PlanRadar prices per user: on their UK pricing page, £25 per user per month on Basic (capped at one user), £89 on Starter and £139 on Pro billed monthly, coming down to £23, £80 and £119 on annual terms. Starter and Pro run up to ten users. Ten people on Starter is ten times £89 a month, whether or not they all opened it that week.

Stathia prices per project: £490 a year for one project and up to ten active workers, £990 for three projects and up to thirty, £3,490 for ten projects and unlimited workers. Everyone on the job is covered. Every plan includes every module.

The per-user model is the one that quietly punishes you for doing the right thing, which is putting your whole crew on the system. That’s the reason Stathia doesn’t use it, and the reason the price basis is a row in the table rather than a footnote.

On AI, specifically

This is the row where the three genuinely differ, so it’s worth being precise rather than loud.

HandsHQ gives you a curated content library and a good editor. You choose the content, you assemble it. That is a real and useful thing, built over years, and for one straightforward RAMS a month it may well be all you need.

PlanRadar has an AI Assistant on its Pro tier, aimed at summarising and searching what’s already in the system. Their own coverage describes them as deliberately conservative on AI. It doesn’t author your safety documents.

Stathia reads the documents you were sent. Scope, specification, drawings, site investigation, and on a drawing it reads the sheet itself: title block, revision, dimensions, levels, the notes down the side, the hold points. Then it drafts the RAMS, COSHH assessment, permit, lift plan, briefing or ITP from what’s actually there, cites each line back to the file it came from, and flags where your answers and the spec disagree instead of quietly choosing one.

The count matters less than what it’s counting. A document tool writes the documents you can describe. The ones that hurt — the ITP with the hold points already in it, the permit with authorisation behind it, the evidence pack a year later — come out of what you were sent, and that’s the part a describe-the-job tool never sees.

What none of the three do is sign anything. The draft is a draft, it says so on its face, and a competent person reviews and approves it. Any product that suggests otherwise is selling you a problem.

Buy HandsHQ if…

You write one or two RAMS a month, you like their content library, and the rest of your paperwork is genuinely under control. £44 a month is a fair price for that and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Buy PlanRadar if…

Your main pain is defects, snags and marking things up on drawings, especially fit-out, housebuilding or facilities work, and you need a model viewer. It’s a mature product and it’s better at that than we are. If your main contractor already has everybody on it, that’s a real reason too.

Buy Stathia if…

You’re a subcontractor between about five and a hundred people, the safety paperwork eats your evenings, and the same week you’re chasing an application for payment. The case for it isn’t any one feature. It’s that the RAMS, the ITP, the competence records, the timesheets and the payment applications stop being five systems and five sets of chasing.

And if you’ve ever spent a fortnight before a renewal assembling evidence that already existed, that fortnight is the thing this was built to delete.

What Stathia doesn’t do

No BIM. The model lives in your designer’s software and your main contractor’s.

No programme management. 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.

We left all three out on purpose. A product that does everything for everyone does the paperwork badly, and the paperwork is the part that costs you the job.

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 plans £440, £990 and £2,000. Training Register is a separate product.

PlanRadar prices from planradar.com/gb/pricing, checked 17 August 2026, per user per month: Basic £25 (single user), Starter £89, Pro £139 on monthly billing; £23, £80 and £119 on annual. Starter and Pro up to ten users. Enterprise on application.

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.