A Trowel alternative for the field

A Trowel alternative for field work

If you’re looking at Trowel, you’re probably trying to leave Excel behind and bring some order to how you manage your sites. That’s a good goal, and Trowel is a capable tool for it. This page helps you see where PinMy and Trowel overlap and, above all, where they differ.

The difference fits in one sentence: Trowel is a construction ERP; PinMy is a field capture tool. They’re not competing for the same job.

What Trowel does well

Trowel is a Spanish all-in-one management platform for construction. Its strength is the financial and administrative side of a project: budgets, cost control, purchasing, invoicing, progress certificates, work logs, time tracking, and Gantt-chart planning. All in a single platform, built so a contractor can keep track of each project’s profitability.

If what you need is that complete management layer — knowing whether a site is making or losing money, handling certificates and time tracking — Trowel is very well developed there. Let’s be fair: in the financial management of construction, it does far more than PinMy, because PinMy doesn’t even try.

The fundamental difference: management vs capture

Here’s the point that changes the decision.

Trowel wants to be the system where all the management of your construction business lives: the financials, the admin, and the field. It’s broad by design.

PinMy does one thing and keeps it simple: capture what happens on site, anchored to the plan. An issue, a photo, a voice note, pinned at the exact point on the plan. No budgets, no certificates, no payroll.

For a site supervisor or a small team that just wants to document the site properly — without setting up a whole ERP or paying for modules they’ll never use — that difference matters. With PinMy you open the app and, on your next visit, you’re already documenting. No onboarding, no setup beforehand.

Where PinMy stands out

Beyond being lighter, PinMy has carefully built field-capture features:

• Highlight the exact area of the problem. Not just a point: you draw a rectangle around the crack or the stain and resize it to the real extent. The size of the highlight already tells the team how big the problem is.
• Voice notes transcribed in 20+ languages. You talk with gloves on and in a hurry; PinMy turns it into searchable text you can edit if it misheard a technical term.
• Video annotation (Premium). Drop pins on specific moments of a site walk-through video.
• Dispute-proof pins. Only the person who creates a pin can move or delete it. Others can reply, but nobody can quietly erase a defect you flagged six months ago. That keeps the record honest.
• Guest mode. A subcontractor or the client opens the file in the browser and replies without installing anything or creating an account.

Honest comparison

	Trowel	PinMy
Category	Construction ERP (all-in-one)	Field capture on the plan
Best for	Contractors moving off Excel	Site supervisors and teams documenting in the field
Budgets, costs, invoicing	Yes, its strength	No
Certificates, time tracking	Yes	No
Highlight and resize the area	—	Yes
Transcribed voice notes	—	Yes, 20+ languages
Video annotation	—	Yes (Premium)
Dispute-proof pins	—	Yes
Starting point	Setup and implementation	Open and use
Free plan	Depends on profile	Yes, free forever

We’ll say it plainly: if you need budgets, costs, and progress certificates, Trowel is ahead; PinMy doesn’t play on that field. PinMy is for when your priority is documenting the site fast and well, anchored to the plan.

And they can work together

It’s not necessarily one or the other. Many teams keep their financial management in their existing system and use PinMy just for visual field capture — the issues, the snagging, the photos on the plan — because that’s where Trowel and other ERPs weigh more than a field team needs day to day.

What you can do with PinMy today

Only features that are on the phone right now:

• Voice, photo, video, and text pins on PDF plans and site photos.
• Resizable area highlighting and freehand drawing on the file.
• Voice transcription in 20+ languages.
• Video annotation (Premium) and OCR (Premium).
• Kanban flow: assign, follow from “to do” to “done”, and close — with @mentions and notifications.
• Guest mode for subcontractors with no account.
• iOS, Android, web, and a Chrome extension. Hosted in the EU, GDPR-compliant.

In short

Trowel and PinMy solve different things. Trowel manages the finances and administration of your construction business. PinMy captures the reality of the site anchored to the plan. If all-in-one management is what you’re after, take a good look at Trowel; if documenting in the field simply is what you need, PinMy will fit you better — and it’s free to start.

If you’re a site supervisor or building engineer, this plan-centred approach maps directly onto your day-to-day.

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