Plansmith
Construction Management

Construction Management Planner

Research-backed planner built from a 60-product census of construction management software across 120 official source pages — a jobsite where rival trades share a project without sharing each other's contracts.

v1.0.060 sources · frequency-ranked

The problem this kills

A construction project is the hardest confidentiality problem in business software, and it does not look like one. Everyone is on the same jobsite. The general contractor, four subcontractors who bid against each other, the architect and the owner's capital team all work the same drawings, the same schedule, the same daily log. They are collaborators and competitors at the same time.

So the naive build — one company, one user table, everyone signed in — is not merely insecure. It is a product that cannot be used, because the first thing a general contractor checks is whether the plumbing sub can see the steel sub's contract value. Ask a coding agent for construction management software and you get project dashboards, a Gantt chart and a document library. All correct, all shared with everyone.

What the research changes

The planner carries a frequency-ranked capability inventory from 60 real products — Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Oracle Aconex, CMiC, InEight and 55 others — read across 120 official source pages, stratified so the census is not just the four names everyone knows.

That inventory does two things. It stops the model inventing a feature list, and it exposes the gap the market's own marketing creates: reports and task coordination are documented by more than nine products in ten, while roles and scoped permissions appear on only 36 of 60 pages and change orders on 34. Public marketing sells the surfaces that photograph well. The planner raises the substrate ones on lifecycle dependency instead of frequency, because a commitment register every party can read is not a commitment register.

What it makes the agent decide

  • Which party owns each record, and which parties are counterparties to it — before any table is written.
  • Whether a denial returns not-found or forbidden, so a subcontractor cannot enumerate what exists by reading status codes.
  • Whether an export path re-derives its rows from the same scoped query as the screen, or becomes a second unguarded copy of the data.
  • What the owner may see. Owners are a party too, and "the client can read everything" is the failure that survives the first fix.
The inventory · 01

The frequency-ranked ledger.

Feature
Prevalence across 60 tabulated construction products
Sources
Freq.
Reports, scheduled distribution, exports, and stakeholder packsThe most evidenced capability in the category, and the one that most often becomes a second unguarded copy of the data — an export must re-derive its rows from the same scoped query as the screen.
55/60
91.7%
Tasks, issues, assignments, and field coordinationNinety percent of the market documents it. The subcontractor should see their own assignments, not the whole project's — this is the surface where record-level scoping is cheapest to get right and most often skipped.
54/60
90%
APIs, accounting, ERP, and system integrationsConstruction runs on a finance system the project software does not own. An integration boundary declared up front stops the model inventing a ledger.
46/60
76.7%
Drawings, sheets, markups, overlays, and revision controlA sheet number without a revision is a liability. Issued drawings are legitimately shared across trades; which revision superseded them is what has to be unambiguous.
46/60
76.7%
Procurement, purchase orders, and material planningCarries vendor and amount, so it is the single most confidential register on the job. Sub A reading Sub B's purchase order is the defect this vertical exists to prevent.
45/60
75%
Mobile and offline jobsite accessNearly three quarters of the market documents it, because the work happens on a phone in a field. A layout that overflows its viewport is not a mobile product.
44/60
73.3%
Document repository, folders, search, and version custodyCustody means knowing which version was current when a decision was made, not just storing files.
43/60
71.7%
Budget, job cost, cost codes, and varianceCost codes are the spine connecting an estimate to a commitment to an actual. Variance without all three is a number nobody can defend.
42/60
70%
Photos, video, 360 capture, and progress evidenceDated visual evidence is what settles a dispute months later — it has to attach to a record, not float in a gallery.
41/60
68.3%
Commitments, subcontracts, and purchase contractsThe contract sum per trade. Documented by 37 of 60, and the one register where a read-authorization mistake is immediately and commercially damaging.
37/60
61.7%
Users, roles, companies, and scoped permissionsOnly 36 of 60 document it, which is the central under-description in this category. Every other capability here depends on it, and a build treating the highest role as a superset of the others has already failed.
36/60
60%
Project directory and stakeholder contactsThe directory spans companies, so it is the first place a hardcoded tenant name or an unscoped list leaks one customer to another.
35/60
58.3%
Estimating, assemblies, and cost databaseUnit rates broken into labour, material and equipment are the contractor's cost build-up. Exposing it to a trade partner hands over the negotiating position.
35/60
58.3%
Specifications and requirement linkingA submittal that does not point at the specification section it satisfies cannot be reviewed against anything.
34/60
56.7%
Potential changes, change orders, approvals, and impactWhere the money actually moves. An approval without an attributable actor and time is not an approval.
34/60
56.7%
Project and portfolio dashboards with drilldownEvery figure must drill to the records behind it. A dashboard counting rows the linked screen does not show is the most common honesty failure in this category.
33/60
55%
Daily logs, diaries, weather, and site conditionsThe contemporaneous record. Its value is that it was written that day and cannot be quietly rewritten later.
32/60
53.3%
Master schedule, Gantt, milestones, and critical pathDocumented by only 31 of 60 despite being the image the category is sold on — the planner treats it as a register with real float and critical-path flags, not a chart.
31/60
51.7%
Commissioning, testing, and system acceptance3 of 60. Public marketing stops at handover; the buyer who needs it needs it as a gated lifecycle, so it stays an explicit selection rather than an assumption.
3/60
5%
Bid comparison, leveling, and award2 of 60 in reviewed evidence. Leveling is where competing bids sit side by side, so it is also the highest-risk screen to build without a party model underneath it.
2/60
3.3%
Incident, injury, near-miss, and corrective actionOnly 2 of 60 document it publicly. Safety records carry personal data and a different retention duty from project records — the planner refuses to infer it from the presence of a forms module.
2/60
3.3%
See it in action · 02

Real apps this planner built.

Confidentiality as a data model — live demoLive
Built by Claude Fable 5

Confidentiality as a data model

“ForgeLedger” — the highest-scoring build of the four, and the one that treats a jobsite as what it is: parties who collaborate and compete at the same time. It keeps a share register, so each document, drawing and report is granted to a named party and everything else is refused. All three subcontractors sit on the same project, so the isolation cannot fall out of project membership — tested in both directions it leaked nothing, and of 416 files the plumbing sub could read exactly the one behind her grant. Pick a role on /login to get straight in — project manager, site supervisor, subcontractor or client. Those buttons are off by default in the build and switched on deliberately here, and they run the same session path as a password sign-in rather than a shortcut around it. You land on its public project showcase; sign in from there. By hand works too: dana.whitfield@northstarridge.example / pm-demo-2026.

Open live demo
The one that works with JavaScript off — live demoLive
Built by GPT-5.6 Sol

The one that works with JavaScript off

“ForgeLedger” again, from the same planner — worth opening beside the others. Its sign-in is a real form rather than a script, so it completes with JavaScript entirely disabled and no credential ever reaches the address bar. Its permissions are a gradient rather than a switch: the project manager sees four tasks, the supervisor three, the subcontractor exactly the one that is theirs, and cost, estimating and procurement are closed to the subcontractor and the owner alike. The highest-sounding role is deliberately not a superset — the project manager is refused the owner’s records screen. Accounts are default-deny: with no password configured for a role, that account does not exist at all. Pick a role on /login. This build ships no demo shortcut of its own — its sign-in page says so — so the buttons here post a seeded credential to the same endpoint the password form uses rather than routing around it. You land on its public bid board — a planner feature in its own right — and sign in from there. By hand works too: pm@northstarridge.example / ForgeLedgerDemo2026.

Open live demo
Two companies, to prove they stay apart — live demoLive
Built by Grok 4.6

Two companies, to prove they stay apart

“ForgeLedger” — the leanest build in the whole demo fleet: one production dependency, no framework, a single server file, and nothing for a future advisory to land on. It is also the only construction build that seeds a second construction company on purpose so customer separation can be demonstrated rather than asserted, and that separation held on every route we drove. Its first audit found demo buttons that handed any visitor a project-manager session with no way to switch them off, and a verification suite covering step one of sixteen with fifteen checks never written; both were repaired and re-verified, and it was rescored 84 → 93. You land on its public work board; sign in from there and pick a role. The demo buttons are switched on deliberately here and off by default everywhere else.

Open live demo
The richest data model, after repair — live demoLive
Built by Gemini 3.7 Flash

The richest data model, after repair

“ForgeLedger” — the fourth build from the same planner, and the one that models the work most thoroughly: WBS codes with real float and critical-path flags, CSI cost codes connecting an estimate to a commitment to an actual, sheet numbers with disciplines and revisions. It arrived with the vertical’s defining defect: of forty-six role checks, forty-five protected a write and exactly one protected a read, so a trade subcontractor read every rival’s contract value — and the one table it did protect leaked anyway through a CSV export with no role check. Two repair rounds closed it: rival subcontractors now see only their own purchase orders with zero overlap, the export returns exactly the row set the screen does, and the public page no longer publishes internal reviewer notes. What is still open is the owner, who reads the contractor’s commitments, estimating build-up and budget in full. Pick a role from the sandbox switcher to get in.

Open live demo