Honest comparison
The Site Book wins on time cost, audit trail, and mobile usability; Excel templates suit builders who write compliance documents rarely and already pay for Microsoft 365.
Reviewed
Based on publicly available vendor documentation and published pricing as of 2026-04-15.
Pricing, fit, and feature coverage side by side.
| Feature | The Site Book | Excel templates |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | from £30/mo | Microsoft 365 licence (£7.90+/mo per user) + your time |
| Team size | 1–50 | Any |
| Best for | Small-to-mid UK builders (1–50 users) who need a full CDM pack -RAMS, CPP, COSHH, site inductions, toolbox talks -without paying enterprise per-seat prices. | Anyone willing to spend 1–3 hours per document on manual admin who already has Microsoft 365 and doesn't produce RAMS often. |
| Not ideal for | New product (launched 2025) -smaller customer base and shorter track record than established tools like HandsHQ. | Each RAMS takes 1–3 hours to write from scratch -manual work that purpose-built tools do in minutes. |
| RAMS | AI-generated, site-specific, edit in-browser. | DIY -manual Word/Excel template, no substance database. |
| CPP | Full Construction Phase Plans -not just RAMS. | |
| COSHH | ||
| Method statements | Manual Word template. | |
| Site inductions | Workers sign from their phone. | |
| Worker cert tracking | ||
| Incident log | ||
| Permits to work | ||
| Site diary | ||
| Subcontractor tracking | ||
| Toolbox talks | ||
| PCPP import | Upload an existing PCPP and reuse the structure. | |
| Document checking | ||
| Data export | Excel exports natively. | |
| AI chat |
Excel works. Technically. But using a spreadsheet for your RAMS, COSHH assessments, and site safety docs costs you hours of admin every week - and one missed CDM 2015 section could mean a failed HSE inspection. You start from a blank template every time, your version control is a graveyard of files called v3_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx, and filling in a multi-sheet workbook on a phone in the rain is nobody's idea of a good site day. The Site Book generates the same compliance output in minutes, stores a single source of truth, and actually works on the device you have in your pocket.
At-a-glance fit per product - pulled from the same data that drives the snapshot table.
Pick the option that matches how your team actually works.
The Site Book wins on time cost, audit trail, and mobile usability; Excel templates suit builders who write compliance documents rarely and already pay for Microsoft 365.
Strengths, weaknesses, fit, and the sources every claim came from.
The Site Book Ltd
from £30/mo
Microsoft
Microsoft 365 licence (£7.90+/mo per user) + your time
Pricing
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The Site Book vs RAMS App: UK CDM Compliance Compared
The Site Book wins for principal contractors needing the full CDM 2015 suite; RAMs App is the right choice for contractors who only need template-based RAMS and nothing else.
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Short, straight answers - the same questions real builders ask.
Not really. You still need a Microsoft 365 licence at around eight pounds a month per user, and every RAMS takes one to three hours to write from scratch. Over a month with any regular document cadence, the time cost of Excel far outweighs a purpose-built tool like The Site Book at thirty pounds a month flat rate, with the documents generated automatically from a brief.
Manual versioning, with files named v1, v2, v2-FINAL, v2-FINAL2, makes it easy to send the wrong document to a client, miss required sections, or lose the audit trail entirely. A purpose-built compliance tool stores a single source of truth with proper change history - exactly what regulators expect to see on a principal-contractor workflow when an inspector turns up to your site.
Excel on mobile is painful - it is simply not designed for editing multi-sheet compliance documents on a small screen. Builders working from a phone on site need a tool purpose-built for mobile document creation, on-site editing, and worker sign-off. The Site Book is built mobile-first so the principal contractor can edit a CPP from the van between visits without juggling spreadsheet tabs.
Yes. Auditors want to see a clear, dated audit trail - who created the document, who approved it, and how it changed over time. Excel files do not capture any of this automatically. The Site Book stores every document version, signature, and edit in a single project record, which is what an HSE inspector or principal designer expects to find when they ask for evidence.
Yes. The Site Book has a free tier that lets you create your first project and generate real documents - your CPP, RAMS, and site induction - without entering a credit card. You can run a real project alongside your existing Excel templates and compare the output yourself. Most builders never go back to spreadsheets once they have seen the difference in time and quality.
Based on publicly available vendor documentation and published pricing as of 2026-04-15.
Every pricing, feature, and fit claim in this comparison is pulled from public vendor documentation and cross-checked against independent sources. The “source basis” footer on each product card lists the exact URLs and the date we fetched them. We revisit this page at least every 90 days - last reviewed on .