OneBookPlus vs Buildxact
and the eight other Buildxact alternatives builders shortlist

Yes, for residential builders and trade contractors who want estimating, plan takeoff, progress claims and cost control without paying $399/month for Buildxact Pro or bolting on Xero for accounting and a separate gateway for payments. Buildxact is genuinely strong on estimating heritage and live supplier price files. OneBookPlus matches the estimate-to-claim workflow and adds online payments, native GST accounting and a full-featured mobile app for a flat $99/month for the whole business, with no per-seat charge (the core plan bands logins at one on Free, three on Starter, five on Plus and ten on Growth). If plans-first takeoff with live merchant pricing is your entire workflow, Buildxact's specialism may still suit you; for most builders who also need to get paid and keep their books straight, OneBookPlus is the more complete and cheaper path.

It depends on which half of the job you are buying. On the Australian side, Wunderbuild prices by active project with every feature on every tier and is the closest Australian like-for-like on the estimate-to-claim workflow, and NextMinute prices by crew band with a genuinely capable site app but no takeoff tool of its own. From the United States, JobTread sells one all-features plan plus a per-member charge and has the best selections and allowance maths in the set, Buildertrend is deeper on scheduling and homeowner financing, Houzz Pro suits design-led remodelers, and Contractor Foreman is the value anchor with no takeoff tool at all. Tradify and simPRO come at it from the trades side: Tradify is per user and has no plan takeoff, simPRO is built for commercial subcontractors. None of the United States four handles GST, BAS or an Australian progress claim, and all four bill in US dollars. OneBookPlus is the Australian all-in-one in that list: estimating, AI plan takeoff, progress claims with retention, online payment of the claim and a GST-native ledger in one app. The comparison table gives what each one publishes and the date of that price. Check the vendor's own page before you sign.

Three of them do not, and it changes the shortlist. Buildertrend replaced its published tiers with a three-step quote form that asks your annual construction volume, so the bill scales with your revenue and you cannot compare it before a sales call. Houzz Pro hides its plan prices too, and gates the tiers that carry its takeoff tool behind that quote. simPRO quotes by sales and charges for implementation on top. Wunderbuild, NextMinute, JobTread, Contractor Foreman and Tradify all publish, but read the basis before you compare: Tradify charges per user, Contractor Foreman caps how many users each tier carries, JobTread charges for every member past the first, JobTread and Contractor Foreman publish in US dollars, and the local vendors quote ex GST or say nothing about GST at all while OneBookPlus prices include it. The comparison table carries the basis and the price date in their own columns.

The tier price is not the bill. Pro is the tier that carries job management, invoicing, variations, the Onsite app and accounting sync, at $399 a month. Buildxact keeps no ledger of its own, so BAS, profit and loss and GST run through Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, and the cheapest published Xero plan adds $37 a month. The Blu Takeoff Assistant, the AI takeoff add-on Pro does not include, adds $99 a month. That is $535 a month for the stack, and the three lines are not on one GST basis: Buildxact publishes ex GST, so add GST to its tier and its add-on, while Xero publishes in AUD with GST already included. The OneBookPlus equivalent is the Builder Suite at $99/month on top of a core plan, so $99 to $168 a month all in with GST already included, and the ledger, GST and BAS reports are on every plan including the free one, so there is no second accounting bill in that column. Buildxact's tier prices are current as at 2 August 2026, the Blu add-on as at 2 August 2026 and the Xero plan as at 2 August 2026.

On buildxact.com/au/pricing, current as at August 2026, Buildxact runs three flat tiers with unlimited users (ex GST): Foundation $199/month, Pro $399/month, and Master $599/month. Foundation is a pre-construction and sales tool, it does not include invoicing, job management, the mobile app or accounting sync, so the tier most builders land on is Pro at $399/month, plus a separate Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks subscription for accounting. Pro includes the Blu Estimate Generator, while the Blu Takeoff Assistant is $99/month and the Blu Estimate Reviewer $149/month on top of it, both bundled only on Master at $599/month. Buildxact's pricing rewards larger teams (users are unlimited) but is expensive for smaller ones who still land on the $399 Pro tier. OneBookPlus's Builder Suite is $99/month for the whole business with no per-seat charge, and it includes estimating, takeoff, claims, cost control, payments and native accounting on top of a core app that starts free. The core plan bands logins rather than seats. Each plan includes a set number of logins, one login on Free, three on Starter, five on Plus and ten on Growth, and below the cap there is no per-seat charge at all. On Growth an extra login is $9/mo, added to the same invoice, so an eleventh person costs $9 and not a new plan. Staff you roster and book but who never sign in (instructors, carers, cleaners, stylists) are free and unlimited on every plan. Check buildxact.com/au/pricing for its current figures before you decide.

Yes. OneBookPlus does AI-measured takeoff on PDF and photo plans with zoom and pan, drag-to-correct directly on the plan, and ‘pick one, find all’ symbol counting that Buildxact still does by hand. One caveat: the AI measures into a review queue you check and correct before the numbers reach a quote, rather than pricing a plan on its own. It also goes the other way on a reno with no drawings: scan the room in the OneBookPlus iOS app on a LiDAR device, an iPhone Pro or iPad Pro, and the measurements come back as a takeoff you check before you price it into the estimate. Buildxact offers room scanning too, through its Rendr partnership, but Rendr is for United States customers only, so an Australian builder on Buildxact cannot turn it on. Buildxact is the more mature 2D plan tracer with years of refinement; OneBookPlus adds AI counting and a streaming estimate generator on top of the same core workflow.

No. Buildxact has no payment collection anywhere, its client-portal invoices are view-only, with no card or BECS option. That means the money still lands in a separate system. OneBookPlus takes card and BECS payments directly on progress claims and invoices, so the payment settles in the same app that raised the claim. It is one of the clearest practical gaps between the two products for a builder who wants the money to arrive against the claim rather than in a separate gateway.

Yes. Buildxact has no native accounting, BAS, P&L and GST reporting all run through a Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks integration, and accounting-sync problems are one of Buildxact's most recurring complaint classes. OneBookPlus includes a GST-native ledger and BAS-ready reporting in the same subscription, so a builder can retire both the estimating tool and the separate accounting bill and stop reconciling across two systems. OneBookPlus also handles GST-inclusive entry and display, which Buildxact's tax-exclusive-only engine does not.

With Buildxact, cancelling means you lose access to your past quotes and jobs. There is no read-only archive: the only ways to keep your own history reachable are to resubscribe, or to pay to hibernate the account, which Buildxact caps at three months once every 13 months. OneBookPlus keeps data export free at any time on every plan, your estimates, claims and job records are yours to take with you whenever you like, with no lock-out and no ransom. If keeping ownership of your history matters, that difference is worth weighing before you commit.

Your cost catalogue and recipes are the part that moves cleanly: export them from Buildxact to CSV and import them into the OneBookPlus cost catalogue, then check your labour rates, wastage percentages and markup defaults before you price anything with them. Contacts import the same way. The limit: completed Buildxact quotes and jobs do not import as live OneBookPlus records, so most builders finish the jobs already running in Buildxact there and start new estimates in OneBookPlus from a chosen cutover date, usually the start of a quarter so the BAS boundary is clean. Keep a Buildxact export for your own records while you still have access, because that access ends when the subscription does.

The free core plan gives you contacts, quoting and invoicing with 10 invoices and 5 quotes a month and 250 contacts, which is enough to test the feel of the app but not enough to run a build. Plan takeoff, the estimate generator, progress claims with retention, variations, cost control and RFQs all sit in the Builder Suite app at $99/month on top of whatever core plan you are on, including the free one, with a 14-day trial and no per-seat charge; the core plan bands logins at one on Free, three on Starter, five on Plus and ten on Growth. So the realistic comparison for a builder is $99/month against Buildxact Pro at $399/month plus a separate accounting subscription, not $0 against $399.