Most inspectors change platforms once or twice in a career, and almost always at the worst possible moment — mid-season, with a backlog, and with years of templates and comment wording locked inside the system they are leaving. It is a high-stakes decision made with very little independent information, which is why so much of what is written about it is vendor copy.
This hub is about evaluating a platform on the things that actually decide whether you still use it in a year: what it does in a crawlspace with no signal, how long a report takes after the last photograph, what the client receives, and what happens to your data the day you leave.
We make one of these platforms. Treat these pages accordingly: they are written to be useful even if you never buy SightSpec, and where we have a commercial interest we say so rather than hiding it in the framing.
How the subject breaks down
What is actually worth evaluating
The short list that survives contact with a real week: field capture, report turnaround, scheduling and payment, and what your client ends up holding.
Offline is not a feature
Somewhere in most houses there is no usable signal. How a platform behaves there is a design decision made long before you saw it, not a setting you can turn on.
Migration and lock-in
What moves with you, what does not, and which questions are worth asking before you sign rather than after.
Cost, honestly
The subscription is the visible part. Minutes per report, re-keying, and the cost of a switch that goes badly are the rest of it.
What to take away
- Judge the platform on your worst day, not your demo day.
- Ask what leaves with you before you ask what it costs.
- Report turnaround is the number that compounds — it sets how many inspections a week you can actually finish.
- A feature grid tells you what exists, not what works with cold hands and gloves on.
Nothing is published on this topic yet
Answers appear here only once they have been researched, sourced against material we can cite, reviewed, and passed the checks we use before a page is allowed into a search index. Being written is not the same as being published, so this list stays empty until one clears that bar.
The overview above stands on its own — it is what we think is true about this subject, not a placeholder. Where to go next is below.
Common questions
What does this hub cover?
How to evaluate, adopt and eventually leave inspection software: field capture, report turnaround, offline behaviour, migration and total cost. Head-to-head platform comparisons live on our comparison pages, not here.
Is any of this impartial?
We build SightSpec, so no page on this site is disinterested and we do not claim otherwise. Any claim a page makes about another product carries the source it came from and the date it was checked; any claim it makes about ours can be checked in the product.