Kestrel - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

A Kestrel takeoff produces two things: an NRM2 Bill of Quantities in Excel, ready for your rates, and a set of annotated PDF drawings that show exactly what was measured and where. It runs on Windows, on your own machine, and it is built for the way UK estimators and quantity surveyors work.

The bill comes out with quantities, codes and descriptions already in place, and live formulas behind them: type your rates into the rate column and the totals recalculate. It arrives ready to price.

The drawings carry a Take Off Legend and a Quantity Key on every sheet. Anyone checking your figures, whether that is a colleague, a client or a subcontractor pricing a package, can see what was measured and where. A drawing register gives you an audit trail of the drawings the takeoff was measured from.

Getting there is straightforward. Open your PDF drawings, calibrate the scale, and measure lengths, areas and counts directly on the page. Quantities accumulate as you work, organised by finish type and project zone, so the bill takes shape while you are measuring rather than afterwards in a separate spreadsheet.

Kestrel is deliberately narrow, and that is the point. It is a takeoff tool, not an estimating suite. There is no job costing, no bid management, no proposal builder, no CRM and no built-in cost database. You enter your own rates, because your rates are your commercial position and not something a table of averages should decide for you. What Kestrel does instead is the measurement and the bill, done properly.

An optional AI assist can scan a drawing to identify the finishes on it and read the scale from the title block. It is off by default, it uses your own API key, and your AI provider bills you for it directly. If you never switch it on, nothing leaves your machine because of it.

Projects are stored locally as single files with the drawings embedded. There is no cloud storage and no login is required to take off, so a project can be archived, copied to a colleague or handed over like any other document. Kestrel works offline; the licence is verified online periodically.

Kestrel is built by Alves Rowe Ltd, a UK preconstruction consultancy, and was designed by a practising estimator around the way a takeoff is actually done. Windows only. Metric only.

PRICING

Core is £25 per month plus VAT. An annual plan is £250 plus VAT, which works out at two months free. One licence covers one user on one machine.

A 14-day free trial is available. A card is required to start it, you are not charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel at any point before then and pay nothing.