SmartBid Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

As a general contractor/construction manager firm, we use SmartBid on almost all of our projects. It's a great tool to let our subcontractors and suppliers know what projects we're bidding on, and ensure we have proper coverage for the scope of work involved. I was part of the initial setup when our company first began using SmartBid. We used to make a "call list" and someone would actually call up to a few hundred subs and suppliers for every project we bid. WOW. I can't believe we wasted so much time! Now, just a few clicks of a button and all of our bidding documents are in one, easily accessible place, and all the appropriate subs and suppliers are notified! Amazing!

The initial setup was a bit time-consuming. This was partly due to our own company's massively outdated subcontractor and supplier list. Most of our time was spent "trimming the fat" and updating old contact information. There are also limited user profiles, when it would be nice to have more people in our company be able to interact with SmartBid.

I enjoy that smartbid streamlines the bidding process in construction. It allows you to upload drawings & specifications, as well as selecting trades to solicit to easily. Most bidding softwares are too complex for small subcontractors to understand and easily access documents. Smartbid offers ease of use for these subcontractors as well as allowing subcontractors to benefit the way the general contractor is. Having the availability to create takeoffs in Smartbid for the subcontractors you invite is so important.

The only thing I struggle with for Smartbid is the options to having subcontractors change their information within the program. We would like to see that subcontractors can update their license information as well as contacts for their company. Hopefully changes will be made in the future to allow these features to be utilized.

I do like the way a project is created and the publishing features. I do feel that it was advantageous in the way we were able to take a project that we were going to bid and get the information out to the trades

I hated the fact that their database is so out of date. Many times our bid invite was going out to the wrong person or that person was no longer with the company. The software needs some form of check and balance to ensure that the information is accurate and that companies are keeping thier information correct.

Hi Todd, Thank you for your review! In SmartBid, clients primarily rely on results from their own private database, which they alone maintain. Use of our SmartInsight database of contractors is included with SmartBid as an additional resource for those situations where you will need additional subcontractor coverage, and is especially helpful when you find that you're bidding in a market...

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Great software to organize all of your Subcontractors and Vendors. Very easy to edit, add, or delete company names and contacts. Many categories for each company, including work types, DBE choices, unique categories to your company. Many fields get pre-filled, and make it quick to input data. Great reporting, exporting, and sending single or mass emails. Updates for bids or just company reports.

There are so many features, sometimes users can double up information. It's better to keep track of what users can modify specific items within each company. It's easy to have multiple entries of the same company. So user monitoring is key.

Smartbid is easy to implement and is very user friendly.

Requiring bidders to submit thru Smartbid is cumbersome to setup.