eSUB alternative
eSUB has been doing this since 2008. Here is the honest comparison anyway.
eSUB is the closest thing to a direct competitor SubMark has: built exclusively for commercial subcontractors, aimed at the same four people — the owner, the PM, the foreman and the office — and at most of the same trades. It is older, broader in project documentation, and it generates the billing forms we do not. It also publishes no price anywhere, has no pricing page at all, and ends every path at “book a demo”. That last part you can verify yourself in about a minute, and it is the honest centerpiece of this page.
14-day free trial, no card needed. Field crews are free and unlimited. See pricing →
- eSUB is deeper than us on project documentation: drawings, RFIs, submittals, document control, field notes.
- It generates G702 and G703 pay applications off the schedule of values. SubMark does not generate those forms.
- eSUB has no pricing page — three likely URLs return 404 and no pricing page appears anywhere in its own sitemap. Every route ends at a demo request.
In their own words
Built exclusively for commercial subcontractors.
Credit where it is due
What eSUB is genuinely better at.
They have had eighteen years to build this and it shows in places we are nowhere near. Several of these are whole modules we do not have, and if one of them is your real problem then eSUB is the better buy — we would rather say so here than take a month of your trial to arrive at it.
They generate G702 and G703 pay applications. We do not.
Straight off the schedule of values, with amounts rolling forward, retainage calculated and the form ready to preview, download or submit. SubMark does not generate those forms. If billing week at your company is mostly producing that form, this is the row that decides it, and it decides it against us.
Retainage withheld and released, by line item.
Their progress-billing page markets retainage withheld and released, by line item and by project. SubMark records the retainage withheld on each draw, in dollars, and totals what was withheld across every job, closed ones included. It does not track retainage released, and it does not split retainage by line. If you need to know which lines are still holding retention, that one is theirs.
Five documentation modules we simply do not have.
Drawings management, RFIs, submittals, document control and field notes, each a named module in their own navigation. If the GC drowns you in RFIs and submittals and you want that in the same system as the billing, nothing on our product page competes.
Purchase orders as a module.
They market POs as their own module, and sync them with Sage 300 CRE. SubMark pushes a purchase order to QuickBooks Online with a click, which is a useful thing but is not a PO module, and we are not going to describe it as one.
A native iOS field app, actively maintained, with offline access.
Published as a current feature of their field app. SubMark is mobile-first in the browser and built for a thumb, but it is a web app and it needs a connection. For a crew working in a basement or on a steel deck with no signal, that difference is the whole day.
Deeper accounting reach than ours.
Their QuickBooks Online integration sends approved timecards across with a single click, along with projects, contacts, vendors, crew and cost codes. Their directory listing additionally names Foundation, Sage 100, Sage 300, Deltek ComputerEase, Viewpoint and Jonas. SubMark integrates with QuickBooks Online and nothing else. If your books are in Sage or Viewpoint, that is a short conversation.
Eighteen years, named customers, and a body of published work.
Eight named trade landing pages, more than a dozen customer case studies, their own published user and team numbers, a podcast, ebooks and guides. SubMark is new, has no case studies and no customer count, and is not going to invent either. You should weight that honestly — a track record is a real thing to buy, and for some buyers it should decide the whole question.
T&M tickets signed in the field, same as ours.
Worth naming as a strength rather than hiding it: eSUB captures signatures on the spot from a tablet or phone, with labor, materials, equipment and scope on the ticket, and tickets reaching the office immediately. This is not a row we win. It is a row we match, and anyone telling you otherwise has not read their site.
The short list of what we do not do.
Read this before the table. If any one of these is the reason you are shopping, eSUB has it and we do not, and a trial will only cost you the week.
- SubMark does not generate G702 or G703 pay applications, or any owner-standard billing form, and it does not submit anything to your GC. eSUB generates them off the schedule of values.
- SubMark has no drawings management, no RFI module, no submittal module, no document control and no field notes module. eSUB markets all five.
- SubMark has no purchase order module. It can push a PO to QuickBooks Online with a click; eSUB markets POs as a module and syncs them with Sage 300 CRE.
- SubMark does not track retainage released, and does not split retainage by schedule-of-values line. It records retainage withheld per draw and totals it across jobs. eSUB markets withheld and released, by line and by project.
- SubMark has no publicly released mobile app. It is mobile-first in the browser and it needs a connection. eSUB has a maintained iOS app that lists offline access.
- SubMark integrates with QuickBooks Online, and that is the whole accounting list. eSUB reaches Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, Deltek ComputerEase and Jonas.
- SubMark has no published case studies, no customer count and no long track record yet. eSUB has eighteen years of all three.
Price
What each one costs, as far as anyone can tell.
This is where the two products differ most, and it has nothing to do with features. Here is the exact state of the public record as of October 2026.
eSUB
- eSUB has no pricing page. Three likely addresses — /pricing, /pricing/ and /esub-cloud-pricing/ — all return a 404, and no pricing page appears among the 945 URLs in their own sitemap.
- Their FAQ page covers the software model, licensing, devices and project management, and says nothing about cost, trial length, user counts, setup fees or contract length.
- Every feature page ends the same way: book a demo, or call sales.
- Their Capterra listing gives the starting price as “Contact vendor”. That same listing’s free-trial field says yes — a directory field, not an eSUB page, and there is no trial offer anywhere on esub.com. We are reporting that as what it is rather than drawing a conclusion from it.
- Dollar figures for eSUB circulate on several software-aggregator sites. None of them appears on esub.com, which has no pricing page to put one on. We are not going to launder somebody else’s estimate of a competitor’s price into our own comparison page.
SubMark
- SubMark publishes its price on its own pricing page.
- A 14-day free trial, no card needed, starts from the website with no call. Pick your trade, build a real schedule of values, bill a real draw, and decide for yourself.
- Field users — every foreman and every crew member — are free and unlimited, and so are the subcontractors you invite to the portal. You pay for office users, and the first three are in the base price.
- This is not a claim to be cheaper. We have no idea what eSUB would quote you, because nobody outside eSUB does. It is a claim that you can price us and try us today without a sales call, which neither eSUB nor Siteline offers.
$249/mo for your company, your first 3 office users included, $39/mo each after that. See what’s included →
The other side of it
What SubMark has that eSUB does not market.
A word about how this list is phrased, because it matters. eSUB never publishes a list of things it does not do, so every gap below is read off their own complete sitemap and navigation. It means they do not market the capability anywhere on their site — which is not the same as saying their software cannot do it. Where that is all anyone outside the company can know, that is exactly what this page says.
Your mailbox, read-only, with the result on your home page
Connect Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and SubMark surfaces insights on your home page, and logs emails with the contacts in your directory on that company’s timeline — not on a job page. The connection is read-only and message bodies are never stored. No mailbox connection, Outlook or Gmail capability appears anywhere on eSUB’s site; their Field Communications module is in-app messaging, which is a different thing.
How the integrations work →Lien waiver tracking against your draws
Every waiver you owe your GC: type, through date, amount, claimant, and which draw it belongs to, with the status it is at. SubMark does not write the form — you upload your own blanks — and there is no workflow for waivers your own subs owe you. eSUB does not market a lien-waiver capability anywhere on its site: no feature page and no module. An older blog post announces a lien-rights partnership with zlien, and we have not confirmed it is current.
Lien waiver tracking →A draw calendar across every GC you bill
Each job carries its GC’s cutoff day, due day and submission method, so fifteen jobs across nine GCs becomes a calendar you read instead of a calendar in one person’s head. No draw calendar or billing-deadline reminder page appears on eSUB’s site.
Draw tracking →A portal for the subs below you
The tiers below you get a login, and they are free. No portal module or page appears anywhere in eSUB’s navigation or sitemap; what they publish is correspondence with your GC, which runs the other direction.
See the product →A bid board and takeoff, and a safety module
Both ship here, in the same system as the jobs. eSUB publishes safety articles on its blog but no safety module in its navigation or sitemap, and no bidding module — a blog sentence mentions managing bids, which is not a product page.
Everything SubMark does →Crew scheduling as its own module
Who is on which job next week, and the hours to prove it afterward. eSUB publishes time management and can generate crew timecards off a daily report, but no crew-scheduling page or module appears in its current navigation or sitemap — the nearest thing is a mobile scheduling feature announced on their blog in September 2019.
Crew scheduling →A schedule of values that locks itself, and change orders that land on it
It locks once the first pay application you build in SubMark is submitted — a draft, or a draw you log from the GC’s own pay app, leaves it open, so the first cycle is still yours to fix. After that, an approved and issued change order adds its own line automatically, carrying the change order’s code. eSUB publishes the same automatic approved-change-order behavior on its billing page; the lock is ours.
Schedule of values →None of that is a tier you upgrade into. The core modules are on from setup, and a few (T&M tags, takeoff, safety, the subcontractor directory) are switched on in settings. The full list is on the product page.
Side by side, including the seven rows we lose.
Their column comes from eSUB’s own pages, read on October 5, 2026, with their directory listing named where it is the source. Because eSUB publishes no list of things it does not do, several cells read “not marketed on their site” rather than “no” — that is the honest limit of what anyone outside the company can know, and we are not going to dress an inference up as a fact.
| What you need | eSUB | SubMark |
|---|---|---|
| Published price you can read without a call | No. There is no pricing page at all; their listing says “Contact vendor” | Yes, on the pricing page, with the per-seat figure beside it |
| Start without talking to a salesperson | No. Every route on their site ends at a demo request or a sales phone number | Yes. 14-day free trial from the website, no card needed |
| Generate G702 / G703 pay applications | Yes, off the schedule of values | No. We do not generate those forms |
| Schedule of values and draw tracking | Yes — percent complete, work in place, stored materials, retainage by line | Yes. Locks once the first pay application built in SubMark is submitted; approved change orders add their own line automatically |
| Retainage withheld and released | Yes, withheld and released, by line and by project | Withheld per draw, in dollars, and totaled across every job in the draws report. No release tracking and no line-item split |
| T&M field tickets signed on site | Yes, signed on a tablet or phone before the crew leaves | Yes, on site or by link, and the signature locks the ticket. Note that T&M hours are billed, not costed |
| Daily logs from the field | Yes — weather, crew, labor, delays, equipment, visitors, photos and video | Yes — weather, crew and hours, work performed, delays, visitors and photos. Uploads are images |
| Job costing | Yes, by phase and cost code, and they call it real-time | Yes — budget vs. actual per job, from the labor logs, the purchase orders and the QuickBooks Online bills, at wage rate rather than fully burdened. No cost codes, and we do not call it real-time |
| Drawings, RFIs, submittals, document control, field notes | Yes, five named modules | No, none of them |
| Purchase order module | Yes, and synced with Sage 300 CRE | No module. A purchase order pushes to QuickBooks Online with a click |
| Native mobile app with offline access | Yes, a maintained iOS app listing offline access | No. Mobile-first in the browser, and it needs a connection |
| Crew scheduling | Not marketed as a module on their current site. They publish time management, and crew timecards off a daily report | Yes, as its own module |
| Time clock for the crew | Yes — crew time collected in the field and approved in the office | Yes, and the field seats are free |
| Lien waiver tracking | Not marketed as a feature or module on their site | Yes, for waivers you owe your GC, tied to the draw. Tracking only; you upload your own blank forms |
| Billing-deadline calendar across your GCs | Not marketed on their site | Yes — cutoff, due date and submission method, per job |
| Read-only mailbox connection, with insights on your home page | Not marketed on their site. Their Field Communications module is in-app messaging | Yes — Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, read-only, bodies never stored |
| Portal for your lower-tier subs | Not marketed on their site. What they publish is correspondence with your GC | Yes, and they are free |
| Safety module and a bid board | Neither is marketed as a module. Safety appears only in their blog articles | Both ship, in the same system as the jobs |
| Accounting integrations | QuickBooks Online and Sage 300 CRE on their own blog; their listing adds Foundation, Sage 100, Deltek ComputerEase, Viewpoint and Jonas. They publish no integrations page | QuickBooks Online. Bills and purchases pull in hourly if you turn it on; a draw pushes back as a QBO invoice with a click, one at a time |
| Cost of putting your foremen on it | Not published, because no pricing is | Nothing. Field users and invited subs are free and unlimited |
| Published customers and track record | Since 2008, more than a dozen case studies, eight named trade pages, their own published user numbers | None. SubMark is new and we will not invent any |
The honest split
Which of the two you should actually buy.
eSUB is the closer competitor of the two we compare against, which makes this split genuinely close for a lot of companies. The left column is real advice, written knowing it sends some readers to them.
Buy eSUB if…
- You need the pay application generated. They produce G702 and G703 off the schedule of values; we do not generate those forms. This one row outweighs most of the rest of the page.
- Drawings, RFIs and submittals are where your week goes. Five modules there, none here. If the GC’s document load is the problem, it is not a close call.
- You want purchase orders as a module rather than a push to your accounting system.
- You need to track retainage released, or see which schedule-of-values lines are still holding it. We record what was withheld on each draw; the release side is theirs.
- Your crews work where there is no signal. Their iOS app lists offline access; we are a web app and need a connection.
- Your books are in Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, Deltek ComputerEase or Jonas, not QuickBooks Online.
- Track record is part of what you are buying. Eighteen years and more than a dozen case studies against a product with no published case studies is a real argument, and it is theirs.
- You are happy to book a demo and go through a sales process. That is the only way to buy eSUB, and plenty of subs prefer being walked through it.
Buy SubMark if…
- You want to know the price before you talk to anybody. Ours is published; eSUB has no pricing page at all. If you have ever been quoted a number you could not sanity-check, you already know why that matters.
- You want to try it this afternoon. A 14-day free trial, no card needed, no demo first. Pick your trade, build one real schedule of values, bill a draw, decide.
- Email is where your project history actually lives. A read-only mailbox connection with insights on your home page, and emails with your directory contacts on the company’s timeline, is the thing neither competitor markets.
- You owe lien waivers every month and lose track of which draw they belong to. That is tracked here, and not marketed anywhere on their site.
- You bill several GCs on several different calendars. Cutoff, due date and submission method per job, in one draw calendar.
- You have subs below you who need a login. The portal is here and they are free.
- Your whole office is four people and you do not want five modules you will never open. We are narrower than eSUB on purpose, and for a smaller commercial sub that is a feature.
- Your books are in QuickBooks Online and you want the job-cost side pulling in by itself.
Questions
eSUB and SubMark: what a sub’s office actually asks.
How much does eSUB cost?
They do not publish it, and the absence is unusually complete: there is no pricing page on esub.com at all, three likely addresses return a 404, and no pricing page appears among the 945 URLs in their own sitemap. Their FAQ page covers the software model, licensing and devices, and says nothing about cost, trial, seats, setup fees or contract length. Their Capterra listing gives the starting price as “Contact vendor”. Dollar figures for eSUB do circulate on software-aggregator sites — we are not going to repeat them, because none of them comes from eSUB and we would not accept a competitor doing it to us. SubMark’s price is on our pricing page: a monthly company subscription including your first three office users, a published per-seat price after that, and field users free.
Is SubMark an eSUB competitor?
Yes, more directly than anything else we compare against. eSUB is built exclusively for commercial subcontractors, sells to the same four roles — executive, project manager, foreman and office — and names most of the same trades we do. Seven of the capabilities we would call core are things eSUB publishes too: the schedule of values and draws, change orders, T&M tickets with signatures, daily logs, job costing, crew time and QuickBooks Online. The real differences are at the edges. They generate the billing forms and run five documentation modules we do not have; we have the mailbox connection, the sub portal, lien waiver tracking and the draw calendar, none of which they market. And they are eighteen years old with case studies, where we are new with a published price and a trial you can start yourself.
Does eSUB have a free trial?
We genuinely cannot tell you, and that is the honest answer. There is no trial offer on esub.com and no trial page in their sitemap; every path ends at a demo request. Their Capterra listing’s free-trial field says yes. Those two things disagree, the directory field is not an eSUB page, and we are not going to settle a competitor’s commercial terms on their behalf in either direction — ask them. SubMark has a 14-day free trial, no card needed, started from our website.
Can SubMark generate my G702 and G703 pay applications like eSUB does?
No. SubMark does not generate those forms; it can only read a G702 PDF you have already submitted, to log the draw. eSUB generates them off the schedule of values and we do not, so if that is your reason for shopping, this comparison ends there. What SubMark keeps is the record behind the form: one schedule of values per job that locks once the first pay application built in SubMark is submitted, approved change orders added as their own lines automatically, each draw carrying the retainage withheld and the check to expect, and a draws report across every job that exports to Excel or PDF. If you bill in the GC’s own portal or template, what you need is that record to be right rather than re-typed.
eSUB has an offline mobile app. What does SubMark have?
A web app, built mobile-first and designed for a thumb — a foreman files a daily log, and a GC signs a T&M tag on site, in a phone browser, with no install and no app-store update to chase. But it needs a connection, and eSUB publishes offline access as a feature of their iOS app. If your crews routinely work somewhere with no signal, that is a real advantage and it is theirs.
Does SubMark do RFIs and submittals like eSUB?
No. eSUB has drawings management, RFIs, submittals, document control and field notes as five named modules, and SubMark has none of them. SubMark is a narrower product aimed at the money side of the job — the schedule of values and draws, change orders and T&M, job costing, the daily log, the crew schedule and the time clock — plus a bid board at the front and lien waiver tracking at the back. For a sub whose main pain is the GC’s document machine, eSUB is the better fit and we will say so.
Where did the facts on this page come from?
eSUB’s own public website, read on October 5, 2026 — their home page, the feature and module pages in their own navigation, their FAQ, their sitemap and their integration blog posts — plus their own Capterra and App Store listings where those are named as the source. Nothing comes from a search summary, a review aggregator’s guess or a price estimate. Because eSUB publishes no list of things it does not do, every gap on this page is phrased as “not marketed on their site”, which is what a complete sitemap can honestly support and no more. Features and pricing change; if you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Read next
Does SubMark do AIA G702 and G703 billing?
The row this page concedes, in full — what SubMark keeps instead of the form, and when a dedicated billing-document product is the better buy.
SubMark vs. the spreadsheet you bill out of today
The comparison most subs are actually making, since the incumbent is usually a workbook rather than either product on this page.
T&M tickets in commercial construction: getting signed before the crew leaves
The one row where eSUB and SubMark genuinely match, and what makes the difference on either product — the signature, not the software.
Lien waiver tracking: what you owe, to whom, and by when
The capability eSUB does not market at all, explained from the sub’s side — and the difference between tracking a waiver and writing one.
SubMark vs. Siteline
The other product we compare against, worth your afternoon, compared the same way and from the same kind of sources.
One of these two you can price and try today.
Book the eSUB demo if the pay application or the RFI pile is your real problem — go do that, genuinely. If what you want is to see a price, start this afternoon, and judge the thing on one real job, that is the part we can offer and they cannot.
14-day free trial, no card needed. See the whole product →
About this comparison
Everything stated here about eSUB was read from eSUB’s own public website in October 2026, with any directory listing named where it is the source. Nothing is taken from a review aggregator’s summary, and no price is attributed to eSUB that eSUB does not publish itself. Software changes: features, modules and pricing may have moved since. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it — including when the correction favors them.
SubMark is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by eSUB, Oracle, Procore, Intuit, Sage, Autodesk, or The American Institute of Architects. All third-party names and trademarks referenced on this page, including AIA, G702 and G703, are the property of their respective owners and are used only to describe what each product does.