STACK alternatives

STACK sells four cloud products: Evaluate (plan and specification management), Takeoff ("automatically measure drawings digitally with speed and precision"), Estimate (pricing and proposals) and Build (field operations). It serves specialty contractors, general contractors, suppliers and manufacturers, and owners. Takeoff works on PDF and TIFF plans with tools for area, linear, arc, pitched, count and volume measurement, and its AI is described as "auto-counting symbols and suggesting scope you might miss" and "automatically identifying doors, windows, walls, and rooms within digital building plans". It also auto-organises plan sets, detects revisions and overlays drawing versions.

Pricing is public as of October 2026. Takeoff & Estimate is "as low as $299 per user / month", Build & Operate "as low as $49 per user / month" and the full STACK platform "as low as $348 per user / month", with a free version and a two-week trial. The pricing page does not say which tiers include the AI takeoff features. STACK's integrations page lists Acumatica, Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Desktop and Online, Procore (two integrations), Autodesk, Ediphi, FollowUp CRM, TopBuilder, Nearmap, Dodge Data, BidCentral, BNi cost data, Velixo (STACK for Excel) and Workpack, described as an AI takeoff engine, plus API access.

STACK is widely reviewed: Software Advice rates it 4.5 out of 5 on 1,399 reviews, with takeoff management, estimating and support (4.7) as the recurring strengths and price, navigation, performance on slow connections and the mobile app as the recurring criticisms. Named customers on its site include F.E. Moran, ABC Supply, Kiewit, Siemens, PCL, CentiMark and 5 Seasons Mechanical. Its stated outcomes ("revenue growth", "increase in bids won", "faster takeoffs") carry no published figures.

Mirage is a forward-deployed AI engineering company. Its takeoff agent reads plan, section and detail sheets together, on PDF, DWG and IFC files, and returns quantities with the source sheet attached, for your estimators to price in the system they already use. Mirage's engineers deploy it on your drawing sets and conventions and run it in production. The published results are from the John Cockerill case study, 80 to 90% less time on piping takeoff and a fabrication bill of materials ten times faster, and from OCBM, three agents in production with every quantity traceable to its source drawing. A proof of concept on your own drawings comes one week after the first meeting; the first workflow is in production in 4 to 6 weeks.

The difference is what the AI does. In STACK, AI counts symbols and suggests scope while the estimator measures and prices in STACK's own tools. In Mirage, the agent produces the quantities, a person reviews them before anything is priced, and the estimating system stays yours: Mirage maintains no material catalogue or labour database and does not replace STACK's estimate and proposal tools.

Start with what you want the AI to do. If a faster estimator in a good cloud tool is the goal, STACK's auto-count and scope suggestions do that, and the trial will show it within a day. If you want the measuring done by the agent and reviewed by the estimator, that is Mirage, and the proof of concept on your own drawings will show it within a week.

Then the workspace. If you need takeoff, estimate and proposal in one place with accounting behind it, STACK is that place. If you already have an estimating system you are keeping, Mirage feeds it and adds nothing to work in.

Then the drawings. Building plans with symbols to count are STACK's ground. Piping isometrics, engineering packages and French tender sets are where Mirage's published deployments sit.