Most subcontractors did not choose Procore. The general contractor chose it, and an invitation arrived.
So the useful question is narrower than whether it is good software. Submittals now run through it either way. Which part of the work did that take off your desk, and which part did it simply put on a screen where everyone can watch you not finish it.
I should say where I stand. I ran construction for twenty years and I build SubPro now, which makes submittal packages, so I am not a neutral party. This is also not a takedown. Procore does what it says, and what it says has never been the part of submittals that eats a subcontractor's week.
What the Submittals tool does
Procore's documentation describes a tool for organizing and managing the submittal workflow:
- Create submittal items manually, or bring them in through Procore Imports
- Submittal Builder, which generates submittal items from spec sections
- Organize by division, add shop drawings, or pages from product catalogs
- Group items into submittal packages for bulk processing
- Assign submitter and approver roles, with sequential or parallel review
- Track status per item with configurable response types
- Attach documents directly or pull them from the project Documents tool
- Mark up PDFs with a personal stamp
- Filter, report and export, with QR codes for field access
Read down that list and the theme is movement. Where is it, who has it, how long have they had it, what came back. On a job carrying four hundred submittal items across six reviewers that matters more than people who have never run one appreciate. Before tools like this, locating any single item meant interrupting whoever touched it last, and often whoever touched it before them.
Submittal Builder is the one entry that reads the project manual. It generates the items, which is the register, and that is the hardest thing on the list to build well.
Where the tool ends
What follows is a scope, not a flaw, and no one at Procore has ever claimed otherwise.
The system will tell you 08 71 00 door hardware owes product data and that it is due on the fourteenth. It routes the item to the architect. It shows you the architect has been holding it nine days. It lets you stamp the PDF and it keeps the response attached to the record forever.
What it will not do is open the project manual, read sixty pages of Division 08, work out which of the eleven listed manufacturers your supplier actually stocks, pull the cut sheets, check the finish and the ANSI grade against what the section demands, put the whole thing in order behind a cover sheet, and hand you one PDF.
That is the work. On a spec heavy job it runs to something like forty hours across a project for a mid sized sub, and almost none of those hours need your expensive people. Reading, matching, downloading, assembling.
The confusion is not anybody's bad faith. It comes from the word itself. To a general contractor a submittal is a record that moves through a process. To a subcontractor a submittal is a document somebody has to build from scratch. One piece of software, two completely different nouns.
The four hundred item problem
Watch how it plays out.
The general contractor issues the log and ninety of those rows have your name on them. Each one becomes an item with a due date and a status, which beats a spreadsheet emailed on a Friday afternoon by a wide margin.
Then a project engineer opens item one and needs a PDF to attach to it. From there everything is hand work. Find the section, read it, match the product, get the sheet, check the sheet against the section, attach, next. Eighty nine more times, while the system displays your progress to the general contractor, the architect and anyone else with a login.
The visibility that helps the general contractor run the job is the same visibility that turns your assembly backlog into a public document. That is not a criticism of the software, and it is probably a net good for the project. It does explain why plenty of subs feel more exposed after a platform rollout rather than more productive, and why "we have Procore now" and "submittals are handled" are answers to different questions.
What goes with it
If your hours disappear into chasing status, Procore already fixed your problem and you can stop reading. If they do not, the comparison page lays out which products cover which part of the job.
If they disappear into building content, what you want is something that produces the object you attach to the item. Honestly stated, there are a few.
Submittal.com is a library and assembly tool from BuildSite with two decades of product data. They call their own approach to the register semi automated, automation where you want it and control where you need it, which is a fair statement of the tradeoff. They add a closeout assembler for operation and maintenance manuals and warranty books.
BuildSync does both: it builds submittal packages for mechanical, electrical and plumbing equipment out of its own product database, and it checks a package you already have against the project manual. Outside those three trades, the checking half is what you get. Their published rejection figures are worth reading in the category comparison, with the caveat noted there.
SubPro is my company. It reads the project manual, finds the manufacturer documents out of a library of more than 400 indexed manufacturers, and assembles the submittal package behind your transmittal. Every row carries the spec page it came from, so the reviewer checks a citation rather than trusting a machine, and rows it could not resolve arrive flagged. A person goes over it before you get it. You attach the result to the Procore item and route it exactly as the general contractor requires. Your documents come out of the system after processing, and nothing you send is used to train anything. Worth saying, since this article is written from the sub's chair: general contractors run it too, for the register off the project manual and the record through closeout. Owing the list and owing the contents are different jobs, and a self performing general contractor owes both.
None of those replace Procore as the job's system of record, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. Where the general contractor runs Procore, the submittal goes into Procore. What a sub gets out of a tool like SubPro is their own copy of the thread: what went out, on what date, what came back, which rows are still waiting and for how long, and what the addendum changed. That record is worth holding on your own side of the line, because the general contractor's platform is not going to reconstruct it for you at closeout, and it is not yours to keep when the job ends.
Check this yourself
Do not take my word for the split, because your jobs are not my jobs. Take one submittal from last month and time it in two halves.
Assembly first: from opening the spec section to holding a finished PDF with a cover sheet on it.
Then administration: logging it, routing it, chasing it, filing the response.
Multiply both across a project and buy against whichever number is bigger. In twenty years I never once saw the second number win, but yours might, and that is worth twenty minutes to find out before anyone signs anything.