ZeroCount vs Groundplan — an honest comparison.

Credit where due: Groundplan publishes its UK price, which most takeoff software does not. It is £59 per seat per month, with £118 off for paying yearly, and no contract. Estimating is inside that price, which is a real part of its value.

Automatic counting is not. Count Assist is an add-on at £59 a month and needs an active subscription, so one estimator who wants Groundplan to do the counting pays £118 a month on monthly billing. Groundplan’s pricing page does not say whether the add-on is charged per seat or per account, so for a team, ask them.

ZeroCount is £55 per licence per month, with the counting included. It is the whole point of the product, not an extra, and unlimited drawings and symbols are inside the price. Estimating is not built in the way Groundplan’s is. Counts hand off into Ensign, with 300,000+ live UK prices behind them. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.

Count Assist works the way its tagline says. You select a symbol, it searches the plan for others like it, and you review the results before applying them. Keeping the estimator in control is a deliberate choice, and a good one. Nothing gets counted that you have not looked at. Without the add-on, Groundplan’s counts and measurements are made by hand on screen.

ZeroCount starts at the other end. A vision model trained on UK construction drawings reads the sheet and counts what it recognises by convention, not by matching a shape you picked. On an electrical layout that means luminaires come out split by type and accessories by variant, without picking an example of each first. You still check the result, because anything it is unsure of is flagged for review. The trade-off is real: a model gives a judgement, not an exact match, so it will sometimes want a correction where matching an identical symbol would have been certain. The AI takeoff page explains how the model reads a drawing.

Groundplan accepts PDFs and image files. Its own help documentation is clear about what Count Assist does with a scan: “Count Assist will not search scanned plans”. Symbols on an image plan are counted by hand, and the advice is to get the original PDF. That is honest and reasonable, and it is also the step that costs the time.

Groundplan’s documentation calls scanned plans a rare case. Further down a UK building-services supply chain they are common. By the time a package reaches the subcontractor it has often been printed, marked up, scanned and emailed, and the original PDF belongs to someone who is not answering the phone on a Friday. ZeroCount runs vector PDFs, scanned PDFs and photographed plans through the same engine at the same price. The best test of either tool is the worst drawing on your desk.

Groundplan lists twelve trades, from electrical, fire and HVAC to painting, roofing and landscaping. It connects to job-management and accounts software such as simPRO, AroFlo, Fergus, Xero and QuickBooks. For a trade business that quotes its own work across several trades and already runs one of those systems, that breadth is a strong reason to choose it.

ZeroCount covers five trades and goes further into each: what gets counted, what gets measured, and which UK drawing conventions it reads. See electrical, mechanical, mep, ductwork and insulation. If your work sits inside those five and arrives as tender drawings, not your own plans, the narrower tool is probably the better fit. If it does not, Groundplan probably is.