ZeroCount vs Kreo — an honest comparison.

Kreo publishes four plans. The UK prices, per user per month and billed annually, are Lite at £25, Plus at £50 and Pro at £125, with Enterprise on request. Lite and Plus are for collaboration, manual measurement, templates and reports. Kreo’s pricing page describes them as plans without its AI measuring tools. Auto Count, Auto Measure and One-Click Area arrive on Pro.

So if the reason you are buying is for the software to do the counting, the like-for-like Kreo figure is £125 per user per month on an annual plan. To be fair to Kreo, Pro includes much more than counting: the estimating spreadsheet, the assemblies database, reports, area measurement and the Caddie agent all come with it.

ZeroCount is £55 per licence per month, and the counting is what you are paying for. Unlimited drawings and symbols are inside the price. Estimating is not built in. Counts hand off into Ensign, with 300,000+ live UK prices behind them. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.

Kreo’s Auto Count is a similarity search, and a well-built one. You select a reference element, erase any clutter around it and allow for rotation or flipping if you need to. It then finds matching elements across the drawing, and you review them with a similarity score beside each. “Split by Text” separates identical shapes that carry different labels. “Save for next time” reuses a reference on other pages. Nothing is counted until you have reviewed it.

ZeroCount doesn’t start from a reference. A vision model trained on UK construction drawings reads the sheet and counts what it recognises by convention. On an electrical layout, luminaires come out split by type and accessories by variant without picking an example of each first. That matters most on the sheets with the most symbol types. Anything the model is unsure of is flagged for review. The trade-off is the same one as always: a model gives a judgement, so it will sometimes want a correction where a close match to a reference would have been certain.

Kreo accepts PDFs, CAD files and images, so a scan will open. Its help centre describes the platform as reading “native PDF and CAD vector data (not rasterized images)”, and its AI area tool notes that polygons on an image have no text to be named from. What its documentation does not say is how Auto Count performs on a scanned sheet. We won’t guess on Kreo’s behalf, so ask for it to be shown to you.

It’s worth asking because of where building-services drawings come from. By the time a package reaches the subcontractor it has often been printed, marked up, scanned and emailed. ZeroCount runs vector PDFs, scanned PDFs and photographed plans through the same engine at the same price. The fairest test of both is one scanned, red-penned sheet from a live tender.

Kreo’s range is wide. Auto Measure finds rooms, walls, doors and windows and returns floor areas such as GIA and NIA. There is a separate BIM takeoff, native CAD uploads and an AI agent, Caddie, that runs repeatable workflows your team can build without code. Its trades menu covers flooring, concrete, electrical, framing, drywall, painting, steel and masonry. For a quantity surveyor or a finishes contractor that breadth is the point, and ZeroCount does not try to match 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 is measuring buildings, Kreo is probably the better fit. If it is pricing the building services from tender drawings, ZeroCount probably is.