The best electrical estimating software for teams that don't share an office

All buying guides › Electrical estimating software

We scored each product on the five criteria published on our buying guides hub: fit for purpose, total cost, support and ecosystem, maturity, and delivery behaviour.

The first four come from vendor documentation, published pricing and verified user reviews on Capterra and Software Advice, all checked on 24 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say so rather than guess.

The fifth is different. Delivery behaviour is about what a product does when it is not installed on the estimator’s own PC: whether the vendor supports remote desktop and virtual environments, how the database is shared, what happens to Mac users, and what the licence lets you do. For this criterion we lean on the vendors’ own system requirements and on what we see hosting these applications every day. Conest’s cloud edition, CE Cloud, runs on our infrastructure, so for IntelliBid the evidence is production traffic rather than a lab test. Our deployment guide covers how to run any of these tools remotely.

Products are listed alphabetically in the table. The verdicts follow.

V2 Cloud partner products: Conest. See the disclosure at the end of this guide.

Head-to-head: Conest vs Accubid.

IntelliBid has been the workhorse of commercial electrical estimating since Conest was founded in 1989, and it shows in the database: more than 140,000 NEC-friendly items and over 500,000 pre-built assembly kits, with manufacturer-specific catalogues from Hubbell, Leviton, Panduit, Schneider Electric, Siemens and others. Three editions cover the range from a two-estimator shop (Standard) to firms that want job-specific assemblies, change orders and bid analysis (Pro). Auto Labor Factoring adjusts labour for installation height, floors, run length and quantity, and pricing comes in from NetPricer, EPIC or TRA-SER, with comparison across up to ten local suppliers.

Takeoff is a separate application, SureCount, with a built-in link: quantities counted on the drawing land in the estimate with drawings and phases intact. Reviewers on Capterra rate IntelliBid 4.6 out of 5 across 24 reviews and single out support as “second to none”. The recurring complaint is the setup time before the depth pays off.

It is a Windows client/server application on Microsoft SQL Server. Out of the box, that means one estimator, one workstation, and a database that lives on your server.

Deployment reality

This is where IntelliBid separates from its desktop peers. Conest’s own requirements document supports the product on Windows Terminal Services (RDS) and Citrix, and it says something else worth reading twice: connecting IntelliBid to its SQL database over a VPN is not recommended because of latency, but remote desktop into a machine that has IntelliBid installed works fine. That is the hosted-desktop pattern exactly. Application and database sit together in the data centre. Estimators connect from wherever they are.

We know this works at scale because Conest runs its cloud edition, CE Cloud, on our platform. When Conest wanted a cloud version without rewriting the software, they chose us, and setting up a new customer environment dropped from about an hour to minutes, a 75% reduction (see our Conest customer story). The same setup is available to any contractor that owns IntelliBid licences: one shared environment, every estimator in the company reaching the same assemblies and bid files from any device, Macs included. That last point matters more than it used to. Apple Silicon Macs cannot run IntelliBid locally at all, because Conest does not support ARM-based machines even under Parallels. One sizing note: Conest bundles SQL Server Express, which caps the database at 10 GB, and asks customers with ten or more IntelliBid licences to talk to support about options. Plan for SQL Server Standard on the hosted server at that point.

McCormick has been selling estimating software since 1979, which is why so many estimators already know it and why hiring for it is easier than for most. The current product bundles digital takeoff (Design Estimating Pro, with the patented Auto Home Run feature) into one program, backed by a 55,000-item database, 25,000 pre-built assemblies and prevailing wage tables for all 50 states. Software Advice lists it from $300 per user per month and shows a 4.4 rating across 113 reviews, with support the highest-scoring category.

Deployment reality

McCormick sells both an on-premises version and its own cloud version, and reviewers are candid about the second one: the online edition is described as slower than the desktop and prone to crashes, and more than one reviewer mentions that only one user can be in a project at a time. Hosting the desktop version on a cloud desktop sidesteps the first problem, because you get the desktop product with remote access, but not the second. Per-user pricing means hosting saves hardware, not licences.

Procore bought Austin-based Esticom in October 2020, when it had about 1,000 customers and 1,600 users, and folded it into the Procore platform as Procore Estimating. It is browser-based takeoff and estimating for electrical, plumbing, structured cabling, fire, security and HVAC contractors, with AI floor-plan detection and auto-count, and its real argument is the connection into Procore’s project financials. Software Advice reviewers rate it 4.5 across 117 reviews. Functionality scores lowest of the four sub-ratings, and reviewers ask for accounting integration and better Canadian pricing data.

Deployment reality

Nothing to host. Any device with a browser works, so the question is not whether it runs remotely but whether its assembly depth matches heavy commercial bidding. Pricing is per user and quote-based.

Announced in August 2019, Accubid Anywhere is Trimble’s cloud-hosted estimating subscription: estimating, LiveCount graphical takeoff, Trade Service pricing, Supplier Xchange quotes and change management, with Trimble Connect included. Trimble hosts and maintains it, and it is built for multi-user, multi-branch operation, so estimators in different offices share the same items, assemblies and projects. On paper, that is what a distributed team wants.

The reviews are the caution. Capterra users rate it 3.6 out of 5 across 71 reviews. Speed is the most common complaint (“too slow for using in a competitive bidding” is one estimator’s verdict), cost is the next, and Classic users report that their existing databases could not be carried across and had to be rebuilt.

Deployment reality

Trimble runs the servers, so there is no environment to build. The trade-offs are structural. Performance is whatever Trimble’s hosting delivers on the day, pricing is a quote-based subscription that reviewers describe as rising each year, and the database and estimate history live inside Trimble’s platform. For non-Windows devices, confirm client requirements with Trimble before you commit.

Classic is the desktop Accubid that a large share of commercial contractors learned on, and Trimble still develops it: Classic Pro v16 ships inside the Accubid Classic Estimating Essentials subscription. It carries 42,000+ items and 13,000+ assemblies, labour factoring, multi-level breakdowns by floor, system, area or cost code, and a bi-directional link to LiveCount for cloud takeoff now that LiveCount Desktop has been discontinued. Trimble sells it monthly or yearly and also offers a Trimble-hosted edition.

Deployment reality

Classic is a Windows desktop product, so it hosts the way any Windows application does: on a cloud desktop, alongside your accounting and takeoff tools, reachable from Macs and thin clients. Trimble’s own hosted edition is a narrower version of the same idea, limited to Accubid. Hosting Classic is a sensible bridge for a contractor that wants distributed access now without rebuilding its database for Anywhere.

TurboBid targets residential, light commercial, remodel, service and flat-rate work for electrical and plumbing contractors, and it is priced to match: $135 per user per month, or $1,595 one-time, plus an optional TurboCloud subscription ($99 a month) that pushes material price updates and new assemblies into the program. Takeoff comes through PlanSwift. Software Advice reviewers give it 4.6 across 29 reviews and describe it as easy to learn.

Deployment reality

It is a single-user Windows desktop product. On a hosted desktop it becomes remote access for one estimator, which suits an owner-estimator who bids from home and from the truck, but it is not a multi-user platform and does not pretend to be one. TurboCloud is a pricing service, not hosting.

EBM’s distinctive asset is Vision’s EPIC pricing service: more than two million electrical items across 100-plus manufacturer catalogues, updated as often as daily, with target-price comparison and supplier price imports. The estimator itself ships with 10,000+ items and assemblies, integrates with PlanSwift and On-Screen Takeoff, and links job costing to QuickBooks. Vision publishes a starting point of under $1,000 a year, which makes it the least expensive commercial-grade option here. Like Conest, Vision InfoSoft is part of JDM Technology Group.

Deployment reality

Windows only. Vision lists Windows 8, 10 and 11 as supported and Mac OS and ARM processors as not. The company’s own website says EBM can run on Windows virtual machines in the cloud and names V2 Cloud as one of the providers, so a hosted desktop is a vendor-recognised way to give a Mac user, or a second office, access to it.

Here is the part of the decision that a feature comparison hides.

Five of the seven products above are Windows desktop applications. A contractor with five estimators across two offices who buys one of them has, by default, bought five workstations, five installs, and a synchronisation problem. Estimates live on individual machines. The senior estimator’s assembly tweaks do not propagate. When someone leaves, their bids leave with the laptop.

Hosting changes the arithmetic. One shared cloud desktop environment, every estimator reaching it from whatever device they own, one set of assemblies, one place bids live. The desktop products that tolerate this well (IntelliBid explicitly, Classic and EBM in practice) become multi-office platforms without a migration and without a per-user cloud subscription. Our plans start from $35 a month and are sized by workload, and a new environment is ready in about 20 minutes.

That is why the delivery column matters more than any single feature. An estimating package that runs well on a shared cloud desktop is a different product from the same package installed locally, and the buying decision should be made on the version you will actually use.

It also changes the cost comparison. Cloud-native platforms carry a per-user subscription indefinitely and keep your database inside their platform. A hosted desktop platform carries the desktop licence plus hosting, with no per-workstation hardware, and the database stays yours. Which is cheaper depends on team size and how long you keep the software, and the answer is not always the cloud-native one.

Contractors running construction accounting alongside estimating can put both in the same environment. Our ComputerEase hosting page shows the accounting side, and our engineering and architecture page shows the same approach for CAD-heavy firms.

Written by Jason Aiginitis, Director of Demand Generation, V2 Cloud. Product facts checked 24 September 2026. Last updated 25 September 2026.

Sources

• Conest: IntelliBid product page, accessed 24 September 2026
• Conest: Hardware and OS requirements (PDF, Feb 2026)
• Conest: CE Cloud platform
• JDM Technology Group acquires Conest (28 Feb 2017)
• Capterra: IntelliBid reviews (4.6/5, 24 reviews)
• V2 Cloud: Conest customer story
• Trimble: Accubid Anywhere product page
• Trimble announces Accubid Anywhere (7 Aug 2019)
• Capterra: Trimble Accubid Anywhere reviews (3.6/5, 71 reviews)
• Trimble: Accubid Classic product page
• McCormick Systems: electrical estimating
• Software Advice: McCormick Electrical Estimating (4.4/5, 113 reviews; from $300/user/month)
• Procore acquires Esticom (27 Oct 2020)
• Software Advice: Procore Estimating (4.5/5, 117 reviews)
• TurboBid: TurboCloud pricing
• Software Advice: TurboBid (4.6/5, 29 reviews; $135/user/month or $1,595 one-time)
• Vision InfoSoft: Electrical Bid Manager (requirements, pricing, cloud VM statement)
• V2 Cloud: pricing