Salus alternatives for Canadian contractors

Most people reading this have either been asked to book a walkthrough before Salus will quote them, or have been told by a prime contractor that their paper binder is finished and they now need something on a phone.

This page compares the options honestly, including where Salus is the better pick. We make one of the products on the list, so read what you give up before you decide anything.

What Salus does well

This is not a courtesy paragraph. If the comparison is not fair, nothing else on the page is worth your time.

It has strong Canadian association relationships. That is not marketing decoration in this market. When a safety association already knows a product, your auditor already knows what its exports look like, and that removes friction from a COR audit that nobody talks about until they are sitting in one.

It has an open API. Very little in Canadian safety software does. An API means your data can move: into your payroll system, into a dispatch board, into a reporting warehouse, or out entirely if you decide to leave. It is the single most practical thing a vendor hosted product can offer a buyer who worries about lock in, and Salus offers it while most of its competitors do not.

It has an AuditSoft integration. AuditSoft is the COR auditing platform used by SCSA, Construction Safety Nova Scotia, AgSafe BC, Continuing Care Safety Association, SafetyDriven and Canada's manufacturing safety associations. If your certifying partner audits through AuditSoft, that integration is a real advantage. We do not have one.

Salus compared with the alternatives

Source: vendor pricing pages, Capterra listings and public acquisition announcements, checked the week of 27 July 2026. Where a row says "not published", the vendor requires a sales conversation before disclosing it. Where it says "not verified in our sources", we could not confirm it from a primary source and will not assert something about a competitor we have not checked.

The pricing question

This is the most interesting difference between us and Salus, and it is a genuine disagreement rather than a gotcha.

Salus does not publish a price. Getting one starts with a form and then a walkthrough of about 30 minutes, and the number arrives after that conversation.

Their own pricing page argues the case for working that way instead of apologizing for it. The gist, paraphrased: a generic published tier can hide what a buyer will actually end up paying once the real requirements surface, and it can push a buyer into purchasing around an arbitrary feature list rather than around the way their operation actually runs.

That is a reasonable position, honestly held. Anyone who has watched a company buy the wrong tier and then pay again to fix it knows the failure mode they are describing is real.

We have taken the other side of it. Our number is on the pricing page and nobody had to talk to us to see it. The licence is $0, at any crew size, forever, and that is not a tier or a trial. A buyer comparing five vendors on a Tuesday night should be able to eliminate or shortlist us without booking anything.

Here is where the argument cuts at us too, and we would rather say it than have you notice it later. The software is free, but the program build is a separate paid engagement, priced by company size and how much documentation you already have, and we have not published a figure for that. So on our services we are quote based as well. The difference is narrower than it looks: what we publish is the part that recurs forever, and what we quote is the one time work.

What reviewers say is missing from Salus

Every item below is reported by reviewers on Capterra, a public review site. It is their feedback, not our claim, and it should be weighed against the association relationships and the API above.

• Subcontractor compliance tracking is weak. If you are the prime and you are chasing certificates and safety documentation from four subs, reviewers on Capterra report this is not where the product is strongest.
• Forms fail to save in connectivity red zones. Reviewers describe losing work where there is no signal. That is the exact scenario this software category exists for.
• No mass upload. Bringing in a worker list or a fleet by hand takes as long as it sounds.
• No batch email. Sending the same document out to a crew becomes a manual job.
• Reviewers describe it as earlier stage, with bugs. Some of them frame that positively, as a vendor still moving quickly and taking requests.

We are in no position to be smug about the last one. A newer product is a newer product, and ours is newer than theirs.

What you give up by choosing us

Required reading. If any of this is a dealbreaker, buy Salus, and we would rather you worked that out now than four months into a build.

• Salus has association relationships that we do not. No association endorses us, and there is nobody to vouch for us in a room we are not in.
• Salus has an open API and we do not have an equivalent story to tell. What we offer instead is the whole database, because it is your Supabase project, which is a different answer to the same problem and not the same as a documented integration surface.
• There is no AuditSoft integration today. Both Salus and SiteDocs have built one.
• There is no dedicated support desk and no 24/7 phone line. During a build you have direct access to the person doing the work. There is no overnight escalation path behind that person.
• It is a smaller product with a shorter track record. Rough edges are still being found.
• There are no published case studies or customer references yet. We are not going to invent them.
• There is no reseller or partner network.
• Somebody has to handle hosting. Either you set up Supabase and Vercel, or we do it during the build. Either way there is an account in your name that you are responsible for. That is the flip side of owning the system, explained in more detail on the self host page.

Who should pick which

Pick Salus if your certifying partner audits through AuditSoft, you want a Canadian vendor with association standing, you need a documented API to connect payroll or dispatch, and a form plus a walkthrough before you see a price is a fair trade for that. Go in knowing what reviewers report about low signal saves and subcontractor tracking, and test both during a trial period rather than after.

Pick SiteDocs if you want the more mature product with a support desk and a purchase order process, and offline reliability is the one thing you cannot compromise on. The SiteDocs comparison goes through its ownership history in detail.

Pick SafetyCulture if your need is inspections and observations at scale rather than COR, and especially if you fit inside its free tier of up to 10 users. Be clear about the structural limit covered on the SafetyCulture comparison: it has no COR capability and will not produce a COR audit binder.

Pick eCompliance if you are already inside the EcoOnline ecosystem, or you want a broader environmental, health and safety suite than a field forms product. See the eCompliance comparison.

Pick us if you run a Canadian company with 5 to 100 field staff, you hold COR or are being pushed toward it, you want the per seat fee gone so every seasonal hand goes on the system instead of being quietly left off, and you want the audit evidence to be yours outright. Your COR certificate depends on producing three years of evidence on demand, and where that evidence lives is a business decision, not a software preference.

If you are not ready to talk to anyone yet, that is the correct instinct, and it is the reason this page exists at all. Start with the free COR forms and templates, print the ones your crews will actually fill out, and see how far the paper version gets you. If it gets you all the way, keep the paper. If it does not, you will know exactly which forms broke first, which is a far better brief for any vendor on this list than a feature checklist somebody else wrote.