Buildscout is a marketing tool that prints and posts letters to homeowners with planning approval. SiteLens is a planning-intelligence platform for material suppliers, subcontractors and developers. Two tools, two jobs — this page helps you pick the right one.
Buildscout focuses on householder approvals so its letter pipeline has a clean target. SiteLens covers all categories — commercial, industrial, infrastructure, residential, change of use — across 350+ UK local planning authorities. Breadth is the difference.
SiteLens gives you map-based search, AI classification, council analytics, constraint overlays, and Companies House enrichment. Buildscout gives you a printed letter in a homeowner’s letterbox. Different jobs.
SiteLens is £0, £39 or £99/month — no matter how many projects you work. Buildscout charges per letter plus a subscription; a contractor sending 300 letters/month is looking at £450–£750 all-in.
Feature-for-feature, based on publicly available information.
| Feature | SiteLens | Buildscout |
|---|---|---|
| Core function | Planning data platform | Direct mail to homeowners |
| Coverage of planning applications | All categories, 350+ councils | Householder + small residential only |
| Commercial / industrial / infrastructure applications | ||
| Map-based search interface | ||
| AI classification + plain-English summaries | ||
| Saved searches + daily email alerts | ||
| Council analytics (approval rates, decision times) | ||
| Constraint overlays (flood, green belt, conservation) | ||
| Land Registry price-paid matching | ||
| Companies House enrichment | ||
| CSV export | ||
| Automated letter sending | ||
| Integration with post/print operations | ||
| Typical monthly cost | £0 / £39 / £99 | Varies by letter volume |
SiteLens’s strength is breadth and intelligence: every type of application (residential, commercial, industrial, infrastructure, householder, change of use), from every LPA, classified by AI.
Yes — for some businesses this is the best setup. Imagine a groundworks subcontractor who does both new-build work (found via SiteLens on commercial and residential schemes at planning stage) and homeowner driveway work (found via Buildscout on householder approvals with direct-mail outreach). The two tools target different parts of the pipeline and don’t overlap.
For a contractor sending letters, SiteLens at £39/month is dramatically cheaper than Buildscout’s per-letter model. But they do different jobs, so it’s not apples-to-apples. If your business model depends on letter volume, the Buildscout cost is the cost of outreach — SiteLens doesn’t send letters.
Yes — that’s the core SiteLens use case. Email, LinkedIn and phone outreach all work from SiteLens’s data. For most supply-chain B2B work, you don’t need letters at all.
It can, but you may find Buildscout’s letter automation more directly useful. The exception is if you want to target developer-built housing (new-build estates) rather than owner-occupier extensions — that’s SiteLens territory.
Pick Buildscout if you’re a residential contractor — builder, extension specialist, loft conversion firm, kitchens, driveways, roofing, solar, rewires — whose sales model is direct-to-homeowner. If what you want is a “set it and forget it” pipeline of phone calls from householders in a 10-mile radius, Buildscout does that job very well and SiteLens doesn’t try to.
The trade-off is that Buildscout’s coverage is limited to householder approvals because that’s what the letter model converts on. It doesn’t show you the commercial, mixed-use, industrial, or infrastructure schemes where the supply-chain opportunities live. If your business is built on those, SiteLens is built for you.
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