Obra vs Workhand: two bilingual apps for small crews, one runs the job and one runs the money

Workhand sells the job, chats with the crew and invoices it; Obra tracks what the job cost and where it lands. Both speak Spanish. Which one comes first.

The short version

Workhand is a run-the-crew app built by a Florida pool-builder's project manager: estimates with e-signature, Stripe invoices, per-job chat that translates itself, time and mileage, all in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Obra is the money layer for the same kind of crew: receipts in over WhatsApp, cost against contract per project, a forecast of where each job lands, exports for the accountant. Workhand puts per-job cost and profit on its team tier; Obra puts them on the free plan. If you need to sell and invoice the work from your phone, Workhand covers ground Obra never will. If you need to know what each job cost before the invoice goes out, Obra is the shorter path.

Obra is the better fit when

  • Your first question is what each job has cost this week, not how to get the estimate signed
  • The crew sends receipts on WhatsApp and should never need an app, a seat or a language they don't work in
  • You want per-project cost, forecast and margin from day one, not on a top tier
  • Your books live with an accountant and you want clean CSVs, not a second system to reconcile

Workhand is the better fit when

  • Estimates signed in the driveway and deposits charged on the spot matter more than costing
  • You want one app for chat, time clock, mileage, punch lists and daily logs across the crew
  • You invoice through Stripe and want a two-way QuickBooks Online sync
  • Portuguese matters, or you run a pool company and want its trade-specific logs

Side by side

What you're comparing Obra Workhand
Starting price Free for one active project; Pro is $12 per user per month or $120 per year. A free plan for one active job and one teammate; two flat monthly tiers above it, the higher one around $90 a month, as published on the checked date.
What it is Per-project money: receipts, income, change orders, forecasts, close, exports. A run-the-crew app: estimates, lead pipeline, invoices, per-job chat, time and mileage, field logs.
Where cost tracking lives On every plan, including free: recorded cost against contract, per category, per project. Cost tracking and per-job profit are listed on the top tier; the receipt scanner starts on the middle tier.
Receipts from the job site WhatsApp, email or photo; scanned into a draft, confirmed by a person, filed to a project and category. An AI receipt scanner inside the app turns a photo into a coded expense.
Languages English and Spanish, per person, in the app and in every WhatsApp reply. English, Spanish and Portuguese across the whole app, plus one-tap message translation in job chat.
Selling and invoicing Not included: Obra records income and change orders, it does not send estimates or take payments. Estimates with e-signature, deposits and invoices through Stripe at no platform markup, recurring invoices.
Crew coordination Not included: no chat, time clock, punch list or daily logs. Per-job chat with translation, time tracking, mileage, punch lists, daily logs, offline queue.
Forecast of the final number Built in: recorded cost plus a reviewed remaining-to-spend, never below what is recorded. Profit updates as costs and hours are logged; no separate expected-final-cost figure is published.
Handing off to the accountant CSV of any filtered list, or the whole organization as a ZIP of CSVs, with accounting classification per category. Two-way QuickBooks Online sync on the top tier; yearly ledger and 1099 exports.

Facts about Workhand checked on September 14, 2026. Prices and plan names change; check the vendor's own site before you buy, and tell us at support@tryobra.com if something here is out of date.

Workhand and Obra are the two bilingual apps a small US crew is most likely to meet in the same search, and they are easy to confuse because both were built by people who got tired of software made for offices. They are not the same product. Workhand runs the crew. Obra runs the money.

What Workhand is

A working contractor's operating app. The estimate is built in the driveway and signed on the phone, the deposit lands through Stripe, the crew gets a per-job chat where the estimator writes in English and the field reads in Spanish or Portuguese, hours and miles are logged against the job, and the invoice goes out from the same screen. It ships trade-specific pieces, pool chemical logs among them, and it has app-store apps on both platforms. It is a lot of product, and for a crew that lives on the phone all day, that is the point.

What Obra is

The ledger for each job. Receipts come in from the crew over WhatsApp, in either language, and a person in the office confirms each one to a project and a category. Every project shows what it has collected, what it has cost, what is still committed, and where it is expected to land. Change orders adjust the contract without erasing the original. When the job closes, the numbers are exported for the accountant. Obra does not sell the work, chat with the crew, or clock anyone in, and it does not intend to.

Where the two overlap, and where they don't

Both scan receipts, both speak Spanish, both promise to tell you whether a job made money. The difference is where that promise sits. In Workhand, per-job cost and profit are on the top tier, above the estimating, invoicing and chat that most of its customers came for. In Obra, cost against contract is the first screen of the free plan, because it is the whole product.

The other difference is what the crew touches. Workhand asks the crew to use Workhand, and rewards them with a chat and a time clock that work in their language. Obra asks the crew for nothing new: receipts go to a WhatsApp number they already use, and the office does the rest. Which model fits depends on whether your crew will adopt an app. Some will. Many, in our experience, quietly won't.

Deciding

If the bottleneck is selling and collecting, and the crew is willing to live in an app, Workhand covers a stretch of the business Obra never touches. If the bottleneck is not knowing what a job cost until it is over, start with Obra, free for one project and $12 a seat after, and keep whatever you use to sell the work. The two export to the same accountant either way.

Questions people ask

Are Obra and Workhand competitors?
Only at one point: both know what a job cost. Workhand gets there as one feature of a crew-management app; Obra is only that feature, done deeper and from the first day. Plenty of crews could run Workhand for the selling and chatting and Obra for the money, exporting the same CSVs to the same accountant.
Which one does the crew have to install?
Workhand is an app the crew uses, in their language, for chat, time and photos. Obra asks the crew for nothing beyond the WhatsApp they already have: they link a number once and send receipts; the office reviews. If your crew will happily live in an app, Workhand gets more out of them. If they won't, Obra was designed for that.
Which one is cheaper for a three-person crew?
On the checked date, Obra with three seats is $36 a month and includes cost tracking, forecast and margin. Workhand's free plan covers one job and one teammate; the tier that lists cost tracking and per-job profit is its top one. Check both pricing pages, and count what each includes at the price you would actually pay.
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