Updated September 2026. Prices checked 4 September 2026.
If lifting equipment is your whole business and you have four or more inspectors, buy software built only for LOLER. If lifting is one standard among several, a broader platform earns its cost. If you receive certificates rather than issue them, you do not want inspection software at all, you want compliance tracking software. The rest of this guide shows you how to tell which one you are.
Most software comparisons count features. That is the wrong test for LOLER work.
The right test is narrower. Can the software produce a legally complete certificate without you building it yourself? Can your inspector get through 200 slings before lunch? Will the price still make sense when you have twelve inspectors instead of four? And if you want to leave in two years, can you take your records with you?
This guide answers those questions for every tool UK lifting inspection companies actually shortlist in 2026. It uses published prices, checks each product against what the law demands rather than what the marketing says, and tells you plainly where Lolerflow is the wrong answer.
We build Lolerflow, so read this knowing that. We have tried to earn your trust by being specific about what we do not do.
Which one should you choose?
| Your situation | What usually fits best | Why |
|---|---|---|
| LOLER inspection company, 1 to 25 inspectors | Lolerflow | Nothing to configure, £250 a month at any headcount |
| Lifting contractor or hire fleet, 25+ engineers, using RFID or NFC tagging | CoreRFID CheckedOK | UK incumbent, per engineer, also covers PUWER and PAT |
| Rope access, height safety or PPE, where LOLER is one part of it | Papertrail | Many standards at once, large kit directory |
| In-house safety team inspecting many different things | Mitti (formerly SafetyCulture) | Cheap per person, but you build the template |
| Lift or crane firm that also needs scheduling and invoicing | Joblogic or Klipboard | The LOLER record sits inside the job |
| You receive certificates rather than producing them | C365Cloud or Ideagen | Chases evidence, does not run examinations |
| Still using a shared spreadsheet | Move now | See LOLER vs Excel |
Not sure which row is yours? Answer these four questions
1. Is lifting equipment the only thing you examine?
Yes, a LOLER-only tool. No, a broader platform.
2. How many logins will you need in two years, counting office staff and clients?
Under five, per person pricing is cheaper. Over eight, flat pricing usually wins. The exact crossover depends on the vendor, and we show the maths below.
3. Do you produce certificates, or collect them?
Produce, inspection software. Collect, compliance software.
4. Do you need scheduling, quoting and invoicing too?
Yes, look at a field service platform.
Six statutory tests any LOLER system must pass
These come straight from the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998. Put them to any demo, including ours.
1. Does every certificate include all 11 legally required details?
Schedule 1 of LOLER lists eleven items that a report of thorough examination must contain. They include the employer's name and address, the address where the examination took place, identification of the equipment and its date of manufacture, the date of the last thorough examination, the safe working load, which kind of examination it was, any defect found and the timescale for putting it right, the examiner's qualifications, the name and address of the person signing the report, and the date of the report.
Why it matters. If one field is missing, the report is incomplete. An incomplete report is treated the same as no report, even if the examination itself was done perfectly.
2. Does the report state which kind of examination it was?
Schedule 1 requires the report to name which of Regulation 9's triggers applies: six months for equipment used to lift people and for lifting accessories, twelve months for other lifting equipment, an examination scheme drawn up by a competent person, or exceptional circumstances.
Why it matters. Generic inspection apps almost never record this, because it is specific to lifting law. It is one of the fastest ways to spot a template that was built for something else.
3. Does it separate a danger from a developing fault, with a timescale?
LOLER does not use the words "Category A, B and C". That is LEEA convention, and it is useful, but it is not the law. The law splits a defect that is already a danger to people from one that could become a danger, and it requires a timescale for the second. Under Regulation 10(1)(a) the employer must be told immediately where there is an existing or imminent danger.
Why it matters. A system with a single pass or fail switch cannot record what the law asks you to record.
4. Can it send the report to the hire company as well as your client?
Regulation 10(1)(b) requires the report to go to the employer and to anyone from whom the equipment was hired or leased. Regulation 10(1)(c) requires a copy to the enforcing authority where there is a risk of serious personal injury.
Why it matters. Most general purpose tools have no concept of a third party on the record. If half your work is hired plant, this alone rules several products out.
5. Can it keep different records for different lengths of time?
Regulation 11(2) sets four different retention rules:
- Lifting equipment that is not an accessory: until the employer stops using it
- Lifting accessories such as slings and shackles: two years after the report
- Reports made after installation or reassembly at a new site: until it stops being used there
- Routine in-service examinations: until the next report, or two years, whichever is later
Why it matters. One blanket retention setting fails across a mixed register. Our full LOLER record keeping guide goes through this in detail.
6. Can you find any record in seconds when the HSE turns up?
The duty is to keep records available for inspection. An HSE inspector does not book an appointment. If retrieval takes an afternoon of folder hunting, the record is not available in any meaningful sense.
How fast is it on a busy day?
One overhead crane is slow and detailed. Four hundred slings in a depot is a completely different job, and it is where software either earns its money or wastes your inspector's afternoon.
Look for a batch or rapid inspection mode, scan to inspect using barcodes, RFID or NFC, batch asset creation, and certificate generation the moment the inspection is submitted rather than back at the office.
Lolerflow has a rapid mode built for accessories. CheckedOK is the strongest at volume, and CoreRFID publish a case study where AMG Plant Testing examined 533 items in a single day and failed 43 of them. Papertrail has MultiScan. Mitti has no batch concept at all.
The honest test is not a feature list. Take fifty accessories into a free trial and time it yourself.
Side by side
Prices checked 4 September 2026. Confirm current rates with each vendor before you buy.
Scroll sideways to see every column.
| Lolerflow | CheckedOK | Papertrail | Mitti (was SafetyCulture) | Job and FM platforms | Spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Made for LOLER | Only | Plus PUWER and PAT | Many standards | General purpose | A module | No |
| Legally complete certificate out of the box | Yes | Yes | Built-in checklist | You build it | Varies | No |
| Records which examination type it was | Yes | Yes | Higher tiers | Manual | Varies | No |
| Works with no phone signal | Fully, including certificate generation | Fully | iOS and Android | Plan dependent | Usually | Not applicable |
| Fast on big batches | Rapid mode | Strongest | MultiScan | Weak | Weak | No |
| Client login included | Yes, unlimited | Yes | Sharing only | Yes | Usually | No |
| Tag scanning | Barcode | QR, RFID, NFC | QR, barcode, NFC, RFID | QR | Varies | No |
| Integrations | Simpro | Open API | Enterprise tier | Broad | Yes | No |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly | Per engineer | Per person | Per person | Per person | Free |
| Published price | £250 a month | On request | £35 to £60 per person a month | About $24 per person a month | On request | Nothing |
| Free trial | 30 days | Demo first | 14 days | Free tier up to 10 users | Varies | Not applicable |
| Export and lock-in | PDF, Excel and CSV, no minimum term | Excel and API | CSV, 60 days' notice | Broad | Varies | Not applicable |
| Setup time | Under an hour | Guided setup | Onboarding fee | One to two days | Weeks | Do it yourself |
| UK credentials | UK company, ISO 27001, LEEA aligned | LEEA Full Member, IPAF | LEEA Associate, ISO 27001 | Australian company | UK based | None |
Software built only for lifting equipment inspection
Lolerflow
Best for: independent LOLER inspection companies, especially ones that are growing.
Every field, interval and certificate template is already built around LOLER 1998, so there is nothing to configure on day one. Twenty seven inspection templates ship with the product, covering overhead cranes, forklifts, MEWPs, passenger and goods lifts, electric and manual hoists, chain slings, davits, fall arrest anchors, and declarations of conformity. You choose which ones your organisation uses.
Certificates generate as branded PDFs the moment an inspection is submitted, with the inspector's own signature on the report. Results include a conditional pass, not just pass or fail, and defects carry severity codes and stay linked to the inspection they came from. Audit packs can be generated and downloaded in one go, which is the part that matters when someone asks for evidence at short notice.
It works fully offline. Not offline viewing, which several products offer, but offline examination and certificate generation, which is what you actually need in a plant room or a steel-clad warehouse.
There is a Simpro integration, so jobs can be searched by Simpro ID and the inspection record ties back to the job.
Trade-off, honestly. Lolerflow is LOLER only today. There is no PUWER, no PAT and no fire safety module, so if you inspect more than lifting equipment you will need something else alongside it or instead of it. There is no single sign-on and no public API yet, beyond the Simpro integration. And under about four inspectors, per person tools cost less.
Price: £250 a month flat. Unlimited inspectors, assets, inspections, office staff and client logins, plus a one-off onboarding fee that covers account setup, importing your asset register and a walkthrough with your team. No minimum term. Full pricing.
CoreRFID CheckedOK
Best for: established lifting contractors and hire fleets that already use tagging.
This is the one to beat in the UK. CoreRFID publish 24,000 or more users and 38 million inspections processed. They are a LEEA Full Member and an IPAF member. Beyond thorough examination the product covers declarations of conformity, electrical equipment testing and PAT, pre-use inspections and risk assessments, plus job management and an open API.
Trade-off. No public pricing and no self-serve trial, so you go through a sales process to find out what it costs. The cost rises with every engineer you add.
Price: per engineer, on request. Assets, certificates and portal logins are unlimited within that. corerfid.com/pricing
OnSiteForm
Best for: firms with a house certificate format they will not give up.
A smaller UK product from Auditform covering LOLER and PUWER, with mobile capture, site hierarchies, Excel and PDF export, and offline working. It will build bespoke certificates to your exact format, which is genuinely useful if your clients expect a particular document.
Trade-off.No published pricing. And a bespoke template that misses a legal field is your problem, not the vendor's. If you go this route, check the finished template against Schedule 1 line by line before you issue a single certificate.
Software that handles LOLER alongside other safety standards
Papertrail
Best for: rope access, height safety, arboriculture and wind businesses.
Papertrail is built around equipment records generally rather than LOLER specifically. It has a ready-made Report of Thorough Examination checklist, a directory of more than 120 manufacturers, NFC, RFID and QR scanning, offline inspections and competency tracking. It is a LEEA Associate, IRATA affiliated and ISO 27001 certified.
Trade-off. The checklist has to be assigned to your records before it does anything, and handling several inspection schedules at once sits on the higher tiers. That is setup work, not out of the box compliance. It is a fair trade if lifting is one of five standards you deal with, and a poor one if lifting is all you do.
Price: Starter £35 per person a month (£33.25 billed annually), Corporate £60 (£57 annually), Enterprise on request. Note that Corporate has a four user minimum, so a three person team is billed as four. papertrail.io/pricing
Mitti, formerly SafetyCulture
Best for: in-house safety teams where LOLER is a small slice of a much bigger job.
SafetyCulture rebranded to Mitti in August 2026. It is the same platform, previously known as iAuditor before that, and it is the most widely used inspection app in the world. The template library is enormous, the mobile app is excellent, and the integrations are the best of anything on this list.
It is also the product we get asked about most, so it is worth being specific about what happens when you use it for LOLER.
None of those thousands of templates are LOLER-specific. You build the Report of Thorough Examination yourself, and then you own the legal risk of it. That means you personally check it against all eleven Schedule 1 items. There is no field for which examination type applied under Regulation 9. There is no concept of a hire company as a second recipient of the report, so Regulation 10(1)(b) has to be handled by someone remembering to forward an email. Retention is one setting, not the four that Regulation 11(2) requires. And there is no batch mode, so a depot full of slings is inspected one at a time.
None of that makes Mitti a bad product. It makes it a general purpose product being used for a specialist legal task. If you run twenty different kinds of inspection and LOLER is two per cent of them, that trade is probably worth it. If LOLER is your business, it is not.
Price: free tier up to 10 users. Premium is about $24 per person a month billed annually, or $29 monthly, which is roughly £19 to £23 depending on the exchange rate. mitti.com/pricing
Inspect2GO
Best for: organisations that want a configurable inspection platform and have someone to configure it.
A long-established inspection platform with a LOLER-capable configuration rather than a LOLER product. Same principle as Mitti: flexible, capable, and the legal completeness of the certificate is your responsibility rather than the vendor's.
Software where LOLER is one feature among many
Joblogic and Klipboard are UK field service platforms. They tie the LOLER record to the job, the engineer and the invoice, which is exactly right if your real bottleneck is scheduling and cash flow rather than compliance.
C365Cloud and Ideagen sit on the other side of the transaction. They are certificate libraries with RAG dashboards and remedial tracking. Right for a housing association or a facilities team receiving reports, wrong for anyone issuing them.
Boxcore adds GA2 and GA3 checks alongside PUWER.
The shared weakness. LOLER support in all of these is real but shallow. Ask about examination types and the hire company copy before anything else, and ask to see a finished certificate rather than a screenshot of a form.
What about spreadsheets?
A shared spreadsheet is still the most common LOLER system in the UK, and it is the one that fails hardest under scrutiny.
It has no tamper-proof audit trail, so you cannot show when a record was created or changed, or by whom. It has no automatic next-due date, so an overdue item is only found when someone looks. It has no way to attach the actual certificate to the asset. Two people editing it at once creates two versions of the truth. And when the person who built it leaves, the formulas leave with them.
The cost is not the licence, it is the afternoon spent finding one record when an inspector asks for it, and the item that got missed because a row was sorted wrong.
If you take one thing from this guide and you are on a spreadsheet, it is that the migration below is easier than you think.
What it costs over a year
Based on published prices, checked 4 September 2026.
| Team size | Lolerflow | Papertrail Corporate | Mitti Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 inspectors | £250 a month, £3,000 a year | £228 a month, £2,736 a year* | About £57 a month, £684 a year |
| 8 inspectors | £250 a month, £3,000 a year | £456 a month, £5,472 a year | About £152 a month, £1,824 a year |
| 20 inspectors | £250 a month, £3,000 a year | £1,140 a month, £13,680 a year | About £380 a month, £4,560 a year |
| 20 inspectors plus 6 office staff | £250 a month, £3,000 a year | £1,482 a month, £17,784 a year | About £494 a month, £5,928 a year |
*Papertrail Corporate has a four user minimum, so three inspectors are billed as four.
Read that honestly. Against Papertrail, flat pricing wins from about five people upwards. Against Mitti, which is far cheaper per head, flat pricing does not win until roughly thirteen people, and Mitti is cheaper than us below that. What you are buying in between is not a lower price, it is a certificate you did not have to build and do not have to defend.
There is a second cost that does not appear on any pricing page. When adding a person costs money, teams share logins or leave the office staff on paper. That is exactly the audit trail gap an HSE inspector looks for. Flat pricing is a compliance decision as much as a financial one.
Ten questions to ask any vendor
- Show me a finished certificate. Does it contain all eleven Schedule 1 items?
- Where on that certificate does it say which examination type under Regulation 9 applied?
- Can the report go to a hire company as well as my client, automatically?
- Can I set different retention periods for accessories and for equipment?
- Does it work with no signal, and can it generate the certificate offline?
- How long does it take to inspect fifty slings? Show me.
- What does it cost when I have twelve inspectors and four office staff?
- Is there a minimum term, and what notice do I have to give?
- If I leave, what format do I get my data in, and does that include the PDFs?
- Who built the LOLER template, and who is liable if a field is missing?
When Lolerflow is not the right answer
- You inspect more than lifting equipment. PAT, fire extinguishers or PUWER, look at CheckedOK, Papertrail or OnSiteForm.
- Two inspectors and no plans to grow. £250 flat is poor value. Come back when you are hiring.
- You need single sign-on or a public API. Neither is available yet. We have a Simpro integration and that is it.
- Your real problem is scheduling and invoicing. A field service platform will fix more of your week than we will.
- You receive certificates rather than issuing them. Compliance tracking software fits better.
How long does it take to move your records across?
Migration is rarely the obstacle people expect. Your starting point decides the effort.
From a tidy spreadsheet, about half a day. Export the asset register to CSV with asset ID, description, serial number, safe working load, client, site and last examination date. Import it, check the dates, and start inspecting that afternoon.
From paper records, two to three days. You have to build the register from your last examination reports first. Put one person on it and let them finish it. This job needs doing whichever system you choose, so it is not really a cost of switching.
From another software platform, about a day. Export to CSV or PDF, import, then check that the legal fields have mapped properly. That checking step is the whole job. Do not skip it.
Keep the old records either way. They are your historical evidence, and the retention periods in Regulation 11 apply to the original data, not to whatever system you move to.
Common questions about LOLER software
So, which one should you pick?
The differences that decide it are narrow. Whether the certificate is legally complete without you building it. Whether your inspector can clear a depot of slings in a morning. Whether the price still works after four more hires.
If LOLER is your business, buy something built only for LOLER. If lifting is one of several standards, a broader platform earns its cost. Then trial it properly: your real data, aeroplane mode, and a timed batch of fifty.