Home inspection · refereed
Palm-Tech vs Spectora
The honest framing of this pair is not feature-versus-feature. It is that one product had a version end-of-life its users found out about late, and the other is where several of them went.
Who wrote this, and what we sell
We make ReportWalk, a competing inspection app. We are not in this comparison and neither company has any relationship with us. Our own product appears once, at the bottom, for a case neither of these covers.
The short answer
Palm-Tech
Choose Palm-Tech if you are on a franchise that mandates it, or if you already have a working Palmtech Complete setup and a template you do not want to rebuild. It is cheaper per user than Spectora at list price.
Spectora
Choose Spectora if you are leaving Palm-Tech and want the destination most other leavers chose, on a web platform that ships frequently. Every documented Palm-Tech exit we found went to Spectora or Home Inspector Pro.
If what pushed you off Palm-Tech was a forced hardware purchase, be careful: Palmtech's own iOS app has not shipped since 4 August 2024. Check the release history of whatever you move to before you buy a device for it.
Who actually switched, and why
We found three documented exits from Palm-Tech and no documented arrivals. That is a directional signal from a sampled corpus, not a market share measurement.
Palm-Tech → Spectora
“Lack of customer service and crashing constantly.”
Palm-Tech → Home Inspector Pro
“Franchise requirement”
Worth reading precisely: this is a mandate, not a preference. It tells you a franchise moved, not that an inspector chose.
Where they genuinely differ
The version 8 end of life, and why people are still angry
Support for Palm-Tech version 8 ended on 2 October 2023. The only public statement of that date we could find is a subordinate clause inside a support article about making backups, written after the fact.
We could not find any announcement, blog post or press release dated before that day. That is not the same as saying no notice was given — customers may have been emailed — but nothing public survives.
The practical effect for some users was a hardware bill. A help article setting out supported devices established a recent-generation Android floor, and inspectors running version 8 on older tablets fell below it.
Price, from each vendor
Palmtech is $50 per user per month, or $500 per user per year. Spectora lists at $109 a month.
Palm-Tech is the cheaper product at list price and it is fair to say so plainly. The complaints we found are not about price.
Mobile, which is where this gets awkward
Palmtech's iOS app has not shipped since 4 August 2024 and holds a 3.0 rating from 23 ratings. Its Android app shipped in July 2026.
Inspectors who bought Apple hardware to stay on the product moved onto the less-maintained of the two platforms. If you are on iOS, this is the single most important fact on this page.
What each is honestly better at
Palm-Tech
Cost, and continuity for anyone already set up. At $50 a user it undercuts Spectora substantially, and if your franchise requires it the comparison is academic. For an established user with a working template, staying put is a defensible decision that this page is not trying to talk you out of.
Spectora
Active development and a web workflow that does not care what device you hold. It is the destination most Palm-Tech leavers chose, which is itself information — and the release cadence on the platform is visible and frequent.
What we could not verify
- What notice Palm-Tech customers were given before 2 October 2023. We found no public record, which is different from establishing that none was given.
- Whether the crash complaints Gerald S. describes are current. His review is dated March 2025 and we have not found more recent corroboration either way.
- Reddit was unreachable in every research session.
- A name collision worth knowing if you go searching: the software is palm-tech.com. palmtech.net is an unrelated IT support firm in West Palm Beach, and it pollutes the results.
If neither fits — a third shape of tool
If the version 8 experience left you wary of products that can retire the thing you bought, the question to ask any replacement is what happens to your template and your data when they change direction. For what it is worth, ReportWalk is a phone-first app with no desktop to strand you on — and if you are carrying a Palm-Tech template you do not want to rebuild, we will rebuild it for you by hand.
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Last updated 15 September 2026