Hotel inspection checklists: what an iAuditor-style form app does, and what a register does instead

Two different products get called "inspection software", and a hotel that buys the wrong one will pay for it in one of two ways: a per-seat bill for a form builder it uses as a diary, or a diary that cannot guide a new housekeeper through a room. This page draws the line between them, because "iAuditor alternative for hospitality" is a search that usually means "I have realised I bought the wrong shape".

The form app

iAuditor — SafetyCulture's product — is a checklist and form tool. You build a template with questions, branching, scoring and photo prompts; a person on a phone works through it in a room or a kitchen; the completed form is stored and can be reported on. It is good at the moment of inspection: the questions are in front of the person, in order, and nothing can be skipped without the app noticing. It is priced per seat — $24 per seat per month on annual billing, $29 monthly, read from the vendor's pricing page on 5 July 2026 — which means it is priced by how many people hold a phone, and in hospitality that is most of the staff.

The register

An inspection register is a different object. It is the list of things that must be checked, the interval each is on, the date each was last done, and the evidence that it was. Its question is not "did the housekeeper tick every box in room 214" but "when was the fire door on the third-floor landing last inspected, by whom, and where is the certificate". That question has a due date attached, and due dates are the whole product.

Inspectora is that register. Its front page is a due board with three states rather than two: due, overdue, and never done. The third is the one a spreadsheet cannot hold — a fire extinguisher that has never been serviced is not "expired", it is a different and worse thing, and filing it under expired hides it. Due dates compute themselves from the last completion and the interval; changing an interval does not rewrite the records already on file, which matters when an inspector asks what you believed the interval to be at the time. Every completion goes into a logbook with the certificate or photo attached. Schedules group checks into rounds — the Monday fire round, the quarterly legionella flush — and a calendar feed puts the due dates into the maintenance lead's own calendar so the register does not depend on anyone opening it.

What it does not do, from its own page: it is not a CMMS (no work orders, no parts, no planning), it does not perform or certify inspections, it has one grouping tag rather than a rules engine, and the people named on records are tracked rather than given logins. There is no form builder. If the moment of inspection is your problem — untrained staff, complex rooms, branching questions — the form app is the right tool and this page will not talk you out of it.

Why hotels mostly need the register

Walk a hotel's compliance obligations and count which kind each is. Fire doors, emergency lighting, extinguishers, the lift, the boiler, the legionella regime, the extraction hood, portable appliance tests, the gas safety certificate, the pool chemistry log: every one is a what is due question with a certificate behind it. The housekeeping room check is a form question. The kitchen's temperature diary is a third thing again — a daily log with deviation rules — and it has its own product, Safora, which flags a reading that deviates, insists on a manager's daily sign-off, and exports the diary in the shape an environmental health officer expects.

So the honest shape for most small hotels is a register plus a diary, bought once for $79 each, plus a paper or free-tier form for the room check if you want one. Not twenty seats of a form builder used as a register.

The arithmetic, briefly

On the published Premium price, twelve seats of iAuditor is $3,456 a year and twenty-five seats is $7,200 — multiplication, not a forecast. Inspectora and Safora together are $158 once, on your own server, with their data in your own database and — since the 3.0 release — a REST API and an MCP endpoint so a head-office assistant can read the due board without being a seat. The iAuditor alternative for hospitality page works that arithmetic in full with the owned side's costs included; the inspection software cost teardown explains why per-user pricing prices a register by the wrong number.

Both demos are open without a sign-up: Inspectora and Safora. Inspectora ships in the Field-Service Suite; Safora in the Restaurant Ops Suite. The SafetyCulture figure above sits, dated and source-linked, in the Price Observatory.