HSE Connect alternatives — an honest comparison, written by one of them

First, the disclosure

Teammate App is our product, and we would like you to buy it. HSE Connect is a separate New Zealand health and safety software company based in Auckland, with no involvement in this page. If you want a comparison written by someone with nothing riding on the answer, this is not it — so instead of asking you to believe us, we have written it to be checked.

Here is the rule we held ourselves to. Every statement about HSE Connect on this page comes from their own public website at hseconnect.co or their Google Play listing, read in September 2026, and is quoted rather than characterised. There are no star ratings, no review counts and no prices we did not read on their own pricing section. Open their site in another tab and mark us against it.

And here is what we deliberately will not do: tell you what HSE Connect cannot do. Their marketing site is a small number of pages and their app listing is a feature summary — neither is a product specification. Something absent from a marketing page is not the same as something absent from a product, and a vendor guessing at a rival's gaps in public is how these pages end up both wrong and unpleasant. Where their published material does not cover a requirement you have, we will say exactly that and tell you to ask them.

What HSE Connect says it is

HSE Connect is an Auckland-based health and safety software product whose entire positioning is simplicity. Their site sells "simple health & safety software" that is "built specifically with Worksafe in mind" and says it provides "peace of mind to hundreds of business owners and company directors across New Zealand & Australia". Their Google Play listing describes the product as "a record management system that will simplify health and safety legislation to help create zero harm in your workplace".

The capabilities named in their own material are: paperless reporting of hazards and incidents, with step-by-step guides so that "you know you're reporting everything correctly"; managed inductions through online induction forms; "snap shot" training modules for creating, tracking and managing staff training and competencies; calendar reminders for outdated training modules, licences or courses; a document library for storing and sharing files with staff; reporting to WorkSafe; reporting intended to "simplify the ACC audit process"; and running safety updates and alerts inside the system. One of their published customer testimonials describes staff electronically signing that they have read a document or watched a training video, with that signature permanently recorded. Their Play listing sits in the Productivity category and was last updated on 21 April 2026.

Their pricing is published, which in this market is unusual and worth crediting. As listed on their site in September 2026, the bands are 1–3 staff at $58 a month with a $495 setup fee, 4–10 staff at $85 a month with a $695 setup fee, and 11–20 staff at $133 a month with a $1,850 setup fee, with 21+ staff shown as price on application. Every band is marked "All Features Included". They also run a partnership page for Motor Trade Association members showing discounted monthly rates and free setup for members. The figures are shown as dollar amounts without a currency label, so confirm that with them rather than assuming.

Two things their public material does not state, which we mention only because buyers ask us about them and should ask HSE Connect too rather than infer anything from this page: it does not name target industries — although the customer testimonials they publish are all from automotive businesses — and it does not say where customer data is hosted. Both are reasonable questions to put to any vendor, us included.

What Teammate App is

Teammate App is an all-in-one health, safety, quality and environmental platform, built and supported in New Zealand, for small and mid-sized organisations that have outgrown a single-purpose safety tool. It runs fifteen modules — audits and inspections, risk registers, incidents, tasks, documents, training and people records, assets, contractors and suppliers, compliance obligations, hazardous substances, online forms, reporting, reminders, noticeboard, workplace centre and visitor registration — on web, iOS and Android, and it keeps working offline in the field, syncing when coverage returns.

The design assumption is that an event is entered once and then travels: an inspection finding becomes a corrective action with an owner and a due date, the evidence attaches where the work happened, and the record an auditor eventually opens is the one the work created rather than a document written afterwards to describe it. That is the thing you are buying when you buy a connected system, and it is also why it is more system than a single-site business with twelve staff needs.

Our own verifiable specifics, since we are asking you to check theirs: we operate an information security management system certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Telarc Limited, a JAS-ANZ accredited body, and the certificate is independently checkable on the JAS-ANZ register from our security page. The platform aligns to ISO 45001, 9001 and 14001. Customer data is hosted in Australia, in the AWS Sydney region — not in New Zealand, which matters if your procurement policy requires onshore storage, and which we set out in full on our data residency page.

And on pricing, they are ahead of us. We publish one bracket — Team (Starter) at USD $199 a month for 1–10 employees, tax inclusive — and quote on requirement above that. HSE Connect publishes three bands plus setup fees, and a member discount. If being able to budget without a sales conversation is what you value, that is a genuine advantage of theirs and it would be silly for us to dress it up as anything else.

What each one is built for

These are not two products competing for the same job. Reading both sets of public material side by side, HSE Connect is built to make a small business's health and safety obligation simple and cheap to discharge, and Teammate is built to hold a multi-standard management system together for an organisation that has several. Most of the apparent disagreement between them is really a disagreement about what size of problem you have.

The shape of the problem

HSE Connect's published scope is health and safety: hazards, incidents, inductions, training, documents, and reporting to WorkSafe and for ACC. Teammate's scope is health and safety plus quality and environmental in one system — the "Q" and the "E" of HSEQ — because the buyers we are built for are usually running more than one management standard and do not want the same corrective action living in three places. If safety is genuinely your only system, the second thing is overhead you are paying for.

The size and shape of the organisation

Their published pricing bands run 1–3, 4–10 and 11–20 staff before moving to price on application, which tells you plainly where the product is aimed. Ours starts at 1–10 and is built to keep going through multi-site, multi-branch operations where scoping who sees what becomes its own problem. A single site with one manager does not need that machinery; four branches with different hazard registers do.

Certification versus compliance

There is a real difference between satisfying a regulator or an ACC audit and holding an ISO certification. The first wants evidence that you identified hazards, trained people and reported what you had to. The second wants a traceable chain — a finding linked to its action, linked to its verification, linked to the management review that saw it — sampled at random across three years. If you are heading for ISO 45001, 9001 or 14001 certification, that chain is the thing to interrogate in any demo, ours included.

How you buy

They publish rates and setup fees and let you sign up; above twenty staff it becomes a conversation. We publish our smallest bracket and quote everything above it. Neither approach is virtuous — published pricing suits a product with one shape, quoted pricing suits one that gets configured — but published pricing is undeniably easier on the buyer, and it is the reason a lot of small businesses never get as far as a demo with anyone else.

Who should stay put

A lot of people reading this should stay with HSE Connect, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon. If you run one site, employ fewer than about twenty people, and your health and safety obligation genuinely is hazards, inductions, training records and incident reports, then a simpler product is the better product — not the compromise version of a better one.

• Small, single-site businesses. Their published bands go up to twenty staff for a reason. At that size, the cost of a system nobody finishes configuring is higher than the cost of one that does less.
• Motor Trade Association members. Their MTA page shows discounted monthly rates and free setup for members. If you are a member, that is real money and a sector relationship, and it should weigh in the decision.
• Buyers who want a price, not a process. You can read their rates and setup fees on their site this afternoon without talking to anyone. Ours above the smallest bracket, you cannot.
• Anyone whose driver is a WorkSafe baseline or an ACC audit. Their material names both jobs explicitly and is built around them.
• Anyone whose team is actually using it. This is the big one. Adoption is the hardest thing in this category to buy and the easiest thing to destroy. A system your supervisors open every day beats a longer feature list they will ignore, and "we already use it" is a better reason to stay than most of the reasons people give for moving.

Who tends to look elsewhere

In our experience, people go looking for a different HSEQ system because their own requirement changed, not because anything went wrong with the software they have. That distinction matters: if your requirement has not changed, changing vendor imports months of disruption to solve nothing. Here are the changes that genuinely do justify a look.

1. 1.You crossed a size or structure line. A second or third site, branches with different hazard profiles, or a headcount that moved you out of a small-business band. Multi-site scoping — who sees which register, who approves what, where a branch manager's authority ends — is a different problem from the one you had with one site.
2. 2.Quality or environmental arrived. A customer or a tender asked for ISO 9001 or ISO 14001, and suddenly a safety product is being asked to carry nonconformances, document control and environmental aspects too. This is the most common trigger we see, and it is a genuine scope change rather than a complaint.
3. 3.You are going for certification. An auditor sampling three years of records wants the chain described above, not a folder of documents. If you are booked for a Stage 2, work out now whether what you have produces that chain — our guide to what certification auditors actually check sets out what gets opened first.
4. 4.Contractors and assets became their own problem. Prequalification, insurance and licence expiry, plant and equipment registers with inspection schedules attached. Once these stop fitting in a spreadsheet they tend to drive the whole decision.
5. 5.The field lost coverage. Crews working where there is no signal need capture that survives it and syncs later. If your work has moved out of town, ask any vendor to demonstrate that with aeroplane mode on rather than describe it.

Notice what is not on that list: any claim that your current system failed. If one did fail you, that is a conversation to have with your vendor first — it is cheaper than a migration and they may well fix it.

What switching involves

Switching HSEQ systems is a few days of your own time spread across roughly four to eight weeks, and almost none of that time is spent on the software. It goes on deciding what history to carry over, getting a clean export out of the old system, and re-establishing the habits of the people who use it. Budget for the data and the people; the configuration is the easy part.

Timing. Do not switch in the eight weeks before a certification, ACC or client audit, and do not switch in your busiest operational season. The best window is immediately after an audit — you have a clean baseline, a list of findings worth carrying, and eleven months before anyone looks again. The second best is the start of a quiet period.

What you keep. Your retention obligations do not move with the software. In New Zealand a PCBU must keep a record of each notifiable event for at least five years under section 57 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and some health-monitoring records run for decades — that duty is yours, not your vendor's, and it survives the contract ending. So the export happens before you give notice, not after.

Run both for one cycle. Keep read access to the old system until you have verified that the export actually contains the attachments, photographs and historical sign-offs and not just the rows they hang off. This is where migrations fail, and it is the subject of the companion guide below, which is deliberately vendor-neutral and applies whoever you are leaving and whoever you are joining.

What to ask any vendor

Ask these before you look at a single demo screen, and ask them of everyone on your shortlist — HSE Connect, us, and whoever else you are considering. They are the questions whose answers you cannot get back once you have signed, and every one of them is answerable in a first call rather than a third.

1. 1.Show me an export, now. Not a description of one. What comes out, in what format, do attachments and signatures come with it, and can I run it myself without asking you? The answer tells you how leaving will feel, which tells you how the relationship will feel.
2. 2.Where is the data hosted, and who can access it? Country, not "the cloud". Then: which of your staff can read my records, and is that logged?
3. 3.What is the total first-year cost? Licence, setup, data migration, training, and anything that is per-user, per-site or per-module. Get it as one number, in writing, in a named currency.
4. 4.Who chases the overdue action? Ask them to show it live. If the answer is a weekly report that a person reads and then emails people about, you are buying a database rather than a system.
5. 5.Does the standard I need actually map to this? If you are certifying to ISO 45001, 9001 or 14001, ask them to walk one clause end to end. Vague answers here are expensive later.
6. 6.What happens with no signal? Aeroplane mode, complete a form, come back on, show me the sync. Watch it happen.
7. 7.What does support look like, in my timezone? Who answers, how fast, and is it someone who has run a management system or someone reading a script?

Then run the same real event through both finalists. Take a genuine finding from your last audit, assign it to someone outside your team, let it go overdue deliberately, close it with a photograph taken on a phone in the field, and export the record as you would hand it to an auditor. Whatever snags in that exercise will snag the same way every week in production — and it will tell you more than this page, or any other comparison page, possibly can.

Questions we get asked