The Best Software for Fire Risk Assessments in the UK: An Honest Guide
We've kept the list deliberately narrow. There are dozens of "fire safety software" products on review sites, but most aren't built for the working FRA professional. Below are the tools that genuinely come up when assessors talk shop — plus Microsoft Word, which deserves more credit than it usually gets.
iAuditor / SafetyCulture
SafetyCulture's iAuditor is probably the most widely used inspection app in the world, and plenty of assessors started out on it. It's a mobile-first checklist tool: build a template, work through it on your phone, attach photos, generate a report at the end. There's a large free template library and a reputation for being cheap and cheerful.
The problem is that it isn't a fire risk assessment tool. It's a general inspection product that happens to have fire templates among thousands of others, and the limitation shows up in the output. Checklist-driven reports are structurally thin — yes/no/N-A answers leave little room for the reasoning and recommendations that make an FRA worth anything. With the industry moving away from the FRA as a tick-box exercise, a tool that encourages exactly that is increasingly out of step. It's fine as a low-cost inspection log. Most serious assessors outgrow it for writing professional FRAs.
Riskbase
Credit where it's due: Riskbase is the strongest of the established players, and it's well built. The team clearly understands fire and building safety, and user feedback is consistently positive. It's used heavily by larger consultancies, housing associations and councils, and it supports a serious range of work — FRAs, fire door checks, compartmentation surveys and PAS 9980 external wall surveys, with offline working, simultaneous multi-user surveys, action management and an API. Its defining idea is a good one: an assessment shouldn't be a one-off snapshot but an evolving, client-owned record that gets richer with every visit. For an organisation digitising its compliance operation, that's genuinely valuable.
Its limitation is simply timing — it's the best of the previous generation, built in 2007 before AI. The workflow runs on checklists and structured question sets: you agree or disagree with statements, and suggested actions appear for you to select. That delivers consistency and traceability across a team, but it doesn't save the individual assessor much time on the actual writing, and the form selection can be fiddly. Some assessors tell us it takes them "out of the flow" on site, so they take notes their own way and only open Riskbase back at the desk to write up.
Firehub
Firehub is built specifically for fire risk assessors, by people from the industry, which puts it ahead of generic tools on relevance. It focuses on PAS 79-compliant assessments, with a pre-populated library of common findings, offline capability and branded reports.
It's a sensible, focused option for sole traders and smaller firms who want a purpose-built FRA app. The trade-offs sit at the advanced end: it's less sophisticated than Riskbase, custom templates are reportedly awkward to build. And, like the others here, it predates AI. It doesn't offer the full feature set of Riskbase and it doesn't make report writing much faster, other than selecting pre-populated responses instead of typing everything yourself.
Aurora
Aurora is a capable platform with a genuine fire safety pedigree — customisable templates, offline mode, photos tagged to interactive floor plans, fire door and compartmentation modules, and strong dashboards for managing a property portfolio.
The telling thing is who it's for. Its case studies lean heavily towards housing groups and councils managing estates — clients who value a holistic, portfolio-wide view of compliance. That's a different customer from the independent consultant whose daily concern is writing strong individual reports efficiently. If that's you, Aurora may be aimed slightly past you.
Microsoft Word
Plenty of assessors still type their reports up in Word from handwritten notes, and it's a mistake to read that as falling behind. Most haven't simply failed to make the jump. Many have tried the dedicated platforms, found them rigid and fiddly, and gone back to Word precisely because it's flexible. Word lets you write the assessment the way you think it should be written, in your own words, without having to set up templates or fill out forms. This is particularly important for sole-traders who don't have to worry about consistency of output across a big team of assessors.
The price is everything around the document: no digital system of record, a lot of manual formatting and no features designed specifically to help assessors save time or improve quality. However, the fact that experienced professionals still actively choose Word over purpose-built tools like Riskbase that has been around for almost 20 years tells you something about the previous generation of tools. They often made the work harder, not easier.
FireCheckr
This is us, so take it as our perspective — but it's grounded in why assessors actually move to us.
The existing tools made you choose: rigid forms (Riskbase, Firehub, Aurora) or the freedom of a blank Word document. Neither really sped up the work. FireCheckr's premise is that you shouldn't have to trade the structure of a proper system of record against the speed and flexibility of writing in your own words — and that AI is what finally collapses that trade-off.
Everything you'd expect from a traditional FRA platform is here: your own templates or our standard ones, pre-written actions and comments, multi-user workflows, and a two-stage validation process with a full audit trail. Use it exactly like Riskbase or Firehub if that's all you want.
The difference is what happens when you switch the AI on. You record voice-note observations as you walk the building, and FireCheckr drafts the report from them — selecting the templated language and actions you've pre-programmed and expanding on them with commentary drawn from what you saw on site. You review, edit and approve every report; you're always in control. The traditional structure is still underneath. It's always your professional judgement that counts. The AI simply takes your words and puts them in the right place.
Assessors move to us from Riskbase, from iAuditor and from Word for the same reason each time: FireCheckr is faster, and it doesn't get in the way.
So which should you choose?
If you want a cheap, generic inspection log, iAuditor will do. If you're a larger consultancy or housing body standardising a compliance operation and you're happy with form-filling, Riskbase is excellent. Firehub suits smaller, purpose-focused firms; Aurora suits portfolio managers; Word remains the honest choice for anyone who's found the rest too rigid.
But if you want the familiar template structure and the option to use AI to reduce the time you spend writing each report, you're exactly who FireCheckr was built for.
See how FireCheckr compares for your own workflow — book a demo.
