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The 7 capital project management tools local governments run a CIP on — Aurigo, Kahua, Projectmates, Mastt, Owner Insite, OpenGov — and where a rollup layer fits.
Capital project management software tracks the money, schedule, and delivery of a local government's capital improvement program (CIP) — the multi-year build of roads, facilities, water systems, and equipment — not the day-to-day task lists that general project tracking software manages. The seven tools below are the ones cities, counties, and agencies actually run a CIP on in 2026.
- Aurigo Masterworks — best for large DOT and agency capital programs; FedRAMP Moderate authorized.
- Kahua — best for federal-facing or security-driven capital construction; FedRAMP-authorized, CMMC-aligned, DoD IL2, GSA-selected.
- Projectmates — best for municipal and school-district bond and CIP construction programs.
- Mastt — best for lean owner's-rep teams needing fast cost, schedule, and contingency control.
- Owner Insite — best for facility owners tracking construction from the owner's side.
- OpenGov (with Cartegraph) — best for tying capital projects to the budget and the asset system of record.
- ClearPoint Strategy — best for rolling the entire capital portfolio up to council and executives, on a public dashboard.
The distinction that governs this list: the first six manage how a capital project gets built. The seventh manages whether the capital program gets reported, owned, and finished. In ClearPoint's analysis of 3,131 capital projects across 100 local governments, only 13% were ever marked complete, and projects with a single named owner were completed more than twice as often as projects with none — yet 54% had no owner at all.
Why “capital” project tracking is its own category
A city runs two very different kinds of work. One is operational: permits processed, potholes closed, tickets resolved — high-volume, short-cycle tasks that general project tracking software handles well. (Looking for that category? See our broader roundup, Best Project Tracking Software for Local Governments.)
The other is capital: a $12M water-treatment upgrade funded by a bond, scheduled across four fiscal years, with change orders, retainage, grant-compliance rules, and a council that wants to know why it is eight months late. That work needs software built for money over time, not tasks over a week — multi-year budget tracking, change-order and cost control, funding-source and grant reporting, and a portfolio view that rolls dozens of projects into one number a council can read.
The failure mode is well documented in our own platform data, and it is not a planning failure. Across 3,131 capital projects in 100 local governments, only 13% were ever marked complete, and 79% of past-due projects were still open in the plan of record — the ones most likely to stall were the “other” capital items that never got a clean owner. A capital improvement plan fails at execution and oversight, not at the spreadsheet where it was drawn up. That is the lens for evaluating every tool below.
What most buyer guides skip: almost every “government project tracking” listicle mixes construction-owner platforms and generic task tools into one ranking, as if they compete. They do not. Aurigo and Asana are not alternatives — they sit at different layers of the same city. The useful question is not “which tool is best,” it is “which layer am I buying for: building the project, or governing the program?”
The 7 tools, and what each is actually for
1. Aurigo Masterworks — best for large capital programs and DOTs
Who it is for: state DOTs, large counties, and big-city public works running infrastructure programs in the hundreds of millions.
The criterion it wins on: end-to-end capital lifecycle. Masterworks covers planning, funding, bidding, cost control, document control, and construction in one system, and it holds FedRAMP Moderate authorization — a hard requirement for many agency deployments. Public capital owners including the Utah and Nevada DOTs and the cities of Houston, Seattle, and Las Vegas run on it. Aurigo also offers a lighter Essentials tier aimed at smaller local and regional governments. If your program is large, regulated, and lifecycle-wide, this is the heavyweight.
2. Kahua — best for federal-facing and security-driven construction
Who it is for: governments whose capital work touches federal funding, defense, or strict compliance regimes.
The criterion it wins on: security and program-management depth. Kahua is FedRAMP-authorized, CMMC-aligned, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO 27001 certified, holds DoD Impact Level 2 authorization, and was selected by the GSA as an enterprise project management information system. It runs capital construction from planning through closeout with a configurable app model. When the compliance bar is the deciding factor, Kahua is the default answer.
3. Projectmates — best for municipal and school-district bond programs
Who it is for: cities, counties, and K-12 and higher-ed districts delivering voter-approved bond and CIP construction.
The criterion it wins on: owner-side construction program management for the public sector. Projectmates is built for the owner, not the general contractor — budget and contract management, bid management, capital planning, and public-facing project transparency across a multi-project bond program. For a district standing up a facilities bond, it is purpose-fit.
4. Mastt — best for lean owner’s-rep teams
Who it is for: small capital teams, owner’s reps, and PM consultants who need control without a long implementation.
The criterion it wins on: speed to cost-and-schedule control. Mastt gives project owners cost reports, budget and contingency tracking, schedule, risk, and contract and payment management in one connected platform, with dashboards built for public-sector oversight and stakeholder review. If Aurigo and Kahua are enterprise builds, Mastt is the tool a five-person capital office can be running this quarter.
5. Owner Insite — best for facility owners tracking from the owner’s chair
Who it is for: school districts, municipalities, and facility owners who want visibility into construction they are paying for but not managing day-to-day.
The criterion it wins on: owner’s-side transparency. Owner Insite centers on giving the owner — not the contractor or architect — a real-time line of sight into budget, schedule, documents, and field status across a construction portfolio. It is the answer for the owner who keeps getting surprised at the monthly meeting.
6. OpenGov (with Cartegraph) — best for budget- and asset-integrated capital planning
Who it is for: local governments that want capital projects living next to the budget and the asset inventory, not in a separate silo.
The criterion it wins on: system-of-record integration. OpenGov’s capital planning and budgeting connects the CIP to the operating budget, and its Cartegraph asset-management lineage ties capital work to the infrastructure it renews. For a finance-led CIP where the budget is the plan, that integration is the draw.
7. ClearPoint Strategy — best for rolling the capital portfolio up to council
Who it is for: city managers, CFOs, and councils who need one line of sight across every capital project, regardless of which tool builds them.
The criterion it wins on: portfolio governance and public reporting — the layer the other six do not own. ClearPoint is not a construction project management tool, and it will not manage a change order or a retainage schedule. What it does is sit above the build tools: it rolls dozens of capital projects into a portfolio scorecard, attaches a single named owner and a RAG status to each, and publishes progress to a public-facing dashboard the council and residents can read. In a category where only 13% of capital projects are ever marked complete and 54% have no owner, the missing piece is rarely another construction tool — it is the accountability and reporting layer over the ones you already have.
The honest boundary (so this list stays useful): if you need to manage the construction itself — bids, submittals, RFIs, pay applications — pick one of tools 1–6. ClearPoint is what you add when you have three different construction tools across public works, facilities, and utilities and no single place a council can see the whole capital program. It complements the build tools; it does not replace them.
Comparison table — capital project management software for local government (2026)
| Tool | Best for | Capital lifecycle stage | Gov security posture | Public-facing reporting | Portfolio (CIP) rollup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aurigo Masterworks | Large DOT / agency programs | Plan → fund → build → operate | FedRAMP Moderate | Program dashboards | Strong (program-level) |
| Kahua | Federal-facing / secure construction | Plan → closeout | FedRAMP, CMMC, DoD IL2, SOC 2, ISO 27001 | Configurable | Strong (program-level) |
| Projectmates | Municipal / school bond programs | Plan → construction | Owner-side, public transparency | Public bond portals | Program-level |
| Mastt | Lean owner’s-rep teams | Fund → build | Public-sector cost reporting | Stakeholder reports | Program-level |
| Owner Insite | Facility owners’ oversight | Construction phase | Owner-side visibility | Owner dashboards | Portfolio visibility |
| OpenGov (+ Cartegraph) | Budget/asset-integrated CIP | Plan → budget → asset renewal | Gov cloud, budget system of record | Budget & capital portals | Budget-linked |
| ClearPoint Strategy | Council / executive line of sight | Governance layer (above build) | Public-sector, public dashboards | Public strategy dashboards | Cross-tool CIP rollup |
Scroll the table horizontally to see all columns. Positioning is descriptive, drawn from each vendor’s public materials as of August 2026; verify current authorizations and feature tiers directly with the vendor before a procurement decision. This is a capability read, not a scored ranking.
How one city made the capital program visible
How Hayward, CA put its entire capital program on a public dashboard. The City of Hayward publishes its full Capital Improvement Program as a live dashboard any resident can open — ten categories from roads and pavement to municipal facilities, fleet, water, and sewer, each project carrying a status and a percent-complete, across a 2024–2033 program of roughly $905 million. The capital lesson is not the construction tooling; it is the governance layer on top of it: one place where the council and the public can see whether the plan is moving. That is the seventh category in action — portfolio rollup and public reporting sitting above whatever tools build the individual projects. (Goldsboro, NC runs the same idea internally across a $411M ten-year CIP.)
Where a capital tool ends and a capital program begins
Buying software is the easy part. The pattern across the local governments in ClearPoint’s data is that the tool rarely fails — the oversight rhythm does. The median local government tracks 136 active projects across 18 plans, and 76.5% of the people assigned to own a metric never update it once. A construction platform can be immaculate and the program can still drift, because no one is rolling it up, assigning it, and putting it in front of a council on a schedule.
That is the whole argument for treating “capital project tracking” as two layers, not one:
- The build layer (tools 1–6): manages the project — cost, schedule, contracts, compliance.
- The governance layer (tool 7): manages the program — ownership, status, portfolio rollup, public reporting.
A city that only buys the build layer gets projects that are well-managed one at a time and invisible in aggregate. A city that adds the governance layer gets the one thing councils actually ask for: is the capital plan on track, yes or no.
Read the pillar this list feeds: Capital Improvement Plan (CIP): Why Most Get Funded but Never Finished — the execution data behind the ranking, and the playbook for closing the gap. See also the Local Government sector and public dashboard best practices.
Related gov guides
- Top 7 Government Strategy Software Features for Cities (2026)
- Best Project Tracking Software for Local Governments — the general task-tracking category, if that is what you are after.
Frequently asked questions
What is capital project management software?
Capital project management software helps a local government plan, budget, and deliver its capital improvement program — the multi-year build of roads, facilities, water systems, and equipment. It centers on money over time (multi-year budgets, change orders, funding sources, cost control) and construction delivery, rather than the short-cycle task lists that general project management software handles.
What’s the difference between project tracking software and capital project management software?
General project tracking software manages tasks, assignments, and short-cycle work — permits, service requests, everyday initiatives. Capital project management software manages capital projects: multi-year, budget-heavy infrastructure and facility builds with change orders, grant compliance, and cost control. A city usually needs both, plus a portfolio layer that rolls the capital projects up for council and executive reporting.
How many capital projects does the average city track?
In ClearPoint’s platform data, the median local government tracks 136 active projects across 18 plans, spanning more than 55,000 live municipal projects across 156 governments. Capital projects are a subset of that — fewer in number but far larger in budget and timeline, which is why they need dedicated cost-and-schedule tooling.
Is ClearPoint a capital project management tool?
Not in the construction sense — ClearPoint will not manage a change order, a submittal, or a pay application. ClearPoint is the portfolio and reporting layer above the construction tools: it rolls every capital project into one scorecard, assigns a single named owner and a RAG status to each, and publishes progress to a public dashboard for council and residents. Cities use it alongside tools like Aurigo, Kahua, or Projectmates, not instead of them.
Why do so many capital projects stall?
Two causes dominate, and neither is the construction software. In ClearPoint’s analysis of 3,131 capital projects across 100 local governments, only 13% were ever marked complete and 79% of past-due projects were still open in the plan of record — the common threads were no accountable owner (54% had none) and no shared line of sight on status. Capital programs fail at oversight, not at planning.
Does capital project management software need to be FedRAMP authorized?
It depends on funding and data. Programs touching federal money, defense, or regulated data often require FedRAMP (and sometimes CMMC) — Aurigo Masterworks holds FedRAMP Moderate and Kahua is FedRAMP-authorized and CMMC-aligned. Purely local, locally-funded programs may not need it, but public-sector security and public-records requirements still apply. Confirm the current authorization directly with any vendor before procurement.
Can we run a capital program on general project management software?
You can start there, but general tools lack multi-year capital budgeting, change-order and retainage handling, funding-source tracking, and grant compliance. They also do not roll a capital portfolio up for council reporting. Most cities outgrow the general tool the moment a program spans multiple fiscal years and funding sources.
