In short
- A Dutch tender scores a certified tier, so the software has to survive an external audit, not impress a colleague.
- A trede is worth a percentage off your bid price. ProRail has awarded on the ladder since 2010, so this is live now, not a 2027 change.
- Language is a real selection criterion here, because the people entering data are not the people reading English feature pages.
For a Dutch tender the shortlist is Hedgehog, Coolset, Greenly, Watershed, Persefoni, Seedling and, if you also bid in the UK, EcoHedge. What separates them is not analytics but three things you can check: whether they publish a price, whether they have a verifiable Dutch presence, and whether the output survives an external certification audit. On 27 August 2026 only two published a price. The right choice depends on whether you are chasing a CO2-Prestatieladder tier, an MPG requirement, or a client questionnaire dressed as a tender question.
We make one of these products, from Amsterdam, and it is described here on the same terms as everything else on the list.
What is a Dutch tender actually scoring?
Not your report. Your certificate.
The CO2-Prestatieladder delivers an award advantage in Dutch public procurement, and the mechanism is arithmetic rather than opinion. It is long established: ProRail has awarded on it since 1 December 2010 and Rijkswaterstaat moved to version 4.0 on 1 July 2026, applying 2, 4 and 6 percent. ProRail switches to 4.0 on 1 January 2027 with a proposed 4, 7 and 10 percent that it calls provisional and that can differ per tender. A fictitious reduction is a discount applied to your bid price for scoring purposes, which means a tier is worth a percentage on every bid you submit into that chain, permanently, until you lose it.
That reframes the software question completely. You are not buying analysis. You are buying a repeatable inventory that a certifying body will accept, year after year, with the same boundary and a traceable method. The business case is in the CO2-Prestatieladder for SMEs.
One date to have in the calendar: from 14 January 2027 authorities can no longer tender with version 3.1, and you must have switched by your first audit after that date. A certificate from a late 3.1 audit can remain valid until 14 January 2028, so this is a transition rather than a cliff. If your current certification and your internal method are built on 3.1, the migration is this year's work.
Is the ladder the only thing being scored?
No, and this is where contractors overbuy or underbuy.
MPG and BPM 2.0 came into force on 1 July 2026, aligned to EN 15804+A2 and covering impact categories 11 to 19. Offices face a 15 percent tighter requirement and utility buildings get an MPG requirement for the first time. That is a building-level calculation with its own inputs, and no organisational carbon platform produces it. We set out what changed in BPM 2.0 and the MPG score.
Then there are the tenders that simply attach a client questionnaire asking for your company footprint and a reduction commitment. Those need the same inventory as the ladder but not the certificate.
| Tender requirement | What it needs | Is it a subscription |
|---|---|---|
| CO2-Prestatieladder tier | Certified organisational inventory, externally audited annually | Yes, plus certification costs |
| MPG under BPM 2.0 | Building-level material calculation per project | No, a modelling project |
| Client CO2 questionnaire | Organisational inventory and an export | Yes |
| Product or material declaration | EPD or MKI per product, per functional unit | No, a service engagement |
At Hedgehog the platform covers the organisational rows and product-level work including LCA, EPD and ECI (MKI in Dutch) is delivered as a service. Ask every vendor on your list to put themselves in that table before you compare anything else.
What separates the seven on evidence you can verify?
We read each vendor's public pricing page and G2 profile on 27 August 2026.
| Tool | G2 rating and reviews | Price found on 27 August 2026 | Dutch presence we could verify that day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hedgehog | 4.7 from 9 reviews | Free account, Pro from EUR 1,200 a year | Based in Amsterdam, product available in Dutch, names the CO2-Prestatieladder as an output |
| Coolset | 4.7 from 18 reviews | None found | Positioned for the NL and EU market, largest regulation content footprint we measured at 197 pages |
| Greenly | 4.7 from 27 reviews | None found | Not verified in our check |
| Watershed | 4.5 from 25 reviews | None found | Not verified in our check |
| Persefoni | 4.8 from 11 reviews | Persefoni Pro offered free, paid add-ons not priced | Not verified in our check |
| Seedling | 5.0 from 11 reviews | None found, though a Start for Free link is published | Not verified in our check |
| EcoHedge | Not listed on G2 | Lite free forever, Express Growth GBP 990 a year | UK focused, publishes SECR, PPN 006 and HMRC categories |
"Not verified in our check" means we did not find it on the pages we opened that day, not that it does not exist. Any of these vendors may serve Dutch clients without saying so on an English pricing page. Ask them, and ask for a Dutch reference.
EcoHedge is on the list only because plenty of Dutch contractors also bid into UK public works. Their own material, read on 27 August 2026, states native one-click integration with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage and 277,000+ emission factors. That library is larger than ours. If the UK side of your business is the bigger one, weigh it seriously.
Why does language belong on a selection checklist?
Because the person who enters the data is rarely the person who evaluated the software.
In a Dutch contractor or installer the inventory gets filled in by a KAM coordinator, a fleet administrator or an office manager, and the ladder auditor asks them, not you, how a figure was produced. An English-only interface adds friction at exactly the point where accuracy matters, and it makes the annual audit conversation harder than it needs to be.
Hedgehog supports English, French and Dutch. That is a fact worth checking on any tool you shortlist, including ours, by having the actual data owner do a test upload rather than watching a demo.
What should a Dutch bid team test before buying?
Six checks, ordered by what they cost you if you skip them.
Freeze a reporting year and try to reopen it. Ladder certification depends on a stable base year. Find out what reopening a closed period leaves behind in the record.
Ask what happens when the factor library updates. If a certified prior year moves silently, your next external audit gets awkward. You want either a locked period or a labelled restatement.
Load a real Dutch purchase ledger. Merchant accounts, plant hire, subcontract labour and fuel cards mixed together. Clean demo data proves nothing about a contractor's ledger.
Separate three roles. Data owner, reviewer and approver, as three logins. A certifying auditor will ask who checked what.
Export to a spreadsheet. Auditors and bid teams both work in spreadsheets. A dashboard is not evidence.
Get the year two price in writing. The ladder is an annual cycle with an annual audit. A first-year discount that resets changes the real cost.
Which tool fits which Dutch bidder?
A contractor or installer chasing a first ladder tier. You want cheap, Dutch, repeatable and auditable. Published pricing matters because the certification itself is already a cost. Hedgehog names the CO2-Prestatieladder as a reporting output and publishes a price.
A rail or infrastructure firm facing the 2027 ProRail regime. The tier is worth a percentage on the bid, so the payback question is arithmetic rather than sentiment. Buy for stability of method across years, because that is what the audit tests.
A Dutch mid-market group with a full ESG reporting obligation. Now you need reporting breadth, not tender output. Coolset is aimed at that European mid-market audience, with 14 of its 18 G2 reviews from Mid-Market.
A large group with international operations and investor scrutiny. Watershed and Persefoni belong in that conversation, and quotes come with services attached.
A firm whose real deliverable is an MPG or an MKI. Buy the modelling project. A subscription will not produce it.
For anything outside those, the general filter in choosing carbon accounting software narrows faster than a feature grid.
Where is Hedgehog the wrong answer?
Three cases, stated plainly.
When you want a broad ESG suite. A Mid-Market customer rated us 3.5 out of 5 on G2 in June 2026 and said the platform is less complete as a broader ESG data and reporting platform, with no data source management feature and no decarbonisation target monitoring.
When you expect the data to load itself. A Small Business reviewer wrote on G2 in August 2026 that it takes a lot of manual labour to load data, and that once the data is there it works perfectly, but getting it loaded is the challenging part. On a first ladder submission that is real weeks, and any vendor who promises otherwise has not seen a contractor's ledger.
When you need the certificate rather than the calculation. No software issues a ladder certificate. A certifying body does, after an audit. Software gets you audit ready and nothing more.
What should you do first?
Decide which tier is actually worth having. The award advantage differs by client and by chain, so work out what a tier is worth on the bids you actually submit before you spend anything.
Then build one year of scope 1 and 2 from fuel cards and energy bills, which is a week of work rather than a quarter, and see how far short of the tier requirement you are. That gap is your plan for the year.
Start on a free account with no sales call, or bring the tender documents to a conversation and we will tell you honestly whether the tier is worth chasing this cycle.
Sources: vendor pricing pages and G2 profiles for Hedgehog, Coolset, Greenly, Watershed, Persefoni, Seedling and EcoHedge, each read on 27 August 2026. EcoHedge comparison material read on 27 August 2026. CO2-Prestatieladder handbook and ProRail and Rijkswaterstaat procurement policy, Hedgehog platform, Hedgehog on G2. Verified 27 August 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.
