"Crane" covers a lot of ground. A mobile crane on a truck chassis, a tower crane bolted to a high-rise foundation, and a crawler crane on steel tracks are all built to lift loads against gravity, but they solve that problem in very different ways — how cranes work mechanically comes down to a boom, a hoist line, and a counterweight system, and how those three parts are arranged changes what a crane can do on site. Knowing the difference matters before you book one, because the wrong type either can't do the job or costs far more than it needed to.
Mobile (hydraulic) crane
A mobile crane rides on a truck or all-terrain chassis, drives to site under its own power or on a low loader, and extends a telescopic hydraulic boom once it's positioned and outriggers are set. Setup is measured in tens of minutes, not days. It can also leave the site the same way it arrived, which matters when a lift is a single task in an otherwise ground-equipment-heavy schedule.
Best for: short-duration lifts, equipment placement (HVAC units, precast elements, steel members), residential and mid-rise commercial sites, and any job where the crane needs to move between locations in the same week.
Tower crane
A tower crane is erected on or beside the building it's serving, anchored to a concrete base, and grows in height as the structure rises — sometimes climbing internally within the building core. It offers excellent reach and lift height for tall structures, but erection and dismantling take days, need a separate mobile crane just to assemble it, and require a fixed footprint for the full project duration.
Best for: high-rise construction, projects running many months at a single fixed location, and jobs where materials need to be lifted repeatedly to increasing heights over the life of the build.
Crawler crane
A crawler crane moves on tracks rather than wheels, which gives it stable footing on soft or uneven ground and lets it lift very heavy loads without deploying outriggers. The tradeoff is mobility: it typically arrives disassembled on multiple trailers and gets built on site, and moving it any real distance means breaking it down again. It's a heavy-lift specialist, not a general-purpose site crane.
Best for: very heavy single lifts, industrial and infrastructure projects, sites with poor ground conditions where a wheeled crane would sink or need extensive matting.
What this means for most Delhi NCR sites
Residential builds, commercial fit-outs, and most mid-size infrastructure jobs in the region don't need a tower crane's fixed installation or a crawler crane's heavy-lift capacity — they need a crane that can show up, complete a lift or a series of lifts, and move on. That's exactly the gap a mobile crane fills, which is why it's the crane type RIGR rents. If you've got a lift coming up in Delhi, you can check what's available now: rent a mobile crane in Delhi.
Not sure if your lift needs a mobile crane at all, or something bigger? Tell us the load weight, lift height, and site access, and we'll tell you straight rather than have you guess.