Honest comparisons,
dated and sourced

How Helios stacks up against the platforms MSPs actually shortlist, written the way we would want to read it: strengths first, prices dated, weaknesses admitted.

Written with respect. We ran an MSP on several of the products we compare, we rate them, and without them Helios would not exist. These pages are here because buyers deserve the numbers, not because we want a fight.

First, the thing vendor comparison pages never say: we respect these companies. We have run managed services for over two decades, at every scale from a working MSP to the enterprise, and we ran that MSP on several of the products below. We know precisely what each one does well, and we say so, because we also know precisely where each one stops: we spent years working around those limits by hand. These pages are not a fight. They built the category we chose to build in, and buyers deserve a guide written by someone who has actually operated these tools, not marketed against them.

Choosing an RMM or PSA is a multi-year decision made on a two-week trial, so most comparison content on the internet is written to flatter whoever wrote it. These pages try to be the exception: every competitor page starts with what that product does well, every price carries the date we checked it, and where a rival has something Helios does not, we name it in plain text.

The short version of every page

Helios is the AI-native platform for small MSPs. One product covers monitoring, patching (including third-party apps), security posture, Microsoft 365, backup monitoring, remote access, a full service desk and a branded client portal. Helio, the AI inside it, investigates device alerts, writes and verifies fixes under approval guardrails you control, answers your clients' tickets, and drafts your QBRs. Around it: the agent heals its own failures, BitLocker recovery keys are escrowed automatically, files move to and from devices without interrupting anyone, every client's people sync from their Microsoft 365 directory, and machines on an out-of-support OS are flagged before an auditor finds them.

The pricing is the other half of the argument: flat per MSP (£99, £199 or £399 a month by fleet size), every feature on every plan, monthly billing, cancel any time. No per-technician seats, no per-endpoint quotes, no multi-year auto-renewals.

And the honest weaknesses, so you do not have to find them yourself: Helios is young, it does not yet monitor network hardware like switches and firewalls, and it does not take payment for you: time tracking, per-client billing, recurring contracts and Xero and QuickBooks invoice export are live, but card payment and rate cards are still on the public roadmap. If those are dealbreakers today, the pages above tell you who does them well.

The parts that rarely make a feature grid

Comparisons and price lists tend to stop at monitoring, patching and tickets. Helios has kept shipping, every feature lands on every plan, and this is the part that usually gets left out:

• Client billing that closes the loop. Recurring contracts (flat, per-device or per-seat), an included-hours retainer that nets against logged time, and the finished invoice pushed into Xero or QuickBooks or exported as CSV.
• The kit that will never take an agent. Nominate a machine already running the agent as a site relay and act on the switches, firewalls, NAS boxes and printers around it over SSH. A target only appears if that relay is what discovered it, every command waits for a human, and the password is fetched at the moment it runs and written to the audit trail.
• Network discovery that names things. Agents map each client's network and identify what they find by vendor and type, so new hardware on a client site is flagged the day it appears.
• Replacement dates without a spreadsheet. Machines report their own age from the BIOS date, so Helios can tell you what is due for replacement against a service-life policy you set, per client.
• Reporting built for the review, not the dashboard. A custom report builder, SLA reporting, Microsoft 365 licence-cost reporting, and a day-one baseline per client that stores the numbers, so a quarterly review can prove what actually moved.
• Quotes the client accepts from the portal. Price a piece of work, send it, and the client accepts or declines it signed in to the portal or from the link in the email. Monthly lines go straight onto their contract, one-off lines onto that month's invoice, and every decision is on the record.
• Approvals on your phone. Helios installs as an app from the browser and pushes a fix waiting for approval, a critical alert or an escalation to your phone, each opening the page it is about. Every kind can be switched off per person.
• Everything is addressable. A published REST API, a credential vault with an audit trail, custom fields on clients and devices, and standing rules that limit what Helio may do on its own: block an action or require a human to approve it, scoped to one client, a device group, a device type or a single machine, and to a class of action or one named fix.

Competitor details on this page were last verified in July 2026 from public pricing pages, announcements and review sites, and may have changed since. They are provided in good faith for comparison; always confirm current pricing and features with the vendor. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Spotted something out of date? Email hello@heliosmsp.io and we will fix it.