Helios vs Action1: free patching, or the whole job

For patching alone, on a small estate, Action1 costs nothing, and nothing beats free. The honest question is not which is cheaper. It is whether patching is the job you are trying to solve.

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.

Every step above is the platform as it runs today; the same fix is on the Tickets page of the live demo.

What Action1 does well

Action1's free tier is the full product: free for your first 200 endpoints with no feature limits (last verified September 2026). Third-party patching is its focus: a large curated catalogue, fast turnaround on new versions, and vulnerability assessment built alongside it. It is cloud-native, quick to deploy, and for an internal IT team that mainly needs Windows and third-party patching under control it may be all you ever need. We would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

What to look at closely before you buy

• It is a patching and vulnerability tool first. That is the design, not a criticism. Full monitoring and alerting across an estate, a service desk with SLAs, client-facing reporting, backup oversight and client billing are not what it is for.
• Past 200 endpoints the model changes. Reported at around $4 per endpoint per month on the Growth tier billed annually, plus a support subscription (last verified September 2026). At 300 endpoints that is a real line on the budget, so model the number you expect to be at in a year rather than today.
• Multi-tenant MSP working. If you manage many clients rather than one estate, check how cleanly client separation, per-client policy and client reporting work for the way you actually operate.

How Helios is different

Helios is not trying to beat free on patching. It is a different scope: monitoring and alerting with flap damping, Windows and third-party patching on per-client schedules, security and Microsoft 365, backup monitoring, remote access, network discovery, a full service desk with SLAs and a client portal, recurring contracts and invoices into Xero or QuickBooks, all on every plan.

And Helio works the queue rather than reporting on it. It investigates an alert by reading the machine, writes and verifies a fix under approval guardrails you set per client, triages inbound tickets and answers your clients directly. If your problem is that patching is unreliable, Action1 solves it and costs nothing. If your problem is that the whole operation runs on you, that is a different product.

Where Action1 is the better pick

If patching and vulnerability management are the whole job, and you are inside 200 endpoints, Action1 does that for nothing, and paying us for the same thing would be the wrong call. Plenty of MSPs will also run it alongside something else quite happily. Look at Helios when the job is the whole operation rather than the patch queue, or when you need the service desk, the client reporting and the billing in the same place.

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.

What the add-ons cost

Common questions

Is Helios a good alternative to Action1?

Only if you need more than patching. Action1 is free for the first 200 endpoints with no feature limits. Helios is a different scope: monitoring, security, Microsoft 365, backup oversight, a service desk with SLAs, client reporting and client billing.

Is Action1 really free?

Yes, for your first 200 endpoints, with no functionality limits. Beyond that it is reported at around $4 per endpoint per month on the Growth tier billed annually, plus a support subscription. If patching on a small estate is the whole job, use Action1 rather than paying us.

Can I run Action1 and Helios together?

Plenty of people run a dedicated patching tool alongside a platform. Helios patches Windows and third-party software on per-client schedules, so most teams do not need both, but nothing stops you trialling them side by side. The Helios trial is 14 days and takes no card.

Is there a free alternative to Action1?

Action1 itself is free for the first 200 endpoints with no feature limits, which is the honest answer to this question and worth saying before anything else. Beyond it, Level is free for the first 10 endpoints, ManageEngine Endpoint Central is free for up to 25 endpoints, and NetLock RMM is a free Community Edition for up to 25 endpoints (checked September 2026). Helios is not one of them: there is a 14 day trial that takes no card, then a 4 pound per device Launch tier from 5 to 25 devices. If a zero bill is the requirement, one of those is your answer and we would rather tell you than waste your trial.

Is there an open source alternative to Action1?

Tactical RMM is the only open source project built for the MSP job specifically: monitoring, alerting, scripting and patching, with remote access from an embedded MeshCentral. MeshCentral on its own is Apache 2.0 and widely used, but it is remote access only, with no monitoring, patching or scripting. NetLock RMM is open core under AGPL with a free tier to 25 endpoints. The honest caveat is that RMM means four things running together and almost nothing in open source does all four, so price in the hosting, the upgrades and the hours. Helios is not open source.

What is the best Action1 alternative for a small MSP?

It depends which axis is hurting. If it is the bill growing with every endpoint, look at flat or per technician pricing. If it is the service desk living in a second product, look at something that has one built in. If it is the contract, check the term and the notice period before the feature list, because that is the part you cannot undo. Helios was built for one to ten technician teams that want the whole job in one bill, which is a fit for some of those and not all of them.

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.