Helios vs Atera: the honest version

Atera earned its reputation by breaking per-endpoint pricing, and in 2026 it is betting the company on autonomous AI. If you are choosing between Atera and Helios, the real differences are what the AI actually covers, and how the bill grows as your team does.

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 Atera does well

Atera's per-technician, unlimited-endpoint pricing changed the market, and MSPs who migrated from per-endpoint vendors often report their tooling bill dropping by more than half. It has been shipping since 2016, has a broad integration catalogue, and since June 2026 its AI Copilot is bundled into every plan rather than sold as an add-on.

Its headline act is Robin, an autonomous AI agent that detects, diagnoses and remediates issues on endpoints. In May 2026 Atera backed it with a bold guarantee: if Robin does not resolve half of your tickets within 90 days, fees are waived. That is a specific commitment, so hold it to the specifics: what counts as a ticket, and what counts as resolved.

What to look at closely before you buy

• What Robin covers. Coverage reported at launch centres on device and cloud incidents. A user emailing "I cannot log in" or "Teams keeps freezing" is a service desk ticket, and it is worth asking Atera directly how much of that queue Robin handles before counting it toward the 50%.
• What Robin costs. The Copilot is now bundled, but Robin itself is a separately billed add-on on top of the per-tech subscription. Get the all-in number for your team size.
• Per-tech maths. Atera MSP plans start around $129 per technician per month billed annually (last verified July 2026). Five technicians is roughly $645 a month before add-ons.

How Helios is different

Helio, the AI inside Helios, works both sides of the job. On devices it investigates alerts, reads the machine's own logs, writes a fix when no playbook covers the case, and asks a technician for approval before running anything novel. On the service desk it triages every inbound ticket, knows who is asking (requesters are matched to the client's own Microsoft 365 directory, so the ticket shows the person, their number and their devices), replies to clients in seconds, and on device tickets carries the fix through end to end. The guardrails are visible and they only ever restrict: auto-healing is switched off, limited to workstations or allowed across the estate, and on top of that you can block an action or require a human to approve it for one client, one device group, one device type or a single machine. No rule can grant Helio more than it already has.

And the pricing is flatter than flat: not per endpoint, not per technician, but per MSP. Your sixth hire does not raise your tooling bill.

Where Atera is the better pick

If a ten-year-old vendor with a long integration list is a requirement in itself, Atera has that and Helios, launched in 2026, does not. On the AI, the difference is scope: Robin works device and cloud incidents, Helio works those and the service desk queue, and the bill never moves when you hire. That is the gap Helios was built to fill, whether you are an MSP or an internal IT team.

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 Atera?

It is worth a look if you want flat pricing instead of per-technician billing, and AI that works the service desk as well as the devices. Atera has been selling since 2016 and has the larger integration catalogue. Helios includes RMM, PSA, security, Microsoft 365 and remote access on every plan, so the advertised price is the price you pay.

How does Helios pricing compare to Atera?

Atera MSP plans start around $129 per technician per month billed annually, with Robin sold as a separate add-on. Helios is £4 a device on the Launch tier for 5 to 25 devices, then £99, £199 or £399 a month for the whole company by device count, with unlimited technician seats. Hiring a sixth engineer does not change the bill.

Can I run Helios alongside Atera while I evaluate it?

Yes. The trial is 14 days and takes no card. Deploy the agent to one or two clients with a single installer and run the two in parallel before you commit to anything.

What does Atera actually cost?

Short answer: it depends on your endpoint count and your term, and the headline rate is rarely the number on the invoice. The full breakdown lives on its own page rather than here, with the published rates, the buyer-reported quotes, the add-ons and the contract terms each labelled and dated: see Atera pricing.

Is there a free alternative to Atera?

Yes, and free rather than a trial. Action1 is free for the first 200 endpoints with no feature limits, 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 Atera?

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 Atera 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.