Helios vs Datto RMM: the contract is the product

Datto RMM runs some of the largest MSP fleets there are. But since the Kaseya acquisition, the thing MSPs talk about most is not the product, it is the paperwork: multi-year terms, auto-renewals and committed minimums. That is the real comparison to make.

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 Datto RMM does well

Datto RMM runs some of the largest MSP fleets in the world. Its patch policies are the part reviewers cite most, the platform holds up at scale, and the wider Kaseya catalogue means BCDR, documentation and security products under one vendor if single-vendor consolidation appeals to you.

What to look at closely before you buy

• The contract. Kaseya standardised on multi-year agreements with auto-renewal windows that are easy to miss, and 2026 brought committed-minimum billing: you pay for the endpoint count you committed to even if you lose a client (last verified July 2026). Read every renewal clause twice and diarise the notice dates.
• Remote access reliability. It is the single most mentioned complaint in Datto RMM's public reviews. Test it hard during any trial, it is the feature your technicians touch most.
• Per-endpoint maths. Reported from around $2.99 per endpoint per month with minimums; a few hundred endpoints lands in the same range as flat-priced alternatives without the lock-in.

How Helios is different

Helios is monthly, flat per MSP, and you can cancel from the billing page without a phone call. Losing a client never means paying for their endpoints anyway. And rather than a recommendations layer, Helio actually works your queue: investigating alerts on the machine, fixing what it can under approval guardrails you set per client, and answering inbound tickets.

Where Datto RMM is the better pick

If you are consolidating a large estate onto the Kaseya stack, negotiating hard on a multi-year rate, and have the scale to absorb the commitments, that is Datto RMM's case. If the last three years taught you to value the ability to leave, price that in.

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 Datto RMM?

If the contract terms are what is bothering you, yes. Datto RMM has been in the market since 2011. Helios is monthly with no minimum term, publishes its prices, and includes a service desk rather than expecting you to buy Autotask alongside it.

How does Helios pricing compare to Datto RMM?

Datto RMM is reported from around $2.99 per endpoint per month with minimums, quoted rather than published, and usually on a multi year term. Helios is £4 a device on the Launch tier up to 25 devices, then £99, £199 or £399 a month by device band, published, monthly, cancel any time.

Is Helios tied to a multi-year contract?

No. Billing is monthly and you can cancel any time. The 14 day trial takes no card. Long auto renewing terms are the most complained about thing in this market and we are not repeating them.

What does Datto RMM 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 Datto RMM pricing.

Is there a free alternative to Datto RMM?

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 Datto RMM?

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 Datto RMM 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.