Helios vs Kaseya VSA: the contract is the comparison

Kaseya VSA is reported at $3 to $6 per endpoint a month, sold by quote with an onboarding fee and multi-year, auto-renewing terms, while Helios publishes its monthly price with no contract. For a small MSP the deciding factor is almost never the feature list. It is what you sign, what you pay to get started, and how easy it is to leave.

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 Kaseya VSA does well

VSA has been in this market a long time and it shows in the automation engine. Scripting and policy depth go further than most MSPs will use, agent coverage is broad, and VSA 10 modernised an interface that badly needed it. Inside the wider Kaseya group it also sits next to Datto, Autotask, IT Glue and BullPhish, so an MSP that wants one vendor for the whole stack can get one bill and one account team. If you are consolidating deliberately, that is a real advantage rather than a marketing line.

What to look at closely before you buy

• Nothing is published. Every VSA price comes through a sales conversation. Independent reporting puts it broadly in the $3 to $6 per endpoint per month range depending on tier, volume and term, with discount breaks negotiated around 100, 500 and 1,000 endpoints (last verified September 2026). Treat any single figure, including that one, as a starting point rather than your price.
• The onboarding fee. A one-off implementation or onboarding charge is commonly required on top of the subscription, reported anywhere from around $1,000 to five figures depending on fleet size and how much help you need. Ask for it in writing in the first call, not the last.
• The term and the renewal. Kaseya is the vendor MSPs most often raise contract concerns about in public forums: multi-year commitments, auto-renewal windows that are easy to miss, and committed minimums that keep billing when you lose a client. None of that is hidden, but it is in the paperwork rather than on the website. Diarise every notice date the day you sign.

How Helios is different

Helios publishes its prices, bills monthly, and lets you cancel from the billing page without a phone call or a notice period. There is no onboarding fee and no minimum term, because the product is meant to be useful in the first hour rather than after a paid implementation. Losing a client reduces your bill instead of leaving you paying for endpoints you no longer manage.

On capability the honest split is this: VSA has more automation surface, and Helios has an AI that does the work rather than more places to configure it. Helio investigates an alert by reading the machine itself, writes and verifies a fix under approval guardrails you set per client, triages inbound tickets, and answers your clients. You are not buying an engine you then have to staff.

Where Kaseya VSA is the better pick

If you are consolidating onto one vendor for RMM, PSA, documentation and backup, have the volume to negotiate properly, and you have someone whose job includes owning the tooling, VSA inside the Kaseya suite is one bill and one account team. If you are a small team who wants a price you can read, a bill that shrinks when your estate does, and no paperwork to escape, that is the gap Helios was built for.

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:

• Cyber Essentials readiness, with the fixes. Every Windows machine is checked each day against the Cyber Essentials technical controls (v3.3, April 2026), 13 checks a machine. Nine of them have a fix in Helios: one press for the firewall, incoming connections, the Guest account, auto-run, lockout, overdue updates and Microsoft Defender, and a yes first before it disables unused accounts or turns off automatic sign-in. Each client gets a readiness report under your name. It is a readiness check: only a Certification Body awards the certificate. How it works
• 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 Kaseya VSA?

If the contract is what is bothering you, yes. VSA has a larger scripting and policy engine and sits in a suite with Datto, Autotask and IT Glue. Helios publishes its price, bills monthly, charges no onboarding fee and lets you cancel from the billing page.

What does Kaseya VSA cost compared to Helios?

VSA is quote only. Independent reporting puts it broadly between $3 and $6 per endpoint per month depending on tier, volume and term, usually with a one-off onboarding fee on top. Helios is published: a per-device Launch tier for 5 to 25 devices, then a flat 99, 199 or 399 pounds a month for the whole company by device band. The full breakdown, with the renewal terms from the vendor's own agreement, is on Kaseya VSA pricing.

Am I locked into a term with Helios?

No. Billing is monthly and you can cancel any time without a notice period or a phone call. The 14 day trial takes no card to start. Multi-year terms and committed minimums are the most common complaint in this market and we are not repeating them.

Is there a free alternative to Kaseya VSA?

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 to start, 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 Kaseya VSA?

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 Kaseya VSA 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.