Helios vs Level: a great RMM, or the whole desk

Level is a new RMM at $2 per device, free under ten endpoints. For a lot of small fleets it is the cheaper option, so the honest question is not price, it is what you still have to buy alongside it.

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 Level does well

Level publishes its pricing: $2 per device per month, everything included, no modules gated behind tiers, no contract, and free under ten endpoints (last verified July 2026). The interface is quick, and scripting and automation are the centre of the product. For a small team that wants a sharp, scriptable RMM without a sales call, it is an easy recommendation.

What to look at closely before you buy

• It is an RMM, not a PSA. This is the big one. There is no full service desk to run your queue and your SLAs from, so you are typically buying a ticketing system alongside it and paying for two products.
• Per-device billing scales with the estate. At 50 devices $2 each is about $100 a month. At 250 it is $500, and at 800 it is $1,600. The rate is fair, but the bill grows every time you win work.
• No dedicated technician mobile app at the time of writing, which reviewers raise regularly if your team works away from a desk.

How Helios is different

Helios is flat per company rather than per device, so the bill steps at 50 and 250 devices and then stops moving. More importantly it is one product for both halves of the job: monitoring, patching, security and Microsoft 365 on one side, and a real service desk with SLAs, email-in, a client portal and an AI agent that triages and answers tickets on the other. Helio also investigates alerts on the device itself and applies fixes under guardrails you set, rather than only running the automations you wrote in advance.

Being straight about the money, because it matters here: below roughly 50 devices Level is cheaper than Helios, and under ten it is free. Helios gets cheaper as the estate grows, and it replaces two products rather than one. Do that sum with your own numbers before you decide.

Where Level is the better pick

If you already have a service desk you are happy with and you just want a scriptable RMM underneath it at $2 a device, that is Level's case. Under ten endpoints it is free and nothing here competes with free. Helios makes sense when you want the monitoring and the desk to be one system, and when the estate is big enough that flat pricing beats per-device.

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 Level?

It depends what you need alongside it. Level is an RMM and not a PSA, so most people run a separate ticketing system with it. Helios is both in one product, with a real service desk, SLAs, a client portal and an AI agent that triages and answers tickets.

Is Level cheaper than Helios?

Below about 50 devices, yes, and under ten endpoints Level is free. At $2 per device the two land roughly level around 50 devices, and Helios is the cheaper of the two as you grow: 250 devices is $500 a month on Level against £199 on Helios. Level also usually needs a second product for ticketing, so compare the whole stack rather than the RMM line.

Do I still need a PSA if I use Level?

Usually. Level is endpoint focused and does not give you a full service desk to run a queue, SLAs and client communication from. That is the main practical reason people look at something like Helios instead of Level plus a ticketing tool.

What does Level 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 Level pricing.

Is there a free alternative to Level?

Level itself is free for the first 10 endpoints, which is the honest answer to this question and worth saying before anything else. Beyond it, Action1 is free for the first 200 endpoints with no feature limits, 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 Level?

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 Level 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.