Helios vs ManageEngine Endpoint Central: the licence is the catch

Endpoint Central is a unified endpoint management product with MDM and an on-premises option at a low headline price. The thing to understand before you commit is how the licensing adds up, because the number you first see is rarely the number you pay.

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 ManageEngine does well

Breadth for the money is the story here. Patching, software deployment, configurations, remote control and mobile device management sit in one product, there is a free tier for up to 25 endpoints, and both cloud and on-premises are offered, which matters if you have a client who will not accept a cloud-only tool. There is a dedicated MSP edition with multi-tenant working. For an internal IT team managing one estate, the value is hard to argue with.

What to look at closely before you buy

• Editions, then add-ons. Professional and Enterprise differ in ways that matter, and the feature you assumed was included is often the one that moves you up a tier. Reported starting points are around $795 per year for 50 endpoints on-premises Professional and around $1,045 on cloud (last verified September 2026), before anything else.
• Servers licence separately from workstations. This is the one that catches people. Server licences are added on top, reported from a few hundred dollars a year for ten upward (last verified September 2026). Count your servers before you compare anything.
• It is UEM, not a service desk. Ticketing lives in a different ManageEngine product. If you want the desk and the endpoints together, you are buying and integrating two things.
• Weight. It is a big product with a lot of surface. Budget real time for setup, particularly on-premises.

How Helios is different

One price, one product, every feature on every plan, and servers are just devices. There are no editions to compare and no module that turns out to be extra, which removes an entire category of budgeting work before it starts.

Scope differs too. Helios is built for running an MSP rather than administering one estate: multi-tenant by design, with a service desk, SLAs, a branded client portal, client-facing reporting, quarterly business reviews written from real fleet data, recurring contracts and invoices into Xero or QuickBooks. And Helio investigates and fixes rather than only deploying: it reads the machine, writes and verifies a fix under approval guardrails you set per client, and answers your clients' tickets.

Where ManageEngine is the better pick

If you are an internal IT team managing one estate, need MDM, or need an on-premises deployment, Endpoint Central has those and Helios does not. If you run an MSP and want the desk, the client reporting and the billing in the same product as the endpoints, with no editions to decode, Helios is the better fit.

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 ManageEngine Endpoint Central?

For an MSP, often yes. Endpoint Central is deep endpoint management for one estate, and ticketing lives in a separate ManageEngine product. Helios is multi-tenant by design with the service desk, client reporting and client billing in the same box.

What does ManageEngine Endpoint Central cost compared to Helios?

It is priced per endpoint by edition, reported from around $795 a year for 50 endpoints on on-premises Professional, with servers licensed separately on top. Helios is 99, 199 or 399 pounds a month for the whole company by device band, with servers counted as ordinary devices.

Does Helios run on-premises?

No, Helios is cloud only. If a client requires an on-premises deployment, Endpoint Central offers one and Helios does not. That is a real difference and worth settling before anything else.

Is there a free alternative to ManageEngine Endpoint Central?

ManageEngine Endpoint Central itself is free for up to 25 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, Level is free for the first 10 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 ManageEngine Endpoint Central?

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 ManageEngine Endpoint Central 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.