Helios vs NinjaOne: public pricing vs the quote call

NinjaOne is the RMM most reviewers rate first for endpoint management. The comparison with Helios comes down to three things: how you buy it, what happens at renewal, and whether you want AI that rates patches or AI that runs the desk.

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 NinjaOne does well

NinjaOne consistently tops review sites for ease of use and support quality. On patching it has one thing Helios does not have today: Patch Intelligence, a stability rating on each Windows patch built from failure data across its fleet, and since March 2026 vulnerability workflows driven from it. Helios patches Windows, macOS, Linux and third-party software on per-client windows with severity-based auto-approval, shows how each update fared on your own estate before it goes further, and lets you block one everywhere or hold every new one for a week; what it cannot show is a rating built from millions of endpoints it does not manage.

What to look at closely before you buy

• No public pricing. NinjaOne sells per endpoint through sales quotes, commonly reported between $1.50 and $3.75 per endpoint per month depending on volume and modules (last verified July 2026). You will not know your price until you have had the call.
• Renewals and exit. Multiple public reviews describe steep price increases at renewal and 60-day cancellation notice requirements. Read the renewal clause before you sign, and diarise the notice window.
• The stack around it. NinjaOne is RMM-first. Ticketing exists but a full PSA, documentation and other pieces typically mean more products, and client-facing reporting is a recurring gripe in its own reviews.

How Helios is different

Helios publishes its prices, and they are flat per MSP rather than per endpoint: your estate growing does not mean a renegotiation. Sign-in is enterprise-grade on every plan (Microsoft Entra SSO, passkeys, TOTP), not an upsell tier. Monitoring, patching (Windows Update and third-party via winget), security, Microsoft 365, backup monitoring, remote access, a client portal and a full AI service desk are all in the same product on every plan. The AI does not stop at patch ratings: Helio investigates alerts on the machine, writes and verifies fixes with approval guardrails, and answers your clients' tickets. The day-to-day tooling NinjaOne admins expect is here too: a remote terminal and file pull/push that never interrupt the user, BitLocker recovery keys escrowed automatically with audited reveal, and an agent that detects and heals its own failures rather than going quietly stale.

Where NinjaOne is the better pick

If you manage thousands of endpoints, want a cross-fleet stability rating on every Windows patch, and have the volume to negotiate a per-endpoint rate, that is NinjaOne's case. If you want the whole stack in one bill you can read before the call, and an AI that works the tickets as well as the patches, look at Helios first.

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 NinjaOne?

If you want published pricing and a full service desk in the same product, yes. NinjaOne has one patching feature Helios does not: a cross-fleet stability rating on each Windows patch. What it does not give you is a price without a sales call, or a PSA without a second product.

What does NinjaOne cost compared to Helios?

NinjaOne sells per endpoint through a quote, commonly reported between $1.50 and $3.75 per endpoint per month. Helios publishes its prices: £4 a device on the Launch tier from 5 to 25 devices, then £99, £199 and £399 a month by device band. At a few hundred endpoints the flat plan is usually the cheaper and always the more predictable of the two.

Does Helios replace NinjaOne and a separate PSA?

For monitoring, patching, security, Microsoft 365, remote access, tickets, SLAs and client portals, yes, those are all one product here, and so are recurring contracts, time tracking and invoices pushed into Xero or QuickBooks, and quotes. It does not do projects, procurement or taking card payments, so check that shorter list against what your PSA does today.

What does NinjaOne 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 NinjaOne pricing.

Is there a free alternative to NinjaOne?

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 NinjaOne?

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 NinjaOne 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.