Helios vs Pulseway: the phone in your pocket, or the queue on your desk

Pulseway earned its following by being the RMM you run from a phone, and a native app with remote control from the phone is still what it has that Helios does not; Helios installs as a web app and pushes approvals and alerts to the phone. The comparison is about what happens when the estate outgrows what one person can watch.

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 Pulseway does well

The native mobile app is the product: remote control and remediation from a phone, which for a one or two person shop on call is a material quality-of-life difference. Helios installs as a web app that pushes approvals and alerts to the phone, but it does not drive a desktop from it. Deployment is quick, the agent is light, and the monitoring and alerting core is solid and mature. If your working pattern is a small team reacting fast from wherever they happen to be, Pulseway fits that shape better than most.

What to look at closely before you buy

• The published price is hard to pin down. Pulseway's own pricing page routes to a demo or a conversation rather than a rate card. Third-party sources report figures around $1.85 per endpoint per month as a starting point, with annual and pay-as-you-go options that differ substantially (last verified September 2026). They do not agree with each other, so get your own quote in writing and do not budget from a blog post, including this one.
• A minimum and an onboarding fee are commonly reported. A 20-endpoint minimum for new accounts, and a one-off onboarding session for a fee. Neither is unreasonable; both belong in your first-year number.
• PSA depth. Pulseway has added ticketing, but a full service desk with SLAs, a client portal, client-facing reporting and client billing is a different scope. Check it against what you run today.

How Helios is different

Helios prices per MSP rather than per endpoint, publishes the number, and charges no onboarding fee. There is a minimum, and it is a small one: the Launch tier bills £4 a device between five and twenty-five devices, so the floor is £20 a month. A new MSP with a handful of machines can start properly rather than paying for twenty endpoints it does not have.

The bigger difference is scope. Alongside monitoring and patching you get a full service desk with SLAs, email-in tickets and a branded client portal, Microsoft 365 and Defender, backup monitoring, network discovery, recurring contracts and invoices into Xero or QuickBooks. And Helio does the triage rather than pushing it to your phone: it investigates the alert on the machine, fixes what it can under guardrails you set per client, and answers the client. The aim is fewer notifications, not faster ones.

Where Pulseway is the better pick

If you run a small estate largely from your phone and a native app with remote control is what makes your day work, Pulseway has that and Helios does not. If you are building something that has to run without you watching it, and you want the service desk, client reporting and billing in the same product as the monitoring, Helios is the better shape.

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 Pulseway?

If you need a real service desk and client billing alongside the monitoring, yes. Pulseway has a native mobile app with remote control and Helios does not. Helios has the wider scope and publishes a flat price per MSP rather than charging per endpoint.

What does Pulseway cost compared to Helios?

Pulseway does not publish a rate card on its pricing page, and third-party reports disagree with each other, starting around $1.85 per endpoint per month. A 20 endpoint minimum and a one-off onboarding fee are commonly reported. Helios publishes its prices, charges no onboarding fee, and its minimum is 5 devices on the Launch tier, which is 20 pounds a month.

Does Helios have a mobile app?

Not a native one. The web app is responsive and you can triage alerts and approve fixes from a phone, and it installs as a web app that sends push notifications for approvals and alerts. What it does not do is remote control from the phone, which Pulseway's native app does. The Helios approach is to need the phone less, by having Helio resolve more before it reaches you.

Is there a free alternative to Pulseway?

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 Pulseway?

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 Pulseway 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.