Every maintenance software quote you will ever receive is priced per user. That number looks simple. It is not, and the difference between vendors is not the rate — it is who gets counted.
I sell maintenance software, so read this with the appropriate suspicion and I will make it easy for you to check everything I say. But this is the question I watch buyers get wrong most often, and it is worth more than any feature comparison.
Four populations touch a maintenance system. Most vendors charge for all four.
Walk through who actually ends up in a work order system at a mid-sized organisation:
The people who raise work. Tenants, staff, students, site managers, clients. They report a broken thing. They are the largest group by a distance, and they do no maintenance at all.
The people who watch. Directors, owners, finance, board members, and in property management, your own clients. They want a dashboard and a monthly report. They will never open a work order.
The contractors. External trades who actually do a large share of the work in facilities, housing and property management. In many organisations there are more of these than there are staff.
The technicians. The people who execute maintenance. The ones you are genuinely buying the software for.
Now the arithmetic. If you have eight technicians and a hundred and fifty people who occasionally report a leaking tap, and your vendor charges per user, you are not buying eight seats. What you are buying depends entirely on a definition buried in a plan comparison page — and it is usually the largest variable in the whole quote.
What the vendors actually do
I checked this rather than assuming it. Here is what is publicly documented as of August 2026:
Limble charges per user, including request-only users.
Fiix charges per user across its tiers, with no free requester tier documented.
UpKeep offers unlimited free requesters — genuinely, and credit where it is due. But read the definition in their own help documentation: those free users are view-only. They cannot edit any record, cannot act on a work order beyond submitting the initial request, and cannot see other users’ requests. Useful for reporting a fault. Useless for a manager who wants a dashboard, and useless for a contractor who needs to do the job.
MaintainX, eMaint and Brightly — I could not establish a clear public answer on requester licensing for these, so I am not going to assert one. If you are evaluating them, ask directly and get it in writing.
And across UpKeep, Limble and Fiix, one thing is consistent and worth knowing: API access sits at the enterprise tier. Custom fields and workflows generally sit at mid-tier or above. If your evaluation involves connecting anything to anything, that is the tier you are actually shopping in, whatever the headline rate said.
WorkTrek — the company I sell for, so weigh this accordingly and verify it — licenses only the people who perform maintenance. Requesters, report-only users such as management, and external vendors are free and unlimited. The vendor part is the one I would check hardest if I were you, because it is unusual: a contractor can receive work, acknowledge it, record what they did, and submit an invoice without anyone holding a paid seat.
The question to ask every vendor, in writing
If you take one thing from this, take the list. Send it verbatim to every vendor on your shortlist and keep the replies:
- Which categories of user require a paid licence? Not “how much per user” — which users.
- Can a person submit a work request without a paid seat? If yes, what exactly can that person do — and what can they not do?
- Can a manager view reports and dashboards without a paid seat?
- Can an external contractor receive a job, record their work, and invoice without a paid seat?
- At what tier does API access begin? And custom fields?
- What is the total for our actual shape — give them your real numbers: technicians, requesters, contractors, viewers.
- What happens at renewal if our headcount grows?
Question four is the one that separates vendors, and almost nobody asks it. Question six is the one that produces an honest quote instead of a headline rate.
Why this is worth your time
Because a quote comparison built on the per-user rate compares the wrong number. Two vendors at the same rate can differ by a factor of ten on the same organisation, and the factor is entirely in the definition of “user.”
And because — as I wrote a few months ago about how B2B software awards get sold — most of the signals pointed at software buyers are bought rather than earned. A badge cannot tell you who your vendor charges for. A star rating cannot either. That answer only exists in writing, from the vendor, in response to a direct question.
Ask the question. Keep the answer.
Disclosure: I do sales for WorkTrek, a CMMS vendor named in this article, and I hold stock options in the company. Weigh what I say about maintenance software accordingly. Every competitor claim above is checkable against the vendors’ own published pricing and documentation, and I would rather you verified it than trusted me. Where I could not establish a fact, I have said so instead of guessing. Corrections welcome — I would rather be right than consistent.
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