Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is a searchable repository containing all of the available information you’ve got on your business’ physical resources, like equipment and tools, via their lifecycle from acquisition to disposition. CMMS also contain the work order management software used by technicians to ensure ongoing maintenance and by direction to boost utilization.

Best CMMS for Smaller Firms in 2017: eMaint

We recommend eMaint as the best CMMS for smaller businesses in 2017 because it offers the best combination of features, cost, and customer care.

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CMMS Comparison Table: eMaint vs Maintenance Connection vs Hippo

	eMaint	Hippo	Maintenance Link
Best For	Best overall CMMS for small companies	Many consumer friendly CMMS	Greatest CMMS if you expect to grow to a medium sized business and will need a bigger EAM alternative
Ease of Installation and Use Learn More	Intermediate	Intermediate	Difficult
Differentiating Features Learn More	Predictive maintenance Create barcodes for resources Voice-to-text on mobile program	Customizable dashboards CAD mapping of facility’s layout around resources Reporting can be automated or scheduled	GIS integration add-ons Scalable to EAM alternative Predictive maintenance
Mobile accessibility	Yes	Yes	Yes
Customer Service Learn More	Telephone and email assistance out of 3am-9pm EST, Monday to Friday, also in four languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German Online knowledge base and ongoing seminars and seminars.	Phone and ticket-based support from 8:30am-5pm CST, Monday to Friday. Online knowledge base.	Telephone, live chat, and ticket-based assistance from 6am-4pm PST, Monday to Friday. Online knowledge base and MC University, together with over 60 training courses.

Replies

	eMaint	Hippo	Maintenance Connection
Pricing	$33/month per user for up to three users $85/month per user for more than three consumers Paid annually	$40/month for unlimited users and up to 40 work order requestors $120/month for unlimited users and unlimited work sequence requestors Plus onboarding prices, which vary from customer demand.	$55/month per user, three consumer minimal, as well as 250 work order requestors $85/month per user, three user minimum, and unlimited work sequence requestors
Free Trial	Yes	Yes	Yes
	www.eMaint.com	www.HippoCMMS.com	www.MaintenanceConnection.com

eMaint

Hippo

Maintenance Connection

Pricing

$33/month per user for up to three users
$85/month per user for more than three consumers

Paid annually

$40/month for unlimited users and up to 40 work order requestors
$120/month for unlimited users and unlimited work sequence requestors

Plus onboarding prices, which vary from customer demand.

$55/month per user, three consumer minimal, as well as 250 work order requestors
$85/month per user, three user minimum, and unlimited work sequence requestors

Free Trial

Yes

www.eMaint.com

www.HippoCMMS.com

www.MaintenanceConnection.com

Best CMMS for Smaller Businesses: eMaint

We recommend eMaint as the very best CMMS for small businesses because it delivers a easy-to-use and feature-rich consumer experience which could help your organization improve the efficiency and efficacy of your maintenance program. EMaint is a CMMS that’s designed for businesses of all sizes, but it is particularly well-suited for small-to-medium sized companies. It’s flexible, highly-configurable, and cloud-based therefore that it’s accessible within your workplace and from technicians outside the field. It’s also competitively priced, falling between Hippo and Maintenance Connection.

EMaint’s extensive tracking, preventative maintenance choices, work order management, and perform scheduling features are housed in a user-friendly and web-based interface which lets you drag-and-drop to personalize, in addition to robust search and filtering tools that will assist you to find and monitor the information you need. We found that eMaint introduced information more clearly and was easier to get than in Hippo and Maintenance Connection.

It’s possible to customize your job order request types to simply include the information that your technicians need and put them out in an order that optimizes their workflow. When the arrangement of your own forms is finished, you may make them available on your business’ intranet (if you use one) to make it effortless for your staff to submit requests.

Once filed, work orders are then sent to their assignee and alarms sent when they are accepted, completed, or rejected. When tracking them, you can account for the labor, materials, and prices needed. Another exceptional characteristic is the ability to track work schedules. You can create work order schedules for your technicians, enabling you to plan their jobs. Neither Hippo nor Maintenance Connection had an equivalent option.

Work orders may be partly automated also. Preventative maintenance tasks can be scheduled ahead of time, either recurring or one-off, and coordinated with your company’ daily/weekly/monthly schedule. Purchase and receiving orders are tracked similarly, such as that which you currently have in stock and what needs to be ordered across multiple places.

EMaint includes several reporting templates or you can make your own with all the information you need. Security settings may also be assigned to your reports to make them read-only for specific users.

Perhaps the strongest feature that differentiates eMaint out of Hippo is predictive care. This monitors the condition of your assets to predict when breakdowns may occur and proactively schedules preventative maintenance to minimize any effect. Maintenance Connection provides a comparable feature, but at a much higher price.

Another of eMaint’s unique features is the capability to generate barcodes to catalog and tag your assets, which makes tracking them much simpler. Neither Hippo nor Maintenance Connection provide the same attribute, although they are harmonious with third-party barcode scanners.

At length, eMaint’s mobile program offers one distinct advantage over Hippo and Maintenance Connection — voice recognition. This allows technicians to upgrade work orders by voice rather than typing.

The lowest-priced Team package includes 500MB of document storage so that you may attach warranty info, meter readings, gear specification documents, or some other significant asset-related info. If 500MB is not sufficient storage to your own team, an additional 50GB can be purchased for a reasonable $100/year. But, Maintenance Connection includes 1GB of storage using their typical plan and 50GB with their Professional plan.

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Most User Friendly CMMS: Hippo

We recommend Hippo as the most user friendly CMMS. It’s a strong and user-friendly CMMS with a online interface that provides customizable dashboards and interactive maps and floor plans. It’s the only CMMS we reviewed, and the only in the market at its price point, that provides customizable dashboards. This feature isn’t accessible with eMaint or Maintenance Connection.

Hippo’s customizable dashboards are a intuitive user interface that enables your business to skin your view with your branding. From a usability standpoint, they comprise interactive website and facility displays with floor plans by which users may change views, manage work orders, and view and manage all your business’ assets.

But this feature is only accessible with Hippo’s highest-priced bundle, HipPro+, that begins at $170/month. But because Hippo’s flexible pricing structure fees a flat monthly fee for unlimited customers, not a user charge such as eMaint and Maintenance Connection, Hippo’s HipPro+ program may still work out are the most affordable option for your business.

Another unique feature is Hippo’s ZoomView, that is a customizable dashboard for managing workflows according to your facility’s floor plan. ZoomView includes CAD mapping to diagramming your center’s design around every one of your resources. Neither eMaint nor Maintenance Connection provide CAD mapping operation.

Hippo also provides you real-time access to the status of your business’ assets, which makes it easy to schedule maintenance to mitigate any potential breakdowns. This helps your organization to lower downtime and costs and reduces the chances of unplanned costs and meter reading mistakes.

But perhaps Hippo’s biggest benefit outside of its customization is how it collates all of your assets’ information in a single database, which is accessible to all your users in real-time regardless of their location and device.

That said, Hippo isn’t as powerful a CMMS as eMaint nor as scalable as Maintenance Connection.

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Best CMMS for Scalability: Maintenance Connection

Maintenance Connection is our recommendation for the very best CMMS for scalability. It can be deployed via the cloud as a managed service for small-to-medium sized businesses or installed on-premise to give a scalable solution for enterprise asset management (EAM). While eMaint and Hippo are our recommended solutions for smaller businesses, Maintenance Connection is better suited to climb with growth.

Maintenance Connection is an extremely intuitive CMMS which helps your small business track its resources, labour, and inventory. The company has a loyal customer base, such as Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and GE Energy, that always ranks them tremendously for client satisfaction.

Along with performing basic CMMS tasks such as work order management, asset management, scheduled maintenance, and stock control, Maintenance Connection provides two features that eMaint and Hippo do not — GIS integration and a web API. GIS integration is valuable for any company with geographical dispersion, such as support suppliers; and the API makes it possible for businesses to construct a customized integration with other internal systems, such as ERP, SCADA, or HR tools.

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In-Depth Review: eMaint vs Hippo vs Maintenance Link

Benefits of Setup/Use

A CMMS is a comprehensive system which will directly affect virtually every operational facet of your business. Implementation normally contains auditing your current operational condition and the data you use to monitor it, cleaning up your information to prepare it for migration, and configuring your CMMS to align with your business’ needs.

This is obviously a significant job for your industry. Therefore, a thorough onboarding process and continuing ease of usage are critical to its success. This is what each service provides.

EMaint: To assist your business throughout the Intricate installation process, eMaint offers extensive implementation support and ongoing consulting and technical service, including:

During execution, a senior adviser from eMaint will help guide your team through their 10 Key Steps process;
Additionally through implementation, eMaint will complete an evaluation of your company to estimate its present state and how it will influence the execution;
Project management support will incorporate a weekly status telephone and project plan updates, as well as project sponsorship to ensure that the needed resources are dedicated; also,
eMaint will support any required data scrubbing and standardization to align it with best standards and practices.

Hippo: Hippo also supplies implementation support — in actuality, they require that all new customers buy an onboarding package that fluctuates based on the degree of monthly package they choose, something to consider when evaluating Hippo’s costs (the specific price of the onboarding process varies by business need).

A Few of the services that Hippo supplies to help your business make the most of their support include:

On-site audits
Data migration and import for transitioning between systems
PM scheduling
Client-based training
Live webinar training
accessibility to a training movie library
Unlimited tech support with the product’s purchase

Hippo’s customizable dashboards also contribute to its simplicity of use as users can tailor the tool to their specific needs and workflow.

Maintenance Connection: Maintenance Link Contains a six-stage implementation process for each new client that includes:

Project preparation
Data migration
Core Setup
Process design
Training/go live
Measuring and managing results

And their training programs include both upfront and continued learning.

Once implemented, users may configure their system homepage depending on their role. Customizable calendars that reveal individual work schedules and how they relate to each other too bring about Maintenance Connection being relatively easy to use.

Characteristics

Any CMMS should supply the same essential attributes to work. These include:

Manage a business’ resources, including across multiple locations
Manage the inventory of any substances that are needed for maintenance
Schedule recurring maintenance activities, like inspections, repairs, and upgrades
Manage resources and devote them to the maintenance operations where they are needed
Track metrics and generate reports on the way assets are used, Expenses, and productivity
Provide a mobile solution for technicians Working off-site

EMaint, Maintenance Link, and Hippo all cover those basics. However, they also each offer some extra characteristics that help differentiate them from their opponents. We’ll look at those below.

EMaint: eMaint and Maintenance Connection equally offer an extremely useful feature that Hippo doesn’t — predictive care. This always monitors the state of your assets to forecast if breakdowns may occur. Preventative maintenance is then scheduled, proactively mitigating any possible effect of the called breakdown until it occurs.

Barcode creation is another feature that’s unique to eMaint. Both Hippo and Maintenance Link allow you to join third party barcode scanners, but only eMaint includes the capacity to create barcodes within the CMMS. This gives you the capability to label and catalog your assets more easily.

Finally, eMaint’s mobile app offers one distinct advantage over Hippo and Maintenance Connection — voice recognition. This allows technicians to upgrade work orders by voice instead of typing when they’re in the field, saving time and the tediousness of typing into a mobile device.

Hippo: Hippo’s two primary differentiating features are their customizable dashboards and CAD mapping.

Customizable dashboards allow your business to skin the CMMS with your branding. But more importantly, they display interactive website and centre views, such as floor plans, in which consumers can change perspectives, handle work orders, and view and handle all of your business’ assets.

Hippo’s ZoomView is just another customizable dashboard that helps you to manage your workflows according to your facility’s floor plan. It comprises CAD mapping to track your center’s layout around each asset. CAD mapping is exceptional to Hippo rather than provided by either eMaint or Maintenance Connection.

It should be said, however, that customizable dashboards are just offered with Hippo’s priciest monthly package, HipPro+, at $170/month. However, since Hippo includes unlimited users within their monthly bundles, which eMaint and Maintenance Connection do not, their most expensive may actually work out to be cheaper than the other services’ lower-priced bundles.

Maintenance Link: In addition to being flexible enough to climb to an enterprise-level alternative, Maintenance Connection provides two unique attributes that eMaint and Hippo do not — GIS integration along with a web API.

GIS integration is valuable for any company with geographic dispersion, such as service suppliers, as it allows you to manage dispersed assets inside the CMMS. Some applications could include:

Synchronize asset information between a geospatial database as well as the CMMS mechanically
Access locations for work orders and assets from inside the CMMS
Integrate with ESRI, AutoCAD, and other GIS programs
Screen dual-map options, like Google and Bing maps and road views within Precisely the Same display

Maintenance Connection’s net API provides your business and third-parties secure access to retrieve and update data inside your CMMS. You can develop custom solutions that query work orders, parts, purchase orders, or any other data that is available. HTTP-based processes can keep your CMMS in sync with your other operational systems. Examples of how this can be used include:

Send inventory and/or buying data to your accounting staff
Synchronize your information with SCADA systems
Update your HR team with staffing demands, hours worked, etc..

Customer Support

Implementing a CMMS in your company is a substantial undertaking. EMaint, Hippo, and Maintenance Connection all provide comprehensive onboarding processes in addition to ongoing customer support.

EMaint: eMaint offers much more customer service than Hippo and Maintenance Link, including telephone and email service from 3am-9pm EST, Monday to Friday, in four languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German.

Self-service online alternatives also include:

EMaint University (eU) — A 24/7 online learning portal
Boot Camp Training — Live sessions held in eMaint’s Training & Expertise Center (TEC) in Southwest Florida
User and Training Conferences — Meet others, participate in training classes, and view customer case studies
Monthly Webinars — Free monthly online webinars directed by eMaint product specialists

Hippo: Hippo features phone and ticket-based assistance from 8:30am-5pm CST, Monday to Friday, using a normal response time of between 1-2 hours during business hours.

Additionally, self-improvement alternatives include access to an online knowledge base with:

Video tutorial catalog
PDF documentation library
Project management library

Maintenance Link: Maintenance Connection provides assisted customer support and self-service options.

Phone, live chat, and ticket-based support can be found in 6am-4pm PST, Monday to Friday, with queries responded to within 60 minutes. Existing customers have given Maintenance Connection’s support a 98% satisfaction rate.

Maintenance Connection also offers a training platform called MC University, which includes over 60 courses covering in-depth coaching for various modules.

Additionally, Maintenance Connection holds Checkpoint, an annual user group convention.

Additional CMMS Options

There are many other CMMS options available on the market that may be a much better match for the business’ needs. Here are some of the others we enjoyed and what makes them unique:

Provider Name	What Makes It Unique?
EMaint	Best overall CMMS for small businesses
Hippo	Most user friendly CMMS
Maintenance Link	Easily scalable as company grows
NetFacilities	Lifetime training and support comprised
Bigfoot	Business solution with easy interface that is easy to utilize
Dude Solutions	Complete suite of management software

The Bottom Line

We recommend eMaint as the best CMMS for small businesses. It is among the leading systems on the market, offers a wide selection of features, and is highly customizable. Additionally, it is competitively priced and offers the most exhaustive onboarding and client support options.