CMMS · refereed
MaintainX vs UpKeep
We looked at who wrote the existing answers. All ten are either one of these two companies or a third CMMS vendor hoping you choose neither. Not one is written by somebody without a stake. That is unusual even by this category's standards.
Who wrote this, and what we sell
We make ReportWalk, which is not a CMMS. We do not sell work orders, parts or preventive maintenance scheduling, and we are not an alternative to either product here. That is why we can write this. Our own tool appears once, at the bottom, and only for a narrow adjacent case.
The short answer
MaintainX
Choose MaintainX if you want a free tier that is not a trial and a mobile interface technicians open without being told to. It is also the better-funded of the two by a wide margin.
UpKeep
Choose UpKeep if its asset and parts model fits how your operation already thinks. Its reporting is named positively even by people who left it.
Check UpKeep's offline limits before you commit. On the Professional plan the app caches up to five work orders — a published number, and a hard ceiling on any day without signal.
Who actually switched, and why
Two each way — the only genuinely bidirectional pair in our CMMS research. That matters: it means neither product is simply losing, and it means the fit question is real rather than a proxy for quality.
UpKeep → MaintainX
“Easier to use then UpKeep, Better Reporting”
UpKeep → MaintainX
“Customer support, ease of use, implementation, functionality”
MaintainX → UpKeep
“Switched from MaintainX”
MaintainX → UpKeep
“Switched from MaintainX”
Where they genuinely differ
Offline, where UpKeep publishes a number most vendors would bury
UpKeep documents that its Professional plan caches up to five work orders, two drafts and five task images for offline use. Enterprise raises it to between five and one hundred. Whether the cheaper tiers get offline at all is not documented.
Credit where due — almost nobody publishes cache limits. But a plant walk or a rural route is routinely more than five jobs.
MaintainX requires a connection before you switch to offline mode so it can build its cache. Configurable, but it has to have been online recently.
Price and free tiers
MaintainX has a free Basic tier, Essential at $20 per user per month annually and Premium at $65.
UpKeep starts at $24 per user per month with Premium at $55, and has no free tier — a seven-day trial only. Professional and Enterprise are quote-only.
One hardware requirement worth checking
UpKeep's iOS app requires iOS 18 or later. Plenty of working site phones are older than that, and this is the kind of requirement that becomes a hardware bill nobody budgeted for.
What each is honestly better at
MaintainX
Adoption and entry cost. A free forever tier and a mobile-first design are why technicians use it, and technician adoption is the thing most CMMS rollouts fail on. It also raised $150M at a $2.5 billion valuation in 2025, so it will be here.
UpKeep
Reporting and asset depth — named positively even in reviews by people switching away from it. It also publishes its offline cache limits, which is more transparency than most of this field offers, and it took growth investment in May 2026.
What we could not verify
- Why Jose Luis S. and Lillian G. moved to UpKeep — direction-only records.
- Whether UpKeep's offline caps apply to its Essential and Premium tiers. Undocumented.
- MaintainX's complaint record is unusually thin for its size; we found one usable recent critical review anywhere, so we cannot fairly characterise its unhappy customers.
- Reddit was unreachable in every research session.
If neither fits — a third shape of tool
If the part still on paper is the inspection round rather than the work order, that is a narrower tool than either of these. ReportWalk covers the walk and the document, offline without a cache condition, and has no work orders, parts or PM schedules at all.
Related comparisons
Last updated 15 September 2026