ManageEngine Alternatives

NinjaOne is a cloud RMM and endpoint management platform: an agent on each Windows, macOS or Linux device reports inventory and health, applies OS and third-party patches on a schedule, runs scripts and opens remote desktop sessions, all from one web console. That is the job Endpoint Central does on ManageEngine's side, without the server you install and maintain for the on-premises edition. Ticketing and backup are sold alongside, so a small team can drop ServiceDesk Plus too if its needs are light.

Pricing is per device and depends on fleet size: on its commercial (non-FedRAMP) instance, NinjaOne publishes a range from $3.75 per endpoint per month at 50 endpoints or fewer down to $1.50 at 10,000, varying by region and products purchased, and sends a quote for the exact figure. That is the catch for a small fleet. Endpoint Central Professional costs $1,045 a year for 50 endpoints in the cloud, or $795 on-premises; NinjaOne at the 50-endpoint rate of $3.75 is about $2,250 a year for the same fleet. What you buy with the difference: no server, onboarding and support included at no charge, and a console most users run fully in less than a week.

Freshservice is Freshworks' IT service management (ITSM) platform: tickets from email, portal, chat and phone, a knowledge base, a service catalog, SLAs, and on the higher plans change, problem and release management. It covers what ServiceDesk Plus covers, in a cloud product that most guides describe as faster to set up. If you are already on Freshservice and weighing a move, see switching from Freshservice. IT asset management is licensed in asset units, sold in packs of 500, much as ServiceDesk Plus Professional adds asset tiers to its price; if assets are your main job, compare the IT asset management software first.

Read the price at the right billing period. Starter costs $19 per agent per month billed annually, or $29 billed monthly; Growth costs $49 annually ($59 monthly), Pro $99 ($119). ServiceDesk Plus Standard is free for up to five technicians and starts at $13 per technician per month in the cloud billed yearly ($16 monthly), so a small desk pays more on Freshservice. Ten agents on Starter come to $2,280 a year, against $1,545 a year for ten technicians on ServiceDesk Plus Standard in the cloud, or $1,195 on-premises. Its API also plugs into automation tools (see Freshservice automations in n8n). The AI assistant is an add-on: Freddy AI Copilot costs $29 per agent per month billed annually, on top of the plan.

Jira Service Management is Atlassian's service desk, now sold in its Service Collection: request portals, queues, SLAs, incident and change management, asset and configuration management from Standard (hardware asset management on Premium), and alerting with on-call schedules. For a team replacing ServiceDesk Plus, the pull is the link with Jira Software: a ticket escalates to a development issue in the same system, and a change request can be tied to a CI/CD deployment.

The free plan covers 3 agents with unlimited customers, a real option for a very small IT team. Standard costs $21.50 per agent per month and Premium $55.28, billed monthly; annual billing saves up to 17%. If a free workspace goes past 3 agents or its 2GB storage limit, Atlassian moves it automatically to a 14-day trial of Standard, so plan the switch before you add a fourth agent. Automation is metered: 1,250 automation steps per month for the whole subscription on Free, 3,000 per user on Standard. The weak spot against ManageEngine is endpoint work: there is no patching or device agent, so it replaces ServiceDesk Plus, not Endpoint Central.

SolarWinds Service Desk is the cloud ITSM of a vendor better known for network and infrastructure monitoring. It handles incidents, requests, problems, changes, a service portal and AI-assisted automation, with IT asset management available alongside. That pairing is the closest match to ManageEngine's spread: SolarWinds also sells monitoring and remote support tools, so a team leaving ServiceDesk Plus and OpManager together can stay with one vendor.

Every plan is billed annually per technician with unlimited requesters: Essentials starts at $39 per technician per month, Advanced at $99, Premier at $124. Ten technicians on Essentials cost $4,680 a year, against $1,545 for ten on ServiceDesk Plus Standard in the cloud ($1,195 on-premises), and up to five technicians Standard costs nothing. In return, Essentials already includes change management, which ServiceDesk Plus Standard sells on-premises as a $2,395-a-year add-on, and a CMDB, which comes with ServiceDesk Plus's Enterprise edition. Asset pricing is on request. The 30-day trial opens the Premier features, so check which ones you will lose when you pick Essentials.

PDQ Connect is the cloud version of PDQ's well-known Deploy and Inventory tools: an agent on each Windows or macOS device, a package library for common software, automated patching, inventory and reports, and on higher plans remote desktop and vulnerability scanning. It connects to other tools through Zapier (PDQ Connect on Zapier). It does a narrower job than Endpoint Central, which also covers mobile devices, OS imaging and a long list of security add-ons, but it does that job with very little setup.

Pricing is per device per year: Basic $12, Plus $18 (automated patching and remote desktop), Premium $28 (vulnerability management and priority support), each with a 100-device minimum. That minimum is the trap for a small office: 40 laptops still pay for 100, so Basic costs at least $1,200 a year, where Endpoint Central's free edition covers 25 endpoints and Professional costs $795 a year for 50 on-premises. Audit log retention also follows the plan: 14 days on Basic, 30 days on Plus, 12 months on Premium. The 14-day trial covers up to 250 devices without a card. For on-premises, PDQ Deploy and Inventory costs $1,950 per admin per year.

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform for networks, servers, virtual machines, applications and cloud services: SNMP and agent polling, templates, triggers, dashboards and alerting. It covers what OpManager does on ManageEngine's side. Since version 7.0, Zabbix is released under the GNU AGPLv3, an OSI-approved open-source license; versions up to 6.4 were under GPLv2. You can download, run and modify it without a license fee, and Zabbix asks commercial users to buy support.

The cost is in the work. OpManager sells annual or perpetual licenses by edition and device pack, from $95 a year for 10 devices on Standard, with an Enterprise edition beyond 1,000 devices; Zabbix costs nothing to license, but someone has to size the server, write or adapt templates and tune alerts. If you would rather not host it, Zabbix Cloud starts at $50 a month for its Nano tier (50 new values per second), $540 a year paid annually; the meter is NVPS, the number of new metric values the system ingests each second, which grows with hosts and polling frequency.