Atera vs Pulseway: A Comparison for IT Decision Makers

Choosing the right IT management system is investing in your company’s future. This means that you want to be sure that the features, usability, support, quality, and pricing all align with the wants and needs of your organization’s IT department — so that you know things will run smoothly and that all the help you need is available as soon as possible when you need it. 

When making this decision, it’s important to look into precisely what a potential IT management platform can offer you. 

Here, we’ll explore two IT management platforms, Atera vs. Pulseway. Both are leaders in the IT management platform industry, and we carefully reviewed what these two platforms can offer your IT department, providing valuable insights for you to make an informed decision for your organization, considering Atera as a Pulseway alternative.

User interface and usability

Let’s start with an important quality: the user interface and the platform’s ease of use. Both Atera and Pulseway offer an intuitive user interface that allows for easier management and completion of core IT department tasks and responsibilities.

These include, but are not limited to: 

• Handling common complaints with an AI help desk (a feature only Atera offers)
• Automatically updating OS, software, and hardware
• Scanning and alerts about common security issues

They also both offer a comprehensive mobile app allowing for remote problem-solving and ticket processing. This makes both platforms highly convenient — especially when an IT issue arises outside regular working hours. At Atera, we even offer an app that allows you to monitor and manage your IT needs from your phone, saving you from hopping on a computer to complete a job.

The Atera platform (both the app and desktop versions) is regularly updated based on real user feedback, meaning that the Atera team is constantly working to make their platform as user-friendly as possible. Don’t be afraid to give honest feedback, we are constantly reading and using it to improve our platform. 

But seeing is believing. Below, you’ll see a brief preview of each platform’s user dashboard:

Not only does our platform offer an easy-to-work-with UI design for IT professionals, but our PSA feature allows you to provide your customers with a helpdesk, billing, and reporting system that is well-designed to help them get what they need from you quickly and efficiently.

With quick-reply templates, calendar integrations, the ability to manage your helpdesk from your phone, the ability to connect devices to a ticket, within the ticket, and much, much more, you’ll never have to worry about the efficiency of your customer-facing interface again.

Features and capabilities

Atera and Pulseway each deliver essential IT features such as RMM (remote monitoring and management), patch management, IT services automation, help desk and ticket processing, and network monitoring.

Both also offer a wide range of integrations surrounding both productivity and security with common IT tools such as Webroot and Bitdefender. At Atera, we’ve worked hard to provide industry-leading integrations focusing on security and backup tools, while maintaining a variety of integrations focused on productivity. 

Pulseway, on the other hand, has a more productivity-emphasized system, with fewer integrations focused on backups and security.

One of the most significant capability differences between these two IT management platforms is the integration of AI. Only Atera incorporates AI into its IT platform to help alleviate your IT department’s tasks and responsibilities, it the ideal Pulseway alternative. For example, Atera’s AI can resolve 50% of tickets, all before you even knew they were there! 

At Atera, we have over 500 checks and solutions that the AI can run, and we focus on the most common scenarios and carefully added risk-free actions only. We also added an intuitive escalation mechanism, so every time the AI identifies the action is outside of its boundaries it will escalate it to a human technician to complete the work.

Another significant distinction, serving as a robust Pulseway alternative, is our Network Discovery feature. It empowers IT professionals to conveniently view and manage their IT environment using their computer or phone. Our Network Discovery feature allows IT professionals to see an overview and manage their IT environment from the comfort of their computer or phone. There are a lot of features within the Network Discovery feature, including;

• Security features like unmonitored device alerts, automated notifications of new devices joining the network, immediate alerts of scanning agents that go offline or IP addresses that change unexpectedly, the ability to manage BYODs within your network, as well as unchecked Shadow IT
• Automated scanning of ports, and common vulnerabilities and exposures of your network
• And much more! Visit our Network Discovery page to learn more about how you can easily upgrade your security posture

Performance and reliability

If you’ve ever worked with or within an IT department, you know the importance of reliability and responsiveness. Whether performing essential data backups or disaster recovery solutions to ensure your organization’s continuity, you want to know that you can rely on your IT management platform to deliver reliable support and performance. 

Both Atera and Pulseway have been praised for their reliability, but at Atera, we’ve been consistently recently as a leader in our industry and highly ranked for our performance and reliability, among a host of other accolades. We’ve received this reputation thanks to our constant commitment to being the best RMM software in the space. We’d love for you to take a look through our verified customer reviews on G2 to see how our customers feel about our reliability.

Pricing and value for money

The RMM pricing of these two platforms can vary depending on what your department needs. These can include extra features, but the biggest factor is usually how many devices your IT department works with. 

Atera’s pricing model is based on the number of technicians using the platform and tiers based on additional services. Our platform starts at only $129 per technician per month and works across an unlimited number of devices. 

Pulseway pricing, on the other hand, is based on a variety of factors, including the number of devices and endpoints your organization has or needs. It also offers security systems and features, but they’re available separately as add-ons. The baseline of Pulseway pricing is $27/month, but it can quickly become as high as $10,000/month depending on your company’s requirements.

We know what you’re probably thinking; “$10,000/month?! Yeah right, you’re just cherry-picking the worst numbers you can find from Pulseway. Your pricing probably works out to be very similar when it’s all said and done.” 

Honestly, great point! Without specifics, it’s difficult to compare Atera vs. Pulseway’s pricing models. So, let’s actually plug in some specifics to see what we can come up with.

Let’s take a one-man MSP operation that manages 300 endpoints across 10 different organizations. Assuming their duties are mainly focused on RMM capabilities, using the Atera Pro plan for MSP will be more than enough firepower to get the job done. This puts the MSP’s cost at $129/mo (billed annually), or $159/mo (billed month-to-month) with Atera (thanks to our fixed fee, unlimited devices pricing). Read a full on Atera review here.

Now to compare this with Pulseway, using their pricing calculator, we see that the monthly total for 300 devices is $597/mo (billed annually), or $918/mo (billed month-to-month). In an attempt to be fair to Pulseway, they do offer a 3-year plan at a further discount, but the total still works out to be $369/mo. And for us at Atera, 3 years seems like a long time to be locked into a contract. 

And this is before we’ve even touched 3rd party patching, ransomware detection, or endpoint protection. It’s easy to see how your bill can quickly skyrocket with Pulseway. And when you consider the fact that the number of devices under your network can change quickly, but the number of technicians is a more gradual change (which is how we determine our pricing at Atera), it’s easy to see why most people prefer our pricing model at Atera.

Customer support and community

The available support and community forums can be deciding factors when deciding between platforms because they add to the user experience in incredibly important ways. After all, what good is an amazing program with all the features you can imagine if you don’t have the resources to use them efficiently and effectively? 

Pulseway and Atera both offer their users the opportunity to use support services like a community board where you can chat with other IT professionals and a self-help knowledge center with a wide array of tutorials and resources. 

At Atera, we go the extra mile by offering a shared script library (so you can automate those repetitive, time-consuming tasks), making it a compelling Pulseway alternative. If you find yourself truly stuck with a problem, we make it simple to access an expert with their 24/7 help and support center.

Security and compliance

Security is essential to any IT department, not just because of the industry’s regulations but for your organization’s protection, continuity, and integrity. An effective IT management platform will allow you to keep tabs on your network security. This is something that both Pulseway and Atera deliver through their services.

Atera not only adheres to industry security standards like multi-factor authentication and is also SOC II certified, but also performs around-the-clock scans to maintain an organization’s security. 

This allows you to always be aware of what’s happening in your network and allows you to remove unauthorized devices, troubleshoot, onboard new devices, and overall maintain a high level of security for your organization.

Pulseway offers some security features, like real-time scanning to monitor your network, as well as a focused solution for ransomware detection.

However, it hides most of these features behind a paywall; they aren’t part of the standard package. You can calculate the pricing of your plan based on how many security features you want on their website, but we believe some of them should be included with your standard $27/month subscription.

User feedback and reviews

Atera and Pulseway have both been recognized for the solutions they provide to organizations and how they help IT departments operate. 
However, on the review site G2, Atera pulls ahead of Pulseway in pretty much all the categories.

When it comes to the quality of support these platforms offer, though, we at Atera pull ahead of Pulesway in ratings, with Pulseway garnering a 4.5 average with only 56 reviews, while Atera ranks 4.6 stars with 500+ G2 customer reviews as of 2024.

One reason IT departments prefer Atera over Pulseway is the pricing structure. Related to the pricing, this is what one Atera customer mentioned on the review site Capterra:

Review via Capterra

At the end of the day, your needs dictate which platform is best

All-in-all, both Atera and Pulseway offer an IT management platform that helps to resolve and prevent IT issues with a broad range of services and capabilities. 

However, based on our stellar G2 ratings and awards, it’s easy to see why Atera is the preferred Pulseway alternative. Atera has consistently been rated as a leading RMM software for IT professionals around the globe and continues to outperform Pulseway in nearly every category.

And when you consider the cost savings that organizations with a large number of endpoints could realize, the decision becomes a no-brainer. If you missed our example, head up to the “Pricing and value for money” section to see a real-life example.

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of our free trial to see if our platform is the right fit for you.
If you find yourself with questions specific to your organization’s operations, get in touch with our sales team to learn more about how we can systematize and streamline your organization’s IT efforts.