Electric AI Alternatives for Small IT Teams

Electric AI is one of the few products in this space that publishes a price list, which makes it easy to evaluate and easy to misread. The figures are per user per month, not per device, and that single distinction decides whether it is cheap or expensive for your team.

What Electric AI publishes

Read 24 October 2026. Refreshingly straightforward, and all of it on one page where anybody can check it.

The free tier costs nothing per user per month and covers hardware visibility, asset tracking, an embedded hardware store, device assignment by employee, and visibility inside your HR and payroll platform. For a small team that has lost track of what it owns, that’s a real amount of function at no cost.

Essentials is $10 per user per month and adds SaaS application management, cross-platform app provisioning, licence utilisation reporting, shadow IT detection and app spend visibility. It includes everything in the free tier.

Pro is $25 per user per month and adds mobile device management, an automation engine, automated patch management, compliance policy enforcement and device health monitoring. Volume pricing is mentioned for both paid tiers with no rates published.

The unit is the whole story

Per user. Not per device. That sounds like a detail, and it changes the arithmetic on your estate completely once you sit down and work it through against your own two numbers.

A company with 80 staff and 112 devices, counting spares, loaners and the machines held for people who haven’t started yet, pays for 80 under a per-user model and 112 under a per-device one. That’s a 40 per cent difference on the same estate, and it runs in your favour whenever your device count exceeds your headcount, which it usually does once you hold any stock at all.

It runs against you in one specific case: shared or kiosk devices used by many people, or seasonal staff who come and go. Then the user count climbs while the hardware stays still.

So do the sum both ways before comparing anything to anything. A per-device quote and a per-user quote aren’t comparable until you have applied your own two numbers to each.

What it does not cover

Here’s the boundary. It’s the main reason teams go looking for alternatives in the first place.

Electric’s published pages describe an embedded hardware store on the free tier, and they don’t describe international shipping, customs handling, warehousing or device retrieval as part of the paid plans. If your actual problem is getting a laptop to a new starter in a country where you have no entity, and getting it back when they leave, that’s a logistics problem and this is a management product.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s simply a different half of the lifecycle, and plenty of teams need both and buy them separately.

What to do:

• Count your users and your devices separately. Write both numbers down.
• Decide whether your gap is software and configuration, or physical movement.
• Price per-user and per-device offers against your own two numbers before comparing them.
• Check whether MDM at the Pro tier duplicates something you already pay for.

The alternatives, by what they actually do

Broad suites. Rippling IT covers identity, device management, inventory, helpdesk and compliance evidence, and states more than 130 countries for shipping. It publishes no price for IT, and the six-figure sum on its page is a customer savings claim rather than a rate.

SaaS and identity specialists. Zluri covers SaaS management and identity governance and doesn’t touch hardware anywhere. If you liked Essentials and ignored the device parts, this is the comparison worth making, though Zluri publishes no price and you’ll need a call to get one.

Asset record systems. Oomnitza handles hardware and software asset management, quoted after a scoping call, with no shipping mentioned. Its pricing page carries customer savings figures which are outcomes somebody reported after the fact rather than prices that anybody is actually charging you.

Logistics platforms. Workwize, Firstbase, GroWrk, allwhere, Esevel and Deel IT buy, ship, store and retrieve. Not one of them publishes a rate card you could use to build a budget without first getting somebody on a call.

A team that needed both halves

A 64-person company ran Electric on Essentials and liked it. Their SaaS spend was visible for the first time and shadow IT had dropped noticeably.

Then they hired 9 people across three countries in one quarter and the wheels came off, not because Electric failed but because nothing in it ships a laptop to Lisbon. They kept Essentials and added a logistics platform for the physical side, which cost less than upgrading to Pro would have and solved the actual problem.

They nearly upgraded tiers to fix a gap the tiers don’t address, which would have cost more and changed nothing about the problem. Worth checking what a higher tier actually adds before assuming it covers you.

Where we fit, and where we don’t

RemoAsset is our own product. It covers the half Electric does not: procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries, with each device tracked from issue through return, from $1,499 a year on the Subscription tier for companies with 50 to 5,000+ employees, including a 60 per cent reduction on retrieval charges.

Three limits matter here. It has no network discovery, so it won’t find devices your register never knew about. It has no software licence management, which is precisely what Electric’s Essentials tier exists to do, so it isn’t a replacement for that. And only the Subscription tier publishes a figure, with pay-as-you-go quoted.

It also does no MDM, so Electric’s Pro tier isn’t something we substitute for either. The two sit beside each other rather than against each other.

Checklist

Checklist:

• User count and device count, both written down.
• A clear statement of which half of the lifecycle is broken.
• Per-user and per-device quotes converted to the same basis before comparison.
• A check for overlap with MDM or SaaS tooling you already pay for.
• Your real country list for anything involving physical movement.
• Any vendor savings claim marked as marketing, not as a rate.

Final Thoughts

Electric’s published ladder is a genuine advantage in a category where almost everybody hides behind a discovery call. Use it. Being able to build a budget without first booking a demo and then waiting a fortnight for somebody to come back to you is worth something real.

But price the per-user unit against your own device count first, and be honest about which half of the lifecycle is actually failing. Most teams who go looking for Electric alternatives turn out to need a logistics platform alongside it rather than a replacement for it.

Frequently asked questions