The Field Technician's CMMS Alternative
An honest features and operational comparison of Equipment Tracker Pro against over-engineered cloud platforms that complicate on-site workflows.
Prices checked 15 October 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page for MaintainX, Limble CMMS and UpKeep. Where a vendor publishes no price, this page says so rather than estimating one.
MaintainXStrong for corporate dispatching, but expensive and cloud-locked.
Starting: Free Basic · $20/user/mo Essential · $65/user/mo Premium, billed annually ($25 and $75 billed monthly) · Enterprise custom
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Equipment Tracker ProBuilt specifically for technicians, facility administrators, and property managers seeking speed and compliance math.
Starting: Free · $9.99/mo Pro
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Field Bottlenecks & Frictions
✗Cloud-first architecture: MaintainX's offline behaviour is something we have not verified, so this page does not score it. Basements, mechanical rooms and other low-signal areas are where technicians work every day — ask any vendor what their app does there before you buy.
✗Inventory and parts tracking are restricted to the Premium plan — $65 per user a month billed annually, $75 per user a month billed month to month.
✗AI features generate procedures from a nameplate photo — no automatic extraction of structured specs (voltage, BTUs, serials) into the asset record.
✗No integrated EPA Section 608 leak rate calculations or regulatory violation flags.
Best suited for: Large administrative office dispatching and facility preventive maintenance work-orders.
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How ETP Solves It
✓Offline-first SQLite local caching runs instantly in zero-signal zones.
✓Unlimited parts, inventory, and buildings are available in the free tier.
✓Gemini AI scanner extracts more than 30 fields from nameplate photos (the scan prompt returns 35 keys, functions/index.js:2176).
✓Built-in EPA calculator flags violations for comfort/commercial thresholds on systems ≥15 lbs.
✓Team plans start at $39.99/mo total for 5 seats ($8/seat) — a flat published figure, against MaintainX Premium at $65 per user a month billed annually or $75 month to month, charged for each of those five people.
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Technician-Centric B2B Optimization Features
📸 AI OCR Nameplate Parsing
Snap a data plate photo; Gemini AI extracts BTUs, voltage, manufacturer, phase, serial number, and refrigerant specs on-site.
❄️ EPA compliance calculations
Every refrigerant addition auto-calculates a leak rate against the EPA leak-repair thresholds (10/20/30% for comfort, commercial, and industrial process systems) and flags units of 15 lbs or more of an HFC (EPA’s HFC rule, 40 CFR 84.106) or 50 lbs or more of R-22 (Section 608, 40 CFR 82.157).
🚪 Guest Check-In & Forms
Print a door-sign QR (Pro feature). Contractors check in and out from their own phone with no app install, and every visit — company, purpose, timestamps — lands in your visitor log.
🧰 Free Core Features
Unlimited locations, equipment, parts, photos, service logs, PM schedules, work orders and invoices, free forever on one account — no trial clock, no ads, and no sign-up needed to start on the phone. Team seats are the paid part: $39.99 a month for five, and the technicians you invite sign in with their own free account and need no plan.
🎫 Work Orders
Track repair tasks with real status — Open, In Progress, On Hold, Done, Cancelled — plus hours and parts logged on every update or completion.
🗓️ Recurring PM Scheduling
Free on mobile. Set an interval, get reminded, and completing one logs the service and schedules the next automatically.
🧰 HVAC Field Tools & Charts
PT charts for eight refrigerants — R-22, R-410A, R-32, R-134a, R-407C, R-404A, R-448A and R-454B, the two A2L gases badged, bubble and dew columns on the glide blends. An Ohm’s and Watt’s law solver that fills in any field from any two. Duct velocity and CFM, all three fan affinity laws, NEC wire gauge with MCA and MOCP, the nominal-versus-actual filter size table, a belt lookup and a capacitor sizing table. Type a belt code (A to D, 2L to 5L, 3V, 5V, 8V, plain or cogged, SPZ to SPC, or ribbed such as 6PK1200) and it shows the width, the length and the equivalent where one exists. Free, offline, in the same app as the equipment record.
🧾 Invoicing off a Finished Job
A completed work order, PM visit or maintenance-plan charge goes onto a numbered invoice with your logo on it, and payments — partial ones included — are tracked against a running balance. Creating invoices is free in the app. No accounting sync.
💳 Customers Pay the Invoice Online
Send the invoice as a link, or show a QR code on your screen. The customer pays by card or bank through your own Stripe account — Pro, with a 0.5% fee capped at $10 on top of Stripe’s — or by PayPal or Venmo links, free on every plan. A card or bank payment marks the invoice paid and notifies you.
🛒 Parts Receipts, Scanned and Billed
Photograph the supply-house receipt and the AI reads each line, the tax and the total. Mark lines billable, business or personal, file the receipt to the job, and bill the parts at cost plus your markup. The AI reading uses the 10 free AI scans, then Pro.
🔩 Parts & Spares Matched by Size
Any system can hold a parts list. This one knows a Dayton 4L220H is the 4L220 with a brand suffix, and that a 16x25x1 filter measures 15.5 x 24.5 — so the spare on the van links to the unit on the roof it actually fits.
🌍 Seven Languages
English, Spanish (Latin America and Spain), French, German, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese — on the phone, the web dashboard, the printed reports and invoices, and the public QR and tenant pages, which carry their own language switcher. Push notifications from the server arrive in the language of the account that receives them. Tenant-request emails and texts go out in the building owner’s language; vendor check-in alerts and work-order assignment emails are English today.
👤 Customer Logins ⚡ Pro Team
Give a building owner or property manager a read-only login, on the phone or the website. They see only the locations you tick and the kinds of record you switch on — equipment, work orders, PM schedules, service history, invoices, site contacts. Costs, labor rates and parts stock never reach them. Each customer login takes one of your Team seats; the customer signs in with their own free account and needs no plan.
🔀 Quick Account Switching
If you give each customer their own Teams account, keep them all on one phone and switch from the account name at the top of the screen — no signing out, no password, and it works with no signal. Each account keeps its own records and unsent changes. Free and paid accounts alike.
🏠 Tenant Request Door Tags
A printed QR tag inside a unit lets a resident report a problem with no app and no login. The request lands in Dispatch for you to review rather than creating a work order on its own. Making the tags is a Pro feature.
📝 Maintenance Plans Signed Online
Build and price a recurring service plan, then send it to the customer to accept and sign — by link, as a PDF or on your phone. Building a plan is free; sending it for signature is Pro.
📤 Send a Job to Another Company
A Pro account can send a work order to a contractor who has their own Pro account. They accept it, work it and hand it back for approval, with hours, parts and photos, without joining your team or taking a seat.
📱 Pro on Two Devices
One Pro subscription covers a phone and a tablet, plus the web dashboard at equipment-tracker.com.
👥 Team Workspaces ⚡ Pro Team
Multiple named users share one synced dataset via a 6-character invite code, with Owner, Manager, Tech and Viewer roles controlling who can edit what, and a read-only Customer role for the people you work for — team seats are priced in blocks, not added one at a time.
When one of the big platforms is the right call
MaintainX, Limble and UpKeep are not bad software. They are built for a different job, and if your job is the one they are built for you should buy one of them rather than this. Be honest about which you are.
- You need approval chains and purchase orders. A request that has to route through a supervisor, then procurement, then a budget code, is a workflow engine's job. This app tracks the equipment and the work; it does not run your purchasing.
- You are reporting to a plant manager on uptime and MTBF. Production-line reliability metrics, downtime costing and OEE are what those platforms are for. This one answers "what is this unit, what has been done to it, and what does it need next".
- You are wiring in sensors. If condition monitoring is triggering your work orders, you want a platform with an IoT ingestion story. There is none here — work comes from a schedule, a technician, or somebody reporting a fault.
- You need SSO, SCIM and a procurement review. Enterprise IT requirements are a real product category and this is not in it.
What is left after those four is a large group of people: contractors, facilities teams, property managers and one-technician shops who need to know what is installed where, what was done to it, what parts it takes and what is on the shelf — and who are currently doing it in a spreadsheet because the alternatives cost more per seat than the problem is worth to them.
What the free tier actually includes
Unlimited buildings, unlimited equipment, unlimited photos, parts and inventory, service logs and recurring PM scheduling. Not a trial, not a fourteen-day clock, and not capped at a number of assets — the records are held on the device in SQLite, so there is no per-record cost to pass on.
Pro at $9.99 a month, or $79.99 a year, buys the things that cost money to run: cloud backup, the web dashboard (including its work order board and the Inbox page), AI scanning and diagnostics beyond the ten scans every registered account gets free, branded PDF reports, live QR pages, vendor check-in and tenant request tags. Team workspaces are a separate plan — $39.99 a month for five seats, or $399.99 a year, in blocks of five up to fifty — and the people you invite sign in with their own free account and need no plan. Work orders, PM schedules, parts, tools and creating invoices are free in the app, and so are PayPal and Venmo pay links; customers paying an invoice by card or bank through your own Stripe account is Pro, with a 0.5% fee capped at $10 per payment. Every AI feature needs a connection, and so does anything that syncs. What keeps working with no signal is your records, your photos and manual entry — worth stating plainly, because a scanner that needs signal is not an offline scanner and should not be sold as one.
The comparison worth running is not feature-count. It is whether the thing you open twenty times a day loads in a mechanical room with two bars of signal, and whether the person who has to use it will.
Put Field Tools First
Drop expensive cloud-locked administrative systems. Download Equipment Tracker Pro and start managing equipment and parts at technician speeds.