Opening with what they do well

Atera, honestly compared

Atera charges per technician with unlimited endpoints. If you have a high endpoint-to-technician ratio and few console-only staff, Atera is cheaper than we are and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Where the per-technician model turns on you

It is excellent for a generalist shop. It inverts the moment you specialise, because anyone needing console access needs a technician licence regardless of role.

Dispatchers. Service coordinators. Billing admins. Account managers. vCIOs. NOC staff. Every one of them is a full-price seat that manages no endpoints — and they are precisely the roles a growing practice adds.

And their AI is two products, neither of which is ours

What Robin actually does, from their own documentation

It executes pre-approved scripts an administrator has flagged, plus a fixed self-service list: log out, restart, lock, shut down, reset a local or Entra password, reset MFA. No hardware. No licensing. No vendor contact. No rollback.

That is a well-designed allowlisted actuator and it deflects the highest-volume ticket in this industry. It is not an analyst, and the marketing around it says otherwise.

And the thing we do not have

Robin answers a client’s employee wherever they are — a portal, a chat, Teams. We do not have that today. A password reset from an end user still reaches one of your technicians.

It is on our list, it will run on the agent already installed on that person’s machine, and it will be included rather than metered. Until it ships, this is a real gap and this is us telling you about it rather than you finding out.

The short version

If you are a small shop with a high endpoint ratio, Atera is cheaper. If you are adding coordinators and vCIOs, the model taxes exactly the shape you are becoming.

And on AI: theirs assists a technician for $29 USD a seat, and the autonomous half has a price nobody outside a sales call has seen. Ours is included, unmetered, and runs on your own hardware.