Top 5 Brightly Asset Essentials Alternatives in 2026 (Review)

IBM Maximo is built for enterprise users. It might make sense if your company manages hundreds of assets and is in a highly regulated industry, but it’s overkill for small businesses.

If you do own and operate complex, mission-critical assets, IBM can help you implement a proactive maintenance program using a combination of AI, IoT and advanced analytics. It offers predictive insights using asset data collected during maintenance operations, helping you take better care of high-value assets.

However, if you’re a small business, you’ll just end up paying for a ton of features you don’t need.

eMaint is a popular CMMS that helps maintenance teams gain full visibility and control over assets and maintenance workflows. It supports condition monitoring sensors, predictive maintenance insights, alerts and automated work orders, helping you automate most parts of the maintenance workflow.

With eMaint, you also get multi-site support and detailed reports and dashboards. If you’re looking to scale your maintenance operations worldwide, these could make things a whole lot easier. However, there are a few things to consider. As we discuss in our eMaint review, it lacks customization options and doesn’t offer built-in chat.

Accruent’s Maintenance Connection is built for companies with a large asset portfolio distributed across multiple facilities. It’s a scalable platform that offers centralized visibility, helping you manage assets, parts, locations and workflows across all sites from a single platform.

Maintenance Connection also covers the basics, such as role-based access, asset tracking, reporting and preventive maintenance scheduling. There are a few things to consider, though. As we discuss in our Maintenance Connection review, the platform lets you open only one work order at a time, and the extensive integration options can leave users feeling overwhelmed.

UpKeep is a mobile-first CMMS that offers a range of advanced preventive maintenance features. For example, it supports multiple trigger points for preventive maintenance work orders. This means you can schedule them based on calendar intervals, meter or usage readings, or a combination of both.

We like how UpKeep offers advanced features without compromising ease of use. Even for a beginner, UpKeep is unlikely to feel overwhelming. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer enough customization options. If your team has unique workflows, UpKeep isn’t a great fit unless you’re open to adapting your workflows to align with the software.