Honest eMaint Review: Is eMaint a Good CMMS?

eMaint is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) with extensive features and functionalities. But is it a good CMMS for your business? And is it worth the price? To help you decide, we look at all critical aspects of eMaint in this review.

It’s an extensive platform designed for enterprise-level companies, so there’s a lot of ground to cover, but we focused on these key aspects:

While evaluating, we tried to get first-hand experience of eMaint, but unfortunately, access to eMaint is heavily gated. There’s no free plan, and the free trial requires you to jump through hoops — requesting a demo, scheduling it via email with a rep and then getting access to the trial. If you want to try eMaint, be prepared to invest some time interacting with a rep before you can actually try it.

Fortunately, eMaint has multiple video resources and an interactive walkthrough. Our eMaint review is based primarily on these assets and customer reviews.

Why Trust Coast?

At Coast, we take our software reviews seriously. Our review methodology evaluates software across seven critical categories that help differentiate the solutions from one another. Each category receives a score from one to five, with five being the highest, and a maximum possible score of 35 points.

eMaint Ease of Use

eMaint offers a fairly straightforward interface. Once logged in, you can use the left sidebar to navigate between sections. You can start creating assets and scheduling work orders by navigating to the relevant section on the sidebar. We like the fact that the left sidebar is configurable. You can go into profile settings and add, remove and sort items in the sidebar.

There’s a question mark icon at the top-right for easy access to help. Click on it, and you’ll see a pop-up where you can type your question to search for eMaint’s internal resources.

The best part? There’s also a built-in walkthrough for various tasks, such as adding new assets or work orders. When you click on a walkthrough, pop-ups guide you through the process.

eMaint Mobile Experience

eMaint offers a mobile app for both Android and iOS devices. The setup process is quick and easy — just enter your username, password and server address, and you’re set.

Your team can configure alerts while logging in for the first time to get notified whenever a task is assigned or becomes overdue. The mobile app makes tracking and claiming work orders quite simple for technicians. When they log in, they’ll directly see the “Mine” section, which shows a list of work orders assigned to them. Switching to the “All” section shows them other work orders that they can claim.

Both the mobile and web interfaces give you access to all the information needed in the field or when making decisions. The interface functions more or less the same on mobile, except the sections that appear in the left sidebar on the web interface appear in a panel at the bottom on the mobile app. Overall, we felt the mobile app’s design is intuitive, resembles the theme of the web interface to a great extent and functions well.

eMaint Core Features & Functionality

Let’s take a closer look at some of eMaint’s core features and how they function for maintenance teams.

Asset Management

In the “Assets” section, you’ll see a list of assets you’ve added, and there’s a button on the top right to add new assets. Each time you add a new asset, you can use a pre-configured form, which already includes category-specific fields, or you can start from scratch. For example, when adding a new vehicle to eMaint, you could just use the pre-configured form for fleet assets that already has a field for vehicle registration details.

If you have other components related to any asset, such as meters or sensors, eMaint lets you add them as “Related Entities.” Adding related entities is critical if you want to set up triggers other than time for your PM tasks. For example, when you add a truck as an asset, also add a meter as a related entity. Your meter can track miles, while eMaint can use this reading to trigger work orders for the truck after every, say, 2,000 miles.

eMaint also offers interactive maps that show assets across the plant with color-coded pins. When you click a pin, eMaint shows you all asset data you’ve stored within its software, including work order histories. This visual map helps make informed decisions and prioritize work intuitively.

Work Order Management

The work order form is thorough. It has fields for adding notes, documents, signatures, labor and material charges, standards used and more.

We like the fact that eMaint offers extensive filter options. For example, when searching for parts, you can search the description field using various operators. Of course, the specific operators differ based on the field you’re dealing with.

The process for scheduling preventive maintenance and inspection work orders is also easy, but unfortunately, the forms are not highly configurable. For example, the preventive maintenance form starts with defining a trigger.

On the first screen, you choose an asset and a trigger. The trigger can be calendar-based (for example, every month), or you can choose other triggers when they’re available. For example, if you’ve added a meter for one of your trucks, you can choose to trigger the PM after every 2,000 miles.

On the next screen, you add the maintenance task and other details. There’s a “Projections Preview” option on this screen that lets you see when a task becomes due on a calendar, based on your chosen frequency. It’s a neat way to get a calendar preview of when a work order is configured to trigger.

Whenever you close a work order, you see a pop-up that lets you record downtime hours for that asset caused by planned maintenance. This data is auto-populated into the asset’s records, which means there’s no need to go all the way into your asset records and manually add downtime.

However, we noticed a major drawback during our evaluation — there’s no built-in team chat feature. The lack of real-time communication makes it harder for technicians to ask questions or request approvals while performing a work order.

eMaint Adaptability & Customization

Customization isn’t eMaint’s strongest suit. The scheduled work order forms, for example, have little to no configuration flexibility. Take the preventive maintenance work order form, for instance. It doesn’t allow you to add new fields or remove existing ones. You’re forced to work with what’s already there.

The default form covers all the essential details, but customization isn’t an option if you want more task- or asset-specific fields. The lack of configuration in the preventive maintenance form is a major disadvantage — the dynamic needs of a preventive maintenance program warrant more flexibility.

However, scheduling work orders is pretty easy. You can choose one of the following options to trigger an automated work order request:

• Fixed frequency: This option automatically schedules a work order every specific number of days, weeks or months. You can also configure the work order to trigger a specific period after the previous work order is closed.
• Reading-based scheduling: If you added a measurement device to your asset, you can use its reading to trigger a work order. For example, if you added a meter to your truck, you can set the work order to be triggered every 2,000 miles.

eMaint Customer Support

eMaint offers support via chat, phone and email. You can get quick answers through all channels, but of course, chat is the fastest route. There’s also a self-help portal on eMaint’s website. It’s extensive, but the interface feels dated.

We looked at a few customer reviews, and customers agree with our experience that support is quick and easy to access. That said, the issues we had to simply test the software made it obvious that new users are less of a priority than existing ones.

eMaint Pricing

eMaint isn’t cheap. The most basic plan starts at $69 per user per month and only includes standard CMMS features. Workflow management and billing management are not available on the basic plan, while access to eMaint’s Experience Center is available at an additional cost.

The Team plan is only available as a three-user package, which translates to $207 per month. If you want to add more than three users, you’ll have to switch to the Professional plan, which costs $85 per user per month. The top-tier plan requires at least five users, and the pricing is only available on request.

Coast: The Better eMaint Alternative

eMaint is a great CMMS for enterprise clients with complex maintenance workflows and a need for deep asset tracking. But if you’re looking for simplicity, efficiency and greater customization abilities, consider Coast.

Here’s a summary of how eMaint compares with Coast:

Ease of Use	eMaint is easy to use for professionals, giving them a more information-dense interface with various modules accessible through a centralized dashboard/	Coast offers a modern, clean and uncluttered interface focused on simplicity to help users focus on maintenance without overwhelming them.
Mobile Experience	eMaint’s mobile app offers a mobile experience similar to the web interface.	Coast is similar in that its mobile app is a reflection of the web interface and is focused on simplicity and efficiency.
Core Features & Functionality	Even though the feature sets of both eMaint and Coast are quite similar, the best eMaint features are available with the most expensive plans.	Coast offers more features on lower-tier plans, while eMaint restricts many features to more expensive plans.
Adaptability & Customization	eMaint lags in terms of customization of PMs and other forms.	Coast offers highly customizable workflows for work orders and asset management.
Customer Support	eMaint’s support staff is quick to answer, and support is easily accessible via phone, email and chat.	Coast offers quick and easy access to support as well as exceptional assistance during and after implementation.
Pricing	eMaint may deliver better value to enterprise users, but it may seem expensive to most other users.	Coast offers greater value given the free plan and hard-to-beat pricing for paid plans, combined with an extensive feature set.
Current Reviews	Customer reviews are fairly positive across multiple review sites.	Coast users love its adaptability and fair pricing.