Honest Maintenance Care Review: An In-Depth Guide to Its CMMS

If you work in maintenance, you know how quickly things can get messy. Maintenance Care offers a CMMS solution that helps you keep everything organized. It’s built for teams working in places like hospitals, schools and manufacturing plants, and it lets you create work orders, schedule preventive maintenance and track assets all in one place. 

Maintenance Care offers a free version of its CMMS to get you started, but the real power shows up when you upgrade. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the upgrade or if there’s a better fit for your team, our Maintenance Care review breaks it all down. Let’s get started! 

We wrote this Maintenance Care review by testing several features through a free trial as well as doing extensive research on its paid platform through demo videos and customer reviews. Our deep dive included testing its features and comparing it to other tools out there, including our own. Read on to see what we found.

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.

Maintenance Care Ease of Use 

Maintenance Care gets generally good marks for ease of use, and if you’re a beginner user, setting it up is fairly straightforward. The interface’s design isn’t exactly cutting-edge, but it’s clean and organized enough that most users can find their way around after a slight learning curve. 

Creating and managing work orders is one of the highlights; it only takes a few clicks to add or update a task. Adding assets or locations follows a similar process and doesn’t feel overly complicated. Searching for work orders is quick, too, thanks to search filters. 

For day-to-day maintenance tracking, this platform doesn’t overwhelm you with too many steps; however, it’s important to remember that the free version is quite limited in what it can do. In fact, we found it almost too limited.

Maintenance Care Mobile Experience 

Maintenance Care offers a mobile app free of charge at all levels. The full version, dubbed iMCare, is available with paid plans only, but a limited version, iMCare Lite, is available with the free plan. While both versions aren’t the most modern or polished, they are relatively simple to use, which can be a plus for folks who aren’t as tech-savvy. 

If you’re using the free version, you’ll get the basics, with the more powerful tools locked behind the paid plans. For example, the full version supports unlimited users, so your whole team can jump in. You’ll also get access to asset tracking, inventory management, preventive maintenance scheduling, advanced reporting and integrations with other tools.

Creating and managing work orders is just as simple on the app as on desktop, requiring just a few clicks to create and start tracking a task. Alerts and notifications also appear within the app, which helps keep techs in the loop while they’re in the field. 

Maintenance Care Core Features & Functionality 

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

Work Order Management

Our first impression of Maintenance Care’s work order management system is that it’s layout is clean. Each row gives you task basics like the number, type (like “ELEC” for electrical or “GEN” for general), area, room and a short comment on what needs fixing. From here, it’s easy to scan and see what’s pending, what’s new and who submitted the request. You’ll also spot when it was created and how old the request is, which helps with prioritizing.

There’s a pretty solid filter setup at the top, too. You can search by facility, task number, status, date range, area, even who submitted or who it’s assigned to. You can adjust viewing options like how many work orders show up per page, set a default date range and even highlight high-priority tasks so they’re easy to spot.

Another handy feature is the “sticky filter” — once you set your filters, they stay in place even after you log out. It’s a simple way to keep your view organized and make managing work orders easier. These customizable display settings help streamline your workflow and make sure technicians get the right info every time.

The status column is color-coded (in our example, “pending” in blue, “new” in green), which is a nice touch. You can’t change the status from here — you’d need to open the task — but it’s still helpful for a quick scan. And since it tracks “age” in days, you can immediately tell if something’s been sitting around for too long.You can open up a task and see all the same key information as well as more details. You can assign the task right from the form, mark it wherever it is in the process and add comments or notes. Filters across the top of the task list let you quickly sort tasks by number or status.

Asset Management & Tracking

Notice there’s no “Asset” dropdown or field in that task form? That’s because asset tracking isn’t part of the free tier. You can mention an asset in the notes or lump it under “Area” or “Class,” but there’s no real way to track downtime or service history. If you need to keep tabs on your equipment, this free version might feel more like a workaround than a full solution.

When you opt for an upgrade, however, you can log an asset’s details such as make, model, serial number, purchase date, warranty info and repair history all in one place. We especially like its forecasting bar chart that tracks an asset’s life expectancy percentage alongside expenditures to ensure you’re getting the most out of your equipment.

Communications Within Work Orders

You can communicate inside a work order. There’s a Comments box for quick updates and a Notes section with full formatting, so you can add detailed progress updates with timestamps (like the one in the screenshot that mentions changing light bulbs.) There are even tabs for adding documents or viewing email threads. However, you won’t find live chat or real-time messaging, which can be an issue for larger teams looking for instant feedback.

Reporting & Analytics

There are no reports or charts in the free version. You can view task lists and maybe export some data, but if you want to see work completion rates or maintenance trends, you’ll have to upgrade. Maintenance Care’s paid plans offer easy-to-use reporting tools where you can track everything from asset costs to task duration hours per month with customizable dashboards, and you can export your reports in PDF or Excel for other teams and departments. 

Unique Features to Maintenance Care

We liked Maintenance Care’s option to create virtual spaces using a 3D-mapping camera that gives technicians the ability to visualize where a building’s electrical circuits or HVAC vents are for better planning. This is especially useful for facility maintenance teams that have thousands of square feet to maintain.

Another cool feature in the paid plan is the option to use voice commands to ask for information such as how many new tasks there are. Amazon Alexa will respond with details, so the user never has to look at their screen.

Maintenance Care Adaptability & Customization 

In Maintenance Care’s Free Forever plan, customization options are non-existent. You can create and manage basic work orders, but you’re restricted to default fields and layouts. Upgrading to a paid plan unlocks the ability to add or remove fields in various modules and create custom views for different users or departments. Automation also becomes possible, allowing users to set up process rules and custom alerts to streamline operations.

However, we couldn’t figure out how to rename fields if we wanted to match our company terminology, and the ability to create new workflows was impossible. This aspect was extremely limited compared to other competitors. Teams looking for more adaptability or options for future growth might find this aspect to be a dealbreaker.

Maintenance Care Customer Support 

Maintenance Care offers a range of customer support options designed to assist users. 

• Live Chat: Accessible on Maintenance Care’s website, this feature connects users to a chatbot, which can escalate issues to human support agents during EST/EDT business hours. 
• Email Support: Users can reach out through a contact form on the website.
• Phone Support: Direct phone assistance is also available.
• FAQs, video tutorials and troubleshooting guides are available on the website.

Maintenance Care’s support team is responsive and helpful. However, some of the above resources may have limitations for users on the free plan.

Maintenance Care Pricing

Maintenance Care stands out by offering flat-rate pricing with unlimited users — unlike many CMMS software competitors that charge per user. Its Free Edition includes up to two users, unlimited work orders and mobile app access. The Enterprise Edition is $225 per month and includes unlimited users, work orders, preventive maintenance scheduling, asset tracking, parts and inventory management, and advanced reporting. 

The All-In-Bundle is a flat-rate plan that runs $500 per month. It covers everything in the Enterprise plan and includes add-ons like CareClean for housekeeping, OneAccess for room bookings and Get Sensored for integrating smart sensors. You also get access to VR Spaces (in which you “walk” through your facility in 3D and see systems behind walls, tag equipment and plan maintenance visually), AI 500 features and full API integration.

Coast: The Better Maintenance Care Alternative 

While Maintenance Care is a solid CMMS solution for many industries, Coast offers a more intuitive experience that’s built for fast-moving maintenance teams that can easily rename fields, create custom workflows and set up automations without needing IT support. Its modern interface also makes it easier for deskless teams to stay connected and productive on the go with real-time chat and barcode scanning. 

Ease of Use
Mobile Experience
Core Features & Functionality
Adaptability & Customization
Customer Support
Pricing
Customer Reviews

Whether you’re managing assets, scheduling preventive maintenance tasks or responding to real-time issues, Coast gives you the control to do it your way, without being locked into rigid systems. Its initial setup is also more user-friendly for the beginner.