Any page naming the best equipment maintenance software is ranking products it was paid to rank, and the ranking would be wrong for you anyway, because the variable that decides the outcome is not the product. It is whether your technicians raise jobs at the machine or write them up later. A modest product that gets used produces a register, a schedule and a history; an excellent one that does not becomes a licence fee beside a spreadsheet. This page is four tests you can run in a demo that predict which of those you are buying.
Test one: time a raise on a phone, yourself
Unlock, open, find the asset, describe the job, save, timed, by you rather than the salesperson. Under a minute is the bar. Over three and the record you eventually get will be written from memory at the end of the shift, with rounder hours and thinner findings, whatever the product's feature list says.
Test two: try to enter bad data
Add an asset with no location, two with the same name, a work order against no asset at all. A product that accepts all three cheerfully will contain all three within a month, and the history you bought it for will be ambiguous exactly where you need it to be precise.
Test three: ask for the schedule in hours
Not jobs, hours, and hours per technician. On the worked example this site publishes, 180 assets at four tasks a year at 1.1 hours is 66 hours a month, $3,168 at a $48 loaded rate. A product that can only show a calendar lets schedules be written that were never staffable.
Test four: ask a real history question
Pick one asset and ask what has been done to it in two years and what was found. If the answer needs an export and a spreadsheet, the history exists and will not be used, which is the same as not having it.
Questions people ask about best equipment maintenance software
Should we buy the market leader?
Only if it passes the four tests for your team. Market leadership is evidence about a vendor's sales, not about whether your technicians will raise jobs at a machine.
How much should we pay?
Price it against your own reactive number. On the worked example here, avoidable labour is $9,273.60 a month; your version of that figure is what makes a subscription cheap or expensive.
What about free options?
Genuinely fine for a small register with one person keeping it. The trigger for paying is a second person needing to answer what is overdue, not an asset count.