CMMS/EAM is written as one thing in a lot of vendor material and it is two, with a line between them that decides what you should pay and how much configuration you will carry. A CMMS holds the register, the schedule, the work orders and the history. An EAM holds all of that and adds spare-parts inventory and purchasing, multi-site consolidation, and asset lifecycle costing that feeds capital planning. Three questions put you on one side of the line, and answering them before you look at products saves comparing things that were never comparable.
Question one: do you hold and reserve spare parts?
Not whether you have a cupboard: whether you need to reserve parts against planned jobs, know stock levels, and reorder on a rule. If yes, you are buying EAM whatever the sales conversation calls it, because a light inventory module will not do it.
Question two: do you consolidate across sites?
Several sites with separate teams and separate budgets, where somebody above them needs a comparable view across all of them, is an EAM problem. One site, or several sites run by one team out of one stores room, is not. The distinction matters because consolidation is most of what you pay the extra licence money for, and you will not use it.
Question three: do you cost assets across their lives?
Total cost of ownership feeding a replacement decision and a capital plan. If that question is asked of you annually, EAM. If nobody has ever asked it, the answer is CMMS and the lifecycle module will not be turned on.
What the line costs if you cross it unnecessarily
Configuration, mostly, and it lands on the person who was already doing the scheduling. A capable platform in a maintenance function of five is the commonest reason a good product fails: nobody had a fortnight to configure it, so it runs on defaults nobody chose.
Questions people ask about cmms/eam
Can we start with CMMS and move to EAM?
Yes, and it is the usual path. Make sure the export is complete before you start, because that migration is where a poor export becomes expensive.
Do EAM vendors sell to small teams?
They do, and the product is often genuinely good. What does not scale down is the configuration effort, which is the thing to ask about rather than the price.
Is one of them better?
Neither. They solve different problems, and the wrong one for your problem is worse than either.