A SaaS CMMS is now the default rather than a decision, and the honest summary is that subscription changes two things and leaves the important ones alone. It changes who is responsible for keeping the software running, which for a maintenance team of three is a genuine relief. And it changes where your history physically lives, which makes the export a contractual question rather than a technical one. Everything that decides whether maintenance improves, the register, the schedule and the findings, is unchanged and still yours. This page is about the two that change.
What subscription genuinely removes: the server
A small maintenance team should not also be administering a database, and self-hosted maintenance systems are famous for being several versions behind because nobody had time. That cost disappears, and it was a real cost even though it never appeared on an invoice.
What subscription introduces: dependence on the export
Your register, schedule and two years of findings live on somebody else's disk. That is fine if you can take a full copy whenever you like, and a problem if that is a support ticket. Test the export in week one with real data, not in year three when you want to leave.
What support should mean
Response time matters less than whether the person answering has ever run a maintenance function. Test it during the trial with a real question about scheduling rather than a password reset, because the second tells you nothing.
What does not change at all
The register still has to be finished by somebody who knows the plant. The schedule still has to be costed in hours: 66 a month on the worked example this site publishes. Findings still have to be written down by technicians. No delivery model does any of that for you.
Questions people ask about saas cmms
Is our data safe in a SaaS CMMS?
Generally safer than on an unpatched server in a plant room. What changes is that access control becomes somebody's explicit job.
What happens if the vendor goes away?
You have whatever your last export gave you. This is the practical argument for a monthly export habit regardless of how good the vendor looks.
Monthly or annual billing?
Monthly until a full PM cycle has run. The annual discount is real and smaller than the cost of a year of a product your technicians will not use.