Comparison
ActivTrak alternatives for MSPs: an honest comparison
ActivTrak is a capable product with more reporting depth than most of its alternatives, including ours. The reason MSPs look elsewhere is usually not capability. It is that the account model and the billing unit assume a single business watching itself.
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We build a competing product, so treat this as an interested party's framework rather than a neutral review. What follows is the set of questions worth asking of any candidate — including SnitchOS — and an honest account of where we lose.
The four questions that decide it
- What is the billable unit? Monitored users, devices, or console logins. This determines whether your cost follows your clients' hiring.
- Is the client a first-class object? One account with separated clients, or one account per client.
- How does it deploy? Silent install through the RMM you already run, or a per-client manual path.
- What does the agent collect? Specifically, whether typed content is captured, and whether the service is visible and removable.
Report depth matters, but it is the fifth question, not the first. A deeper report you cannot deploy at an acceptable cost across twelve clients is not useful to an MSP.
Where the incumbents are stronger
ActivTrak has spent a decade building reporting surface, and it shows. Long-tenured products in this category typically offer more report types, more filtering and column control, deeper historical analysis, and features SnitchOS does not have at all.
If a specific view drives your weekly workflow — a particular productivity breakdown, a specific export format a client expects — check for it explicitly. Do not assume parity because two products describe themselves the same way. The most reliable test is to run your normal week inside the candidate and see what you reach for and cannot find.
Where SnitchOS is different
| Criterion | SnitchOS |
|---|---|
| Billable unit | Enabled Admin or Manager logins, $100 each per month |
| Monitored employees, devices, clients | Included, no per-unit fee |
| Account model | One account; records, files, and settings separated by client |
| Access scoping | Admins account-wide; managers scoped to assigned clients, full or read-only |
| Deployment | Silent install via RMM, Intune, or Group Policy |
| Typed content | Never recorded — keystrokes, clicks, and mouse distance are counted only |
| Agent visibility | Visible Windows service, removable by a local administrator |
| Branding | Per-client display name, logo, and accent color |
| Commitment | Month-to-month; 14-day pilot with no card |
We do not publish competitor prices in evergreen articles like this one — vendor pricing changes, and a stale number here is worse than none. Where SnitchOS does publish pricing figures, they carry a capture date; see the cost comparison for those.
Where SnitchOS loses
- Windows only. No macOS or Linux agent, and none planned this year.
- Microsoft Entra sign-in only. Clients not on Microsoft 365 cannot be given dashboard logins.
- Less report surface than products that have been building it for a decade.
- No long customer list. We are early, which is why the pilot needs no card and billing is month-to-month.
- No historical import. Reporting starts from the data we collect ourselves.
How to evaluate without a migration
Do not switch to compare. Run the candidate on one client and one Windows device alongside your current tool for 14 days, then compare both against the week you actually had. Export from both. Confirm uninstall on both. Whichever loses, you have spent an afternoon.
The honest limitation of this page
We wrote it, and we sell one of the options. The criteria are the durable part; the conclusions are ours. Read the comparison page for the short version, and test the claims against a real client rather than against either vendor's marketing.
Evaluate it alongside what you run today
One client, one Windows device, 14 days, no card, no migration.