Open a demo of most “all-in-one” MSP platforms and the pitch is always the same: one login for everything. Monitoring, patching, remote access, tickets, billing, all under one roof. It sounds like less to manage. In practice it is usually more to be locked into.
Opentra takes the opposite position, and we say it out loud: we don’t do RMM. That’s the point.
What “all-in-one” quietly costs you
When your PSA and your RMM are the same product, a few things tend to follow, and none of them show up in the sales deck:
- Your monitoring becomes a switching cost. The day you outgrow their agent or their alerting, you can’t just swap it out. It’s wired into the same platform that runs your tickets and your invoices, so leaving one means leaving all of it.
- You take what they ship. If their RMM is average at the thing you care most about, whether that’s Mac fleets, network gear or a specific EDR, you live with it, because the alternative is running the tool you actually want alongside a console you’re already paying for.
- One vendor holds the whole shop. Service desk, billing and the agents on every endpoint you manage, all owned by one company. That is a lot of leverage to hand a supplier who might get acquired next quarter.
Consolidation is sold as simplicity. Often it’s just a bigger switching cost wearing a tidy login.
Best tool for the job, not the biggest bundle
Small MSPs already made their RMM choice, and it was rarely an accident. You picked Level.io, or NinjaOne, or ScreenConnect, or Tactical RMM, because it fit how you work. A PSA shouldn’t ask you to throw that away to get a decent ticketing and billing workflow.
So Opentra plugs into the monitoring you already trust instead of replacing it. Alerts become tickets, remote sessions tie back to the right client org, and the work flows through to time and invoicing. Your RMM stays your RMM. We stay in our lane: the path a client request travels from first email to paid invoice.
Staying out of RMM is a feature
Being PSA-only isn’t a gap we’re apologising for. It’s a design decision that pays you back:
- Your monitoring stays yours. Change RMM next year and your service desk doesn’t move. No re-platforming your whole business to swap one tool.
- No agent lock-in. We don’t put software on your endpoints, so we can never hold your fleet hostage against a migration.
- We get to be good at one thing. Tickets, contracts, time, projects and invoicing, built for how a roughly 10-tech shop with around 100 clients actually runs, not spread thin across a monitoring stack too.
And it’s flat, however you run it: Community free and self-hosted on your own box, Pro at $149/mo with unlimited techs and client orgs, or Opentra Cloud at $249/mo hosted with a 99.9% uptime SLA. No per-seat maths on any tier.
The honest version
If what you want is a single vendor to run your monitoring and your service desk from one cloud, and you’re happy with that trade, Opentra isn’t for you, and that’s fine. Some shops genuinely prefer one throat to choke.
But if you’ve already got monitoring you rely on, and you just want the rest of the business, the tickets, the time, the contracts, the month-end run, to work as one system without signing your endpoints over to it, that’s exactly the line we drew on purpose.
Bring your own RMM. We’ll handle everything from the first email to the paid invoice. See how the workflow fits together at opentra.net.
Notes from building Opentra. Built by an MSP. Designed for yours.