Free, Pro, or MSP: How to Actually Choose
Most pricing pages are written to nudge you toward the middle tier, regardless of whether it's actually the right one for you. We'd rather you land on the plan that fits and stay a long time than get talked into the wrong one and churn out three months later feeling oversold. So here's the honest version: what each NetMon tier is actually for, who genuinely fits each one, and how to tell which you are before you sign up for anything.
Start with what you're actually managing
The real dividing line between NetMon's tiers isn't features, exactly — it's scale and shape. How many devices are you responsible for. How many separate physical sites. Whether "your network" means one place you can walk to, or a portfolio of client networks you'll never set foot in. Answer that honestly first, and the right tier mostly picks itself.
Free: genuinely useful, not a trial with training wheels
Free covers one site and up to twenty devices, and it is not a crippled preview designed to make you upgrade out of frustration. Auto-discovery, live monitoring, vulnerability and CVE scanning, rogue-device detection, audit-ready reporting, the topology map — all of it, fully functional, at no cost, forever. What it doesn't include is remote access into devices or Wake-on-LAN, and it caps out at twenty devices and one site.
This is the right tier if you're a home office, a very small business, a solo consultant monitoring your own environment, or genuinely anyone who wants to know their network is being watched properly before committing to anything paid. It's also a completely legitimate place to stay long-term if twenty devices and one site is simply what you have — there's no clock running, no feature slowly degrading to push you off it. Signup is self-service and your account starts monitoring immediately, so you can find out within minutes whether it actually tells you anything useful, rather than booking a call to find out.
Where Free stops making sense is the moment you outgrow either number — a twenty-first device, or a second site you also need eyes on. At that point you're not being underserved by Free on purpose; you've genuinely grown past what a single-site plan is built for.
Pro: built for one growing operation, not many clients
Pro removes the device ceiling entirely and extends you to up to five sites, and adds two things Free deliberately holds back: remote access into devices and Wake-on-LAN. It's priced per site — £29/month per site, or £290/year, which works out to roughly two months free if you commit annually.
The person this fits is running one business with more than one location, or one IT operation with more devices than a home-office plan should reasonably cover — a retail operation with a couple of shops, a clinic with a satellite office, an internal IT team supporting a head office plus a warehouse. What unites all of those is a single organisation with a handful of physical places, not a roster of separate clients each needing their own walled-off view.
Remote access is the feature that tends to justify Pro on its own for most people who need it — being able to reach a device directly instead of driving to a site or talking someone through a fix over the phone changes how fast a genuine problem actually gets resolved. If you've never needed that, and Free's device or site cap isn't binding yet, there's a real argument for staying put a little longer.
MSP: built for managing other people's networks
MSP removes both the site and device ceiling completely and is built around a different shape of problem entirely: managing a genuinely separate client base, where every client's devices, alerts, and remote access need to be walled off from every other client's, cleanly and by default. It's £79/month or £790/year — flat, not per-site, because the pricing model recognises that an MSP's site count is a business metric they're trying to grow, not something that should make growth more expensive to monitor.
If you're managing client networks — and especially if any of those clients might end up on overlapping private IP ranges, which is normal and not a red flag — MSP is the tier built for the isolation that requires. It's not really an "upgrade" from Pro in the sense of getting more of the same thing; it's a different kind of account built around a different kind of responsibility, one client's data never able to leak into another's view no matter how similarly their networks happen to be configured.
The honest version of "which one should I pick"
If you have to ask whether you're an MSP, you're probably not one yet — the tier fits the business model of managing others' networks as clients, not just the fact of monitoring more than one place. If you're one team, one company, a handful of sites, Pro is almost certainly the right fit the moment Free's ceilings start to bind. And if you're not sure any of this applies to you yet, Free is not a lesser starting point to feel embarrassed about — it's a fully real product, and the honest signal to move on from it is simply running out of room, not running out of patience with artificial limits.
Every tier here is self-service, and every account is live and monitoring the moment you sign up — no sales call required to find out if it's worth your time. That's deliberate. The product should be able to make its own case before anyone has to make it for you.
Getting it wrong isn't a disaster, either
None of this is a decision you have to get perfectly right on day one. Upgrading is self-service in either direction — nothing here locks you into a plan that stops fitting, and nothing about signing up on Free commits you to staying there, or forces you into an awkward migration if you outgrow it in month two rather than year two. The worst outcome of picking "wrong" is a few minutes spent upgrading later, not a contract renegotiation or a support call to plead your case.
If there's one genuinely useful rule of thumb underneath all of this, it's to pick based on what's true about your network today, not what you expect might be true in a year. Sites and devices are easy to add to as they show up. What's much harder to fix after the fact is choosing a tier that doesn't match your actual shape from the start — a single business squeezed awkwardly into MSP-style isolation it doesn't need, or an MSP trying to make a per-site Pro plan work for a client roster it was never built to scale with. Match the tier to what you are, not to what sounds more impressive on an invoice.
About the Author: Stephen Richards
Bio for Stephen Richards: Born in Colwyn Bay North Wales, Steve's introduction it Computers was at secondary school in 1974. That first year, Machine Code was hand written onto gridded paper and sent to Connah's Quay Technical College where is was copied to punch card and then entered into a mainframe computer. The results printed out were sent back for the following week!
Steve left School in 1976 joining the Royal Air Force to work on RADAR and communications equipment. His last 5 years involved working in an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) department on the System Management Team and also writing models for Microchips. It was a good job that he had kept up with computers which had become rather a passion by the time he started in ATE.
During that time the main Mainframe we replaced in a £3.9 million upgrade reducing the run time of the biggest ATE program from just under 2 weeks to the time it took for a finger to come off a depressed return key!
Leaving the RAF after 18 years service Steve worked for a Charity (Apex Leicester Project) before returning to electronics at Sonatest in Milton Keynes which after 3 or 4 years led to a Job at Telematica the then development arm of Trafficmaster PLC (Tm). Eventually brought in-house at Tm he worked moved into the IT Support Team with his last project moving email from a Linux Box to Microsoft Echange for the 300 users in the company each of whom typically had 5 email addresses.
In 2006 Steve left to start his own company back in North Wales, Computer Technical Solutions was an MSP and moved to become an MSSP following another of Steve's passions Cybersecurity. Officially retiring in 2025, by May 2026 that overactive mind started thinking about all of the software he had seen not just for MSSPs but also for his clients that was either extremely expensive or that didn't exist with a complete answer to the needs of the SME.
By August 2026 two significant pieces of software have been created. Netmon the Network Monitoring Software and the second release Parkcore aimed at Caravan/Lodge Holiday Parks..... And so it begins!
