CAFM vs CMMS
CAFM vs CMMS: which one does your team need?
A CMMS looks after your equipment and the maintenance done on it. CAFM software does that too, then adds everyone who asks for work, the locations it happens in and what all of it costs.
Look for maintenance software and two acronyms come back, often on the same page. They overlap a lot, so most comparisons end with "it depends". It does depend, mostly on two things: who asks for the work, and what you need to know once it's done.
What a CMMS does
CMMS stands for computerized maintenance management system. It's built around equipment: the asset register, the work orders done on each asset, the preventive maintenance schedule and the history that builds up over the years.
Many keep a stock of spare parts too, and open a job when a meter reaches a reading, like a pump's running hours. The maintenance team is the main user. They write the work down, they close it, and the schedule shows them what's coming up next.
That suits a plant room or a production line well, where nearly every job starts with someone on the maintenance team noticing something.
What CAFM software adds
CAFM stands for computer-aided facility management. It covers the same maintenance, then the rest of what happens at your locations. That means requests from everyone who works there, the floors and areas the work happens in, the providers who come in to do it, bookings, and what each location costs.
The biggest difference is who uses it. In a CMMS, the maintenance team writes the work down. In CAFM software, anyone at the location can ask for it: the receptionist, a store manager, a visitor scanning a code on the wall. There's more on what that looks like on our CAFM software page.
Where they overlap
Both have work orders, preventive maintenance and an asset register, which is why the line looks blurry. A CMMS that lets anyone ask for work starts to look like CAFM. CAFM software with a good asset register does most of what a CMMS does.
So the name on the box matters less than how you answer the questions below.
Five questions that decide it
Who asks for the work? If it's only your maintenance team, a CMMS covers it. If it's everyone at your locations, and you don't want to pay for a seat for each of them, you're looking for CAFM software.
Who does the work? When outside providers do some of it, they need to see their jobs, accept them and add their costs in the same system as your own team. Otherwise you're back to forwarding emails.
Does it matter where the work happens? A job is easier to plan when the asset is pinned on a floor plan, in the exact spot it's in, and not only listed in a register.
Does anyone book anything? Bookings and maintenance use the same assets and areas. Keep them in two systems, and sooner or later someone books an area that's closed for repairs.
What will finance ask? A CMMS tells you what an asset cost to maintain. CAFM software also tells you what a location cost this year, across every asset, provider and job in it.
If most of your answers point at the maintenance team alone, look at a CMMS. If they point at your whole organization, look at CAFM software.
Where fam. fits
fam. is CAFM software, and it does the maintenance a CMMS team expects as well.
Preventive maintenance runs on planned tickets. You set each recurring job up once: its asset, its task and how often it's done. Every visit goes on the calendar from the start, with whoever's doing it, the checklist they'll fill in and a budget they can spend without waiting for approval.
Ticket #51247 is a worked example from the product demo. Open the demo and work one yourself.
When someone creates a ticket and says the asset has stopped working, its downtime counts from that moment until it's marked as working again. Each asset shows its total downtime and every time it stopped, and your dashboard can rank the assets that were down the longest.
Every approved cost on a ticket counts towards its asset. fam. works out each asset's book value from its purchase price, the date it went into service and its lifespan. Choose how much a year of upkeep may cost as a share of replacing it, and fam. picks out every asset past that point, so the replacement goes into next year's budget.
Then there's everything a CMMS leaves out. Requester seats are free, so anyone in your organization can ask for work without taking a paid seat. Put a visitor link's QR code up at a location, an asset or an area, and someone without an account can scan it and create a ticket right there. You decide whether those tickets wait for someone to accept them or go straight in.
Each request goes to an organization, a team or a person, depending on the location and whether it's in business hours. Upload a floor plan, mark its areas and pin each asset in its exact spot. Bookings is an add-on that uses the same assets and areas.
This booking is a worked example from the product demo. Open the demo and make one yourself.
Connected to the systems you already run
Your meter readings and spare parts are often in systems you already use. Through fam.'s API they can create a ticket on the right asset, say when a pump passes its running hours, and fam. sends them a webhook the moment a ticket is created or updated. Every endpoint is in the API reference.
