Stalmio compared with rental software
MCS, inspHire, Point of Rental and MovoGo are good at hire, and if hire is your whole business one of them is probably right. This page is for the dealer whose business is not only hire, and who keeps being sold software that assumes it is.
What rental software is built for
MCS has been building for the UK hire market since 1983 and runs some of the country's largest plant hire firms, sold by quote after a project-managed implementation. inspHire has thirty years behind it and is owned by Kerridge Commercial Systems. Point of Rental sells three product lines, including Syrinx for larger UK and European fleets. MovoGo, from Denmark, is the newest and the most transparent, aimed at rental businesses with twenty machines or more and published from 159 euro a month billed annually. Texada, which merged with InTempo in 2023, sits above all of them at the mid-market and enterprise end. Quipli is the one people ask about most often after seeing it online, and it is United States based, so its payment and damage-waiver plumbing is built around American practice rather than UK or Polish. What they all assume is the same thing: that hire is the business, and that a machine is an asset on a rate card.
Side by side
Rows marked “they win” are the ones where the honest answer is that the other option does it and we do not. A comparison without any is not a comparison.
| What a dealer asks | Rental software | Stalmio |
|---|---|---|
| Selling a machine outright | Not what the system is for. A sale is an exception to an asset on a rate card. | A first-class deal, with its own pipeline, quote, margin and signed contract. |
| Taking a machine in part exchange | Generally no concept of it. | The trade-in is its own line on the deal, subtracted from the sale, and can be appraised with an inspection before you commit. |
| Your own website and portal listings | Marketplace features at best, and usually theirs rather than yours. | Your own storefront under your own brand, plus portal listings from the same record. |
| Workshop and work orders | Varies, and generally aimed at maintaining a hire fleet rather than running a service department. | Work orders with estimate against actual, labour and parts at your rates, and warranty work priced as warranty work. |
| Depth of the hire desk itselfThey win | Deeper than ours. Utilisation analytics, rate card sophistication and hire-specific workflows are their entire product. | Enough for a dealer who also hires. Not enough for a business whose day is nothing but hire. |
| What it costs | MovoGo publish from 159 euro a month. MCS, inspHire and Point of Rental are sold by quote. | Published on our pricing page, in your currency, before you talk to anybody. |
When rental software is the better choice
If you are a hire company, buy hire software. The hire desks in this category are deeper than ours, MCS in particular, and if your day is utilisation, rate cards, damage waivers and a counter full of hire customers, you will feel the difference. Nothing on this page argues otherwise.
What moving actually looks like
The dealers who move to us are not usually leaving a rental system. They are the ones who never bought one, because every product they looked at had nowhere to put the sales half of the business, so they carried on with a hire book and a spreadsheet. If you are already on rental software and it works, the honest advice is to keep it and look at us for the parts it does not touch.
Questions we get asked
- We hire out thirty machines and sell two hundred a year. Which are we?
- You are the case this page exists for. Rental software will handle your thirty and give you nowhere sensible to put the two hundred, the trade-ins against them, or the margin on each. Stalmio treats the same machine as something you can hire this month and sell next, with its costs following it either way.
- Is your hire desk as good as theirs?
- No, and it is not trying to be. We cover contracts, deposits, per-period billing with the right VAT, overdue flagging, collections and a public availability catalogue, which is what a dealer who also hires actually uses. A specialist will beat us on utilisation analytics, rate card sophistication and the deeper corners of a pure hire operation.
- Can the same machine be for sale and for hire?
- Yes, and it is the point. One record, hired this month, sold next, with purchase, transport and workshop costs attached to it the whole way through, so the margin at the end is a fact rather than a reconstruction.
Bring your own numbers
The fastest way to settle a comparison is to put your own stock and your own week in front of it. That is what a demo is for.