Left in the Dust by Your CMMS

CMMS that does not fit

A facilities manager at a community health center pays $900 a year per user for Limble’s Enterprise plan. Across three calls with us this spring, he described watching the app get rebuilt around someone else’s problems. “I’m afraid that their new app… is going to be more complicated than what I want” he told us in March as he felt the ground shifting under him: “They may just completely drop that first original app.”

Two months later, looking at the redesign itself: “I’ve got a zero where it says new work requests… I’m not really a fan of it at all.” He runs a mid-sized team. He isn’t the customer the redesign was built for, and he knows it.

“I think we’re going to be left in the dust because they have a lot of clients that are really wanting much more on their app than what we want.”

Others highlighted that the system was a miss-match for the work they were actually doing. A maintenance manager at a manufacturing plant told us about his CMMS: “I wasn’t on the team that originally selected it… [they] never talked to me about the management of the paint side of things.” He’s run the system ever since.

At a regional transit agency, a facilities lead described getting routed through a construction project-management tool, not a maintenance system, for basic facilities requests: “It really wasn’t made for this purpose… it’s a little bit manual.”

Three companies, three CMMS products, the same shape of problem: the CMMS is overly complicated and built for things they are not doing.

Public reviews highlight the lack of support and cost increases

A quick perusal of public reviews shows the same pattern. Robert M., a maintenance technician using eMaint, wrote on Capterra.com in June: “Fluke never answers the help line on my first call. I usually have to send an email.” Scott B., a maintenance supervisor at a food and beverage plant, flagged the same vendor’s upgrade pricing in March: “Price to upgrade to x5 is steep when we already have x4.”

Customer service is also lacking. Over on Fiix, Anibal M. put it plainly in a Capterra review: “Good luck trying to get someone on the phone unless it is to sell you the software, customer service is lacking.” Fiix’s Trustpilot score sits at 2.0 out of 5 across 63 reviews — one from November 2025 describes a $2,900 charge for an auto-renewed subscription the customer says they never authorized. Limble isn’t exempt either: a Capterra reviewer in April described the system crashing “a lot for me personally, even after my IT team has sworn they’ve done” the fix.

There’s a version of this story that stops at “implementations are hard.” Farshad Bakhshi made that case well in Buildings magazine this March: CMMS rollouts don’t fail because of bad code, they fail because vendors and buyers treat a maintenance system change as an IT install instead of a change in how a team actually works. That’s true, and it’s worth reading. But it doesn’t explain why the same handful of vendors keep making this mistake, release after release, year after year. For that, you have to look past the product and at who owns it.

Private Equity has invaded the CMMS space

Some of the category’s biggest names have gone through the same ownership cycle recently. Eptura — which owns Hippo CMMS and ManagerPlus — is currently owned by the private equity firms Thoma Bravo and JMI Equity, formed in 2022 by merging two other PE-backed workplace software companies.

Accruent, which owns Maintenance Connection, spent 2016 to 2018 under Genstar Capital, a PE firm whose own materials describe nine acquisitions in two years during that stretch, before Genstar sold Accruent to Fortive for roughly $2 billion. Brightly (formerly Dude Solutions) went through Clearlake Capital from 2019 to 2022, then sold to Siemens for $1.875 billion. That’s three of the category’s larger platforms run through a buy-consolidate-sell cycle inside the last decade.

The impact on the products and the support experience is real.

What the ownership map actually shows is a pattern: a wave of financial buyers and roll-up-minded strategics has moved through this category, buying and re-selling the same handful of products. The incentive on the other side of that kind of transaction is the next sale, not the facilities manager’s help-desk ticket. Whether the owner of record is a PE firm or a public parent that bought its way into the category, the clock that matters to them is an exit or a stock price — not whether a one-site customer’s app still makes sense to use. (For what a fully financialized version of this can look like: private equity roll-ups in veterinary care have been documented raising prices at acquired clinics by as much as 100%. Different industry, offered here only as a pattern — not as proof of what’s happening in CMMS.)

Inspired us to be different

We started Bricks because we kept hearing a version of the same story: a facilities manager wants to focus on their team - not software; they hate paying enterprise prices for a roadmap built for someone else’s company. We’re not a roll-up, and we’re not chasing an exit that requires 200-location customers to make the math work. We built for the maintenance manager who wasn’t in the room when the last system got picked, and who wants someone to actually answer the phone. That’s a small claim. It’s also the whole reason the company exists.

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Sources

Lead article

Farshad Bakhshi, “Why CMMS Implementations Fail in Facility Operations and What Leaders Can Do Differently,” Buildings, March 6, 2026. buildings.com

Prospect calls (Bricks sales conversations, anonymized)

• Facilities manager, community health center — calls of 3/19, 3/25, 3/31, and 5/28/2026
• Maintenance manager, manufacturing plant — call of 4/16/2026
• Facilities lead, regional transit agency — call of 8/7/2026

Review evidence

• Robert M., Maintenance Technician, Machinery — Capterra (eMaint), June 25, 2026
• Scott B., Maintenance Supervisor, Food & Beverages — Capterra (eMaint), March 9, 2026
• Anibal M., Manager, Food Production — Capterra (Fiix), November 9, 2023
• Fiix — Trustpilot, TrustScore 2.0/5, 63 reviews (verified); Adrian, November 12, 2025
• Edwin R., Maintenance Supervisor, Facilities Services — Capterra (Limble), April 27, 2026

PE ownership research

• Thoma Bravo / Eptura (Condeco + iOffice/SpaceIQ merger): cnbc.com
• Genstar Capital / Accruent sale to Fortive: prnewswire.com
• Clearlake Capital / Brightly sale to Siemens: pehub.com