Hudu is cheaper for a three to ten technician UK managed service provider because it has no user minimum and no onboarding fee, while IT Glue's Basic and Select plans force a five-seat minimum, $145 a month on Basic, even for a three-person team, plus an unpublished one-time onboarding fee. IT Glue still wins on Kaseya and Datto integration depth, so the right choice depends on your existing PSA and RMM stack, not just the sticker price.
Key pointers
- On IT Glue's Basic and Select plans, a three-person shop still pays for five seats because of the five-user minimum, so budget $145 a month on Basic, or $190 on Select, before you document a single client.
- Ask IT Glue's sales team to confirm the exact onboarding fee in writing before you sign; the published pricing page says only that "a one-time onboarding fee applies," with no number attached.
- Hudu has no seat minimum, so a three-person shop pays $81 a month on the annual plan, roughly £61, against IT Glue's forced £109 equivalent for five seats.
- IT Glue's Enterprise tier lets a team of one to four buy exactly the seats it needs at $49 to $102 per user, but that rarely beats simply buying five Basic seats.
- Check whether self-hosting matters for a client's data residency requirement. Hudu offers it at no extra cost; IT Glue does not offer it at all.
- Price Network Glue ($453 a month) or Hudu Radar (from $44 a month for up to five client collectors) separately if automated network discovery is part of the deal. Neither is included in the base seat price.
- Both vendors bill in US dollars, so ask your card provider what FX margin it adds, and if you are VAT-registered, expect to self-account for UK VAT under the reverse charge rather than see VAT itemised on the invoice.
- IT Glue's headline prices run on a 36-month term. Negotiate it down if you are not certain about headcount; a shorter term costs more per seat but keeps your exit cheaper.
What Documentation Software Actually Does for a Small MSP
A documentation platform is not your PSA (professional services automation, the ticketing and billing system) or your RMM (remote monitoring and management, the tool that watches client devices). It is the single place a technician goes to find a client's network diagram, admin passwords, standard operating procedures and asset list before touching anything. For a three to ten technician MSP, that matters most at 2am, when the technician on call did not build the client's environment and has minutes, not hours, to work out what they are looking at.
Both IT Glue and Hudu store the same broad categories of information: client records, network configurations, passwords, and repeatable procedures called runbooks, linked together so a technician can move from a client to its firewall to the right credential in a few clicks. The difference between the two is not what they document. It is what they charge you to do it, and who owns the platform underneath.
Comparing the Published Plans
Both vendors publish their current prices on their own websites, checked live on 29 September 2026.
| Plan | Price per user, per month | User minimum | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT Glue Basic | $29 | 5 | 36 months |
| IT Glue Select | $38 | 5 | 36 months |
| IT Glue Enterprise (5+ users) | $44 | 5 | 36 months |
| IT Glue Enterprise (1 to 4 users) | $49 to $102 | 1 | 36 months |
| Hudu, billed monthly | $30 | None | None |
| Hudu, billed annually | $27 | None | None |
IT Glue's own pricing page lists API access, Cooper Copilot AI and Runbooks against all three tiers; the clearest published difference between them is integration count and sync direction. Basic allows one integration with one-way PSA/CRM sync, Select allows two integrations with two-way PSA sync, and Enterprise allows unlimited integrations. Hudu sells a single tier: every subscriber gets every feature, including API access, single sign-on and 24/7 support, whether they pay monthly or annually.
The Real Cost for a Three to Ten Technician MSP
The five-user minimum is where the advertised price stops meaning much for a small team. IT Glue does not let a three or four-person shop on Basic or Select buy fewer than five seats. You pay for five whether you use them or not.
For a three-technician MSP on IT Glue Basic, five forced seats at $29 come to $145 a month, or $1,740 a year, before a single client is documented. Add the reported one-time onboarding fee of roughly $545 and the first year runs to about $2,285 (roughly £1,725 at the exchange rate below), even though only three of the five paid seats are in use.
The same three-technician team on Hudu pays for exactly three seats: $81 a month billed annually, or $972 a year (roughly £734), with no onboarding fee. That is the concrete cost trap the row for this article was built around: IT Glue's $29 headline rate looks cheaper than Hudu's $27 to $30 per seat, but the five-seat floor and the onboarding fee turn the real first-year gap into more than £990 for a three-person shop.
The gap narrows as the team grows, because the five-seat minimum stops biting once headcount reaches five. At 5 users, IT Glue Basic runs $145 a month against Hudu's $135. At 10 users, IT Glue Basic runs $290 a month against Hudu's $270, a gap of $20 a month rather than $64. A ten-technician MSP already at full strength has much less to gain from switching than a three or four-person shop does.
There is a route around the minimum on IT Glue's side. Enterprise plans for one to four users cost $49 to $102 per seat, so a three-person team could buy exactly three seats at $147 to $306 a month instead of five Basic seats at $145. At the low end of that range the price is close to identical to five Basic seats, and you would get unlimited integrations rather than Basic's single integration. At the high end it is meaningfully more expensive. Either way, a three-person MSP on IT Glue is realistically looking at $145 to $306 a month for licensing alone, against Hudu's flat $81.
Onboarding Fees, Add-ons and Contract Terms
IT Glue's pricing page states plainly that "a one-time onboarding fee applies" without naming a figure; Kaseya, IT Glue's owner, quotes it individually through its sales team. The review cited above reported the fee as commonly cited around $545 and up, which is the only concrete number available outside a direct sales quote, so treat it as an estimate to confirm before you sign rather than a published price. Hudu charges no equivalent fee at any point.
Both platforms sell network discovery as a separate add-on rather than bundling it. IT Glue's Network Glue, which automates device, port and Microsoft 365 discovery, costs roughly $453 a month. Hudu Radar, the equivalent feature, is sold in collector-based packages starting at $44 a month (billed annually) for up to five collectors, rising to $89 for 25, $269 for 150 and $449 for 500, where a collector is one Radar install per client environment. IT Glue also sells MyGlue, a client-facing password and document portal, at roughly $407 a month; Hudu's client portal is included in the base price.
IT Glue's headline prices are quoted against a 36-month term. That length is the default rather than a fixed rule, and it is reported as negotiable in practice, trading a longer commitment for a lower per-seat rate or a shorter one for a higher rate and an easier exit. Hudu has no minimum term on either its monthly or annual billing, and a subscription simply stops at the end of the current billing period with no cancellation fee.
Self-hosting, Data Control and Ownership
Hudu is the only one of the two that offers self-hosting, and it charges exactly the same per-user price whether you run it on Hudu's cloud or on your own server. IT Glue is cloud-only; there is no on-premise option and none has been announced. For an MSP with a client in a regulated sector who specifically requires the documentation platform to sit on infrastructure the client can audit, that difference removes IT Glue from consideration entirely, regardless of price.
IT Glue has been owned by Kaseya since 2018 and now sits inside the same portfolio as Kaseya VSA, Datto RMM and Autotask. If your MSP already runs those tools, IT Glue's two-way sync and native integrations are more mature than Hudu's growing but narrower connector list, and that depth is a genuine reason to pay the premium. If you run a different PSA or RMM stack, that advantage largely disappears and the pricing gap does the talking. Hudu offers an automated import tool that maps and migrates existing IT Glue data, which matters if you are locked into a 36-month IT Glue term and weighing an early switch against the cost of waiting it out.
For an MSP that wants to cut documentation costs to near zero and is comfortable managing its own server, ITFlow is a free, open-source, self-hosted alternative that covers client records, passwords, asset tracking and basic ticketing under a GPL licence. It is a narrower, community-supported product than either IT Glue or Hudu, with no dedicated support line, so it fits a specific budget-constrained case rather than replacing either platform for most three to ten technician MSPs.
Currency, VAT and What You Actually Pay
Neither IT Glue nor Hudu publishes a GBP price list. Both bill in US dollars, so the sterling amount that actually leaves your account depends on the exchange rate your card provider or bank applies on the day, not a fixed published rate.
Assumptions. Using the mid-market USD to GBP reference rate of $1 = £0.7549, sourced from the European Central Bank via Frankfurter's currency API on 29 September 2026, a three-technician MSP's first-year IT Glue Basic cost of $2,285 (five forced seats plus the reported onboarding fee) converts to roughly £1,725, and Hudu's annual cost of $972 converts to roughly £734. This is an illustrative conversion, not the supplier's UK price; your own bank or card provider will apply its own margin on top of, or instead of, the mid-market rate.
If your MSP is VAT-registered, neither vendor is expected to add VAT to the invoice, because both are non-UK suppliers of business-to-business digital services. Under HMRC's place of supply rules, the reverse charge applies: you self-account for UK VAT (currently 20%) on your own VAT return, declaring it as both output tax and input tax, which is VAT-neutral for a fully taxable business but still has to be recorded correctly.
Which Fits a Three to Ten Technician MSP
There is no universal winner here; the right answer depends on your existing tools and your headcount trajectory. If your MSP already runs Kaseya VSA, Autotask or Datto RMM and has five or more technicians, IT Glue's deeper native integrations and longer track record are a defensible reason to pay its higher, minimum-bound price. If you are a three or four-person shop, not committed to the Kaseya ecosystem, or need self-hosting for a client's data residency requirement, Hudu's flat per-seat price with no minimum and no onboarding fee is the more defensible default, and it is the platform this comparison favours for that profile. An MSP already mid-way through an IT Glue contract should use the 36-month term's renewal point, not the sticker price, as the moment to run this comparison again.
Sources
- IT Glue Pricing — IT Glue (Kaseya)
- Hudu Pricing — Hudu
- Hudu Product Overview — Hudu
- IT Glue Review: Great Docs, but Read the Contract Twice — Flamingo
- IT Glue vs Hudu: Which documentation tool fits your MSP in 2026 — Rallied
- VATPOSS14300, Reverse charge: services to which the reverse charge applies — HMRC
- ITFlow — free, open-source documentation platform
