Fabrico vs Coast: Choosing Maintenance Software for Manufacturing

Coast and Fabrico both promise easy, mobile-first maintenance management, but they are built for different kinds of operations. Coast is a popular, affordable app for general maintenance and work-order tracking; Fabrico is a manufacturing platform that unifies maintenance with real-time OEE. If you run a factory floor, the difference matters. This comparison helps you decide which fits your operation.

General maintenance app, or manufacturing platform with native OEE? That is the real choice here.

The headline difference

Coast is known for being simple, affordable and quick to start, a strong choice for small businesses, facilities and light maintenance needs, with handy team messaging built in. Fabrico is purpose-built for manufacturing: it combines CMMS with native OEE monitoring and connects directly to machines, so it is designed around production performance, not just task tracking. The choice usually comes down to how manufacturing-specific your needs are.

Where Coast is strong

• Simplicity and a fast, low-friction setup.

• Affordability for small teams and lighter use cases.

• Built-in messaging and general work-order/maintenance tracking across many industries.

Where Fabrico is strong

• Native OEE + CMMS in one, tying machine performance to the maintenance that affects it.

• Direct OT-layer integration (PLCs, SCADA) for real-time production data, not just manual entries.

• Manufacturing depth: downtime reasons, performance and quality losses, built for the shop floor.

• A connected, contextualised data foundation ready for analytics and AI.

Side by side

Which should you choose?

Choose Coast if you need simple, low-cost maintenance and work-order tracking for a small team or facility and do not need production monitoring. Choose Fabrico if you run a manufacturing operation and want to improve OEE and maintenance together, with real machine data rather than manual logs. See our integrated OEE and CMMS software guide for the wider picture, and CMMS vs spreadsheets if you are still on manual tracking.

Frequently asked questions

Is Coast or Fabrico better for a factory?

Fabrico is purpose-built for manufacturing with native OEE and direct machine-data capture. Coast is better suited to simple, general maintenance for smaller teams and facilities.

Does Coast have OEE?

Coast focuses on maintenance and work-order management rather than native OEE monitoring; Fabrico builds OEE in.

Is Fabrico harder to use than Coast?

Fabrico is mobile-first and designed for fast frontline adoption, while offering the manufacturing depth a simple app does not.