Helisum
Cost - Is free up to 3 hotspots. For 4 - 14 hotspots, the cost is $1.00/each. 15 - 50 hotspots, the cost is $0.90/each. 51+ hotspots, the cost is 0.80/each.
UI - Is clean and simple. The filter system of hotspots is a good feature, although it is a bit of clutter if you don’t have many hosts/hotspots as you cannot hide irrelevant sections (personal opinion).
Dashboard - We will breakdown the dashboard down to an overview of wallets, hotspots, & hosts.
Overview of your wallets provides the earning stats of all your hotspots in that wallet together. This is presented in numerical figures and a graph—everything you need to get an overall picture of your earnings over time.
Next to that, you can view the list of all the hotspots tied to this wallet.
You can also view the rewards of the hotspots that are tied to your wallet as well from your dashboard.
The dashboard for the hotspot is similar to that of your overall stats, with additional details such as basic information of your hotspot taken from the Helium API, who are the contacts for this hotspot (hosts, referrers, & partners), and a list of witnesses.
The contacts dashboard provides an overview of the details and agreements that you have with them. If you have written documentation, you can upload this there too. If enabled, the commission is auto-generated monthly.
You can generate a dashboard that you can provide to your contacts to see the hotspot’s basic details and their all-time earning.
Report - You can generate reports by contacts or period.
By generating a report for a contact, you can see how much this person has earned across a selected period across all their hotspots. This is a useful insight for the owner to see how much they have earned after paying the hosts & referrers in a month. You cannot download the CSV file for this report type.
You can select to view your rewards by period and the historical exchange value for a given hotspot or account. You can download the CSV file for this report type.
There is a commission tab, in which you can keep track of all the paid and outstanding commissions. You can filter this out and only select what you need to know.
Overall, Helisum provides very advanced tools to manage your fleet of hotspots and make sure that you pay your hosts/referrers the correct amount every month. What I like about Helisum is the ability to change the value of HNT to the fiat currency of your choice and the option to share a link with your hosts for them to keep track of their earning. However, it would be nice if the host could see what they are earning for the month instead of just their lifetime earnings from hosting. Another pet peeve that I have with Helisum is that the stats on the dashboard is not in real-time and is very behind the explorer/app. You could have already earned 1 HNT, but Helisum would still say that you just earned 0.5 HNT.
Hotspotty
This is a review of Hotspotty V1 fleet & payment management only. This will be updated with V2 once it is live and after testing it for one month.
Cost - It is free up to 30 hotspots. 30+ hotspots you need to get in contact with hotspotty for a quote.
UI - Is clean and very basic. It has everything you will need, but no filtering system depends on how many hotspots you manage; it could be a good thing.
Dashboard - We will breakdown the dashboard down to an overview of wallets & hotspots/hosts.
The overall view of the dashboard is basic, with no function to select a custom period, and there is no way that we could change the fiat price of HNT. It is default at USD. However, stats are more accurate and up to date in real-time.
The hotspot/hosts overview is again basic, with very limited information available about the hotspot. We cannot select a custom period to view rewards, but the reward amount for host/referrer/partners is presented on the same page.
Hotspotty automatically calculates earnings daily, which makes things less complicated.
Report - No such function
Hotspotty v1 at its best is very basic. The biggest pro with hotspotty v1 is that up to 30 hotspots are free, but you trade this for the advanced management system. For example, you cannot select the fiat currency, so those who live in the other part of the world might find it frustrating. Although lacking in advanced features, Hotspotty v1 does have everything you need to manage your fleet of hotspots, and not everybody needs that trade-off.