Key points
- CMMS is maintenance-first: assets, work orders and planned servicing, with roots in manufacturing.
- IWMS is estate-first: space, leases, energy, projects and maintenance, built for corporate real estate.
- CAFM sits between the two and is the term UK buyers most often use for multi-site maintenance and compliance software.
- For hospitality, the label matters less than whether the system handles reactive and planned maintenance, compliance certificates, contractors and costs, and whether site teams and contractors will actually use it.
The three labels in one paragraph each
CMMS: computerised maintenance management system
A CMMS manages maintenance work against assets. Its heart is the work order: something needs doing, to this machine, by this person, by this date. It schedules planned maintenance, tracks parts and labour, and reports on asset reliability. It was built for factories and plant rooms, where the assets are big, numerous and expensive, and it still carries that flavour.
CAFM: computer-aided facilities management
CAFM covers what a facilities team is responsible for: the building and its services, the equipment in it, the contractors who maintain it, the compliance that proves it is safe, and the money spent doing all that. It includes the work order management of a CMMS and adds buildings, contractors and statutory compliance. Many CAFM systems also do space and room booking, a legacy of where the term started.
IWMS: integrated workplace management system
An IWMS is the widest of the three. It is designed for organisations whose property is a major cost and a strategic asset: corporate head offices, banks, universities. Alongside maintenance it manages leases and property portfolios, space planning and moves, capital projects, energy and sustainability reporting. It is usually a large, modular, enterprise product with an implementation to match.
Side by side
| CMMS | CAFM | IWMS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Maintenance and engineering teams | Facilities and operations teams | Corporate real estate and finance |
| Core object | The asset and its work orders | The site, its assets, contractors and compliance | The property portfolio |
| Reactive and planned maintenance | Yes, strong | Yes | Yes, as one module |
| Contractor management | Sometimes | Yes | Yes |
| Statutory compliance | Limited | Yes, central | Yes |
| Space, moves, room booking | No | Often | Yes |
| Leases, projects, energy | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Typical size | One site or plant to many | A few sites to hundreds | Large estates |
| Typical pricing | Per user | Per site or per user | Enterprise quote, modular |
| Setup | Days to weeks | Weeks | Months |
Where each came from
The origins explain the emphasis. CMMS came out of manufacturing in the 1960s and 70s, when plants first computerised their maintenance planning. The user was a maintenance engineer, the unit of work was the work order, and the goal was uptime of expensive machines. That lineage is why CMMS products are strong on assets, parts and preventive schedules, and lighter on buildings, contractors and the legal side.
CAFM started in the 1980s in corporate facilities departments, with computer-aided design drawings of floor plans and the records attached to them. Over time it absorbed maintenance, helpdesk and compliance, because those were the things the facilities team was asked to manage. In the UK it became the standard term for the software an FM team or managing agent runs an estate on.
IWMS is the youngest, a term coined by analysts in the 2000s for systems that joined up real estate, space, maintenance, projects and energy for very large organisations. If the property director and the finance director both want the same system, it is probably an IWMS.
The other labels you will meet
- EAM (enterprise asset management): a CMMS scaled up to cover the whole lifecycle and finance of assets, usually in utilities, transport and heavy industry.
- FM helpdesk or maintenance helpdesk: the request-handling part of CAFM, sometimes sold on its own or run as a service by a managing agent.
- Work order software or job management software: the reactive maintenance part, often aimed at the contractor rather than the client.
- Property maintenance software: a term used by some UK vendors for CAFM aimed at multi-site retail and hospitality estates, and by others for landlords and letting agents.
- Field service management (FSM): software for the contractor’s side of the same job: scheduling engineers, job sheets, invoicing. ServiceM8, Joblogic and Simpro sit here.
Because the labels overlap, a vendor can reasonably call the same product a CAFM, a CMMS and a maintenance management system in three different sentences. Do not try to resolve this. Write down what you need the system to do and test each candidate against that list.
What a multi-site food and drink operator needs
A restaurant group, coffee shop chain, bakery chain or contract caterer has a particular shape. Many sites, each small. A lot of equipment per site, much of it with statutory duties attached. No facilities department: the operations team runs maintenance alongside everything else. Work done almost entirely by external contractors. Site managers who need to report faults on a phone in thirty seconds.
That shape rules out most of what an IWMS offers (you do not need lease accounting for twelve cafés) and exposes the gaps in a pure CMMS (it will manage the oven’s work orders beautifully and have nowhere to put the gas certificate or the contractor’s insurance). What is needed is the CAFM core, without the enterprise weight:
- An asset register that already knows what an espresso machine, a combi oven and a kitchen extract are.
- Reactive jobs that site staff can raise from a phone and contractors can update without a licence.
- Planned maintenance with intervals set for hospitality equipment and UK compliance.
- Certificates stored against assets with expiry tracking.
- Contractor records and performance.
- Invoices matched to jobs, with spend by site.
- Per-site pricing, because per-user pricing punishes exactly the people you want using it.
If the demo spends its first twenty minutes on floor plans, space utilisation or lease events, you are looking at the wrong category. If it spends them on the asset register, a reactive job and a certificate, you are in the right one.
A quick decision guide
- Do you manage leases, space planning and capital projects across a large estate, with a property team to run the system? Look at IWMS.
- Is your maintenance mostly in-house engineers working on plant and machinery at one or a few sites? A CMMS may be enough.
- Do you run many sites with external contractors, statutory compliance to prove and an operations team rather than a facilities department? You want CAFM, and specifically one built for multi-site operators rather than for hospitals.
Fabric FM is in the third category: CAFM software for hospitality groups, priced per site with no per-user fees. See the CAFM software page for what it covers, or read how to choose CAFM software for a requirements checklist you can use with any vendor.
This guide is general information, not legal or financial advice. Prices and product details are taken from vendors’ published pages in October 2026 and change over time; check with each supplier before you decide.
