Best Aviation Maintenance Software of 2026

This buyer's guide, along with our aircraft maintenance software reviews, cover the essential information needed to make a smart purchase. In this guide, we'll discuss:

What Is Aircraft Maintenance Software?

Common Features of Aircraft Maintenance Software

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Market Trends to Understand

What Is Aircraft Maintenance Software?

Aviation maintenance software tracks and simplifies the constant maintenance, repair and overhaul (aviation MRO) operations associated with the aviation industry. It performs a number of essential functions, such as:

• Monitoring inventory

• Supporting preventive and essential maintenance and repairs

• Scheduling work orders

• Tracking and documenting compliance

Overall, aviation maintenance tracking software (or MRO software) helps organizations maximize their efficiency, letting them focus on their jobs and keep their facilities and aircraft running smoothly and safely.

Common Features of Aircraft Maintenance Software

Common functions of aviation management software include:

In addition to the above, many companies offer full-suite aviation management software solutions that move beyond the realm of maintenance into other departments within the aircraft operation industry. These aircraft maintenance systems will incorporate some or all of the following features or functionality:

What Type of Buyer Are You?

In our experience, most aviation software buyers fall into one of the following categories:

Small charter companies. If you only operate a handful of aircraft out of a handful of bases, you’ll probably want a fairly “basic” (as these things go) aircraft maintenance software solution that has strong support but without too many extra features.

Larger charter companies and freight airlines. As the company size grows, additional features like intelligent forecasting and cost accounting all become more important. Even more so, integration with other departments, such as aviation operations management, sales and accounting, becomes crucial to company-wide success.

Aircraft maintenance specialists. Buyers who exclusively provide the service of maintaining other operations’ aircrafts will want a best-of-breed solution that offers extensive functionality within this market. Exchanges between bases becomes less important, but assigning parts to different customers become more so. Therefore, they may also want accounting support and HR support to tie costs, labor and revenues with the associated customer.

Commercial airlines. The largest companies dealing with hundreds of planes, thousands of customers and millions or billions of dollars in revenues and expenditures need highly robust aviation management systems that can manage their complex and rigorous demands. This may mean one large system that combines everything, or it may mean best-of-breed systems that integrate extremely well together. Regardless, be sure to talk to other departments and consider how your software will fit with their processes as you make your purchase decisions.

Market Trends to Understand

As you evaluate aviation management software, keep these trends in mind. How your vendor fits with these trends could have a big impact on their viability.

Software as a Service (SaaS). Web-based software is becoming more popular across most industries and markets, and aviation management is no different. Most companies prefer the simplicity of a hosted solution that lets them worry about maintaining their aircraft, not their software solutions.

Mobile devices. Needless to say, people who work in the aviation industry move around a lot. Neither aircraft operators, nor personnel should have to locate a physical desktop computer in order to use their management software. Both want to be able to input and download information at the most valuable point of use—the airplane or hangar. Most vendors already offer mobile accessibility, so be sure to look at their mobile offerings before making any decisions.