Is managed IT better than hiring in-house? The actual comparison

"Is managed IT better than in-house IT?" is one of the most common questions a growing business asks, and the honest answer is: it depends on scale, but the crossover point is higher than most owners assume.

Start with what one in-house hire actually costs. SEEK's July 2026 data puts an Australian IT Support Technician's salary at $65,000-$80,000. That's before superannuation, leave loading, a laptop and software licences, any training to keep their skills current, and the cost of recruiting and onboarding if they leave. And it buys the coverage of exactly one person — when they're sick, on leave, or simply stuck on a problem outside their experience, there's no one else to call.

Otaris publishes its managed IT plans openly at $79-$199 per user per month — no hidden add-ons, no quote required to find out. For a business of, say, 15-20 people, that's typically less than the fully-loaded cost of a single support hire, and it buys a team rather than a person: unlimited incident support, 24/7 network monitoring, and a dedicated Account Manager who still knows the business by name, backed by specialists rather than one generalist's own skillset.

That breadth is the part a single hire genuinely can't match. Otaris's own team splits by depth — Miguel across AWS and Azure infrastructure, Ikrum across Microsoft 365, Intune and Zero Trust architecture — and the client range it's actually delivered against spans an 80-plus person solar panel manufacturer (Tindo Solar), a not-for-profit group training organisation (TAPS), a growing joinery business running a decades-old estimating system (Top Stairs), and a general practice running clinical software under Essential Eight. One in-house hire, however good, has usually worked in one or two of those environments — not all of them.

None of that means in-house is always the wrong call. A business large enough to keep a full internal team genuinely busy — generally somewhere north of 100-200 staff, depending on how tech-heavy the operation is — can justify the dedicated attention and institutional knowledge an internal team builds up. Below that threshold, the maths rarely works: the business is paying for a full-time person's overhead to get part-time coverage of what they actually need, with no backup when that one person is unavailable.

The practical test: add up one hire's real fully-loaded cost — salary, super, leave, tooling, training, recruitment risk — and compare it against a managed plan for the same headcount. For most businesses under 100 people, the managed number comes in lower, and it buys a team, not a person.