Comparison · Emergency mass notification

Multilarm vs Alertus: an honest comparison

Emergency notification across desktop takeover, beacons, panels, mobile and existing systems.

Checked against published documentation on 2026-08-30

Alertus is the right choice for an organisation whose requirement is emergency notification in its own right — visible, acknowledged, and reaching every device and screen on a campus. Multilarm is the right choice when the requirement is a building's everyday audio, with emergency as its highest-priority case.

This page is written by the makers of one of the two products, so the only version worth publishing is one that is specific about where the other one wins. Every section below names a buyer who should not choose Multilarm.

What Alertus is

Alertus is an emergency mass notification system built around reaching people through whatever they are already looking at: desktop pop-ups, wall-mounted alert beacons, digital signage takeover, mobile push and integration with systems a campus already owns.

It is a campus and enterprise product, bought by safety and security officers rather than facilities teams.

Where Alertus is better

Desktop takeover and visual alert hardware — the things people actually see. Multilarm's feature matrix lists desktop takeover as absent.
Incident workflow: templates, groups, escalation, acknowledgement and reporting.
Integration with existing campus systems as a design goal, including taking over signage and fire panels' outputs.
Panic and duress initiation from a button, a badge or an app.
Being a recognised name in a procurement process where safety officers need one.

Where Multilarm is better

Everyday use. A system used only in emergencies is a system nobody is confident operating. Multilarm runs every day, so the emergency path is exercised by the same people who use it for bells.
The audio layer itself — priority, ducking, zones, typed speech — which an alerting platform treats as an output rather than a discipline.
Offline operation with no cloud dependency.
Cost shape and scale. A single building on a perpetual licence.
Runs on a Raspberry Pi already plugged into the amplifier.

Side by side

Cells reading “Not published” mean we could not find the answer in Alertus Technologies’s own documentation on 2026-08-30. That is not the same as “no”, and this table will not pretend it is.

Capability	Alertus	Multilarm
Desktop alert takeover	Yes	No — planned
Alert beacons and panels	Yes	No — a browser display page and a relay output
Panic button initiation	Yes	Yes — a physical emergency input and network triggers
Escalation and acknowledgement	Yes	No — planned
Drill mode	Yes	No — planned
Everyday scheduled audio	Not the product	Yes — the core
Works with no internet	Not published as a supported mode	Yes
Public alert feed (CAP) ingestion	Yes	Yes
Certified life-safety equipment	No — a notification platform	No — not fire-alarm equipment

Choose Alertus if

The requirement is written by a safety or security officer and is about people, not rooms.
Acknowledgement and after-action reporting must exist.
You need alerts on screens and beacons, not only through speakers.
It is a campus rather than a building.

Choose Multilarm if

The system will be used every day, not only in an emergency.
The audio is the point and the emergency case is the top of the same priority ladder.
There is no appetite for a subscription for one building.
It has to work when the network does not.

How to check any of this

Multilarm’s own capabilities are published as machine-readable data at features.json, including every feature it does not have and the ones it has deliberately declined to build. Measured performance figures, with the method for each, are on the measured data page. The canonical facts about licensing, offline operation and the fire-alarm boundary are at facts.json. If anything on this page is wrong, say so and it will be corrected.

FAQ

Is emergency notification safe to run on a Raspberry Pi?

For a supplementary voice alert, on a device with signed self-reverting updates and an on-device diagnostics battery, yes. It is not certified life-safety equipment and does not replace a fire alarm — that boundary is published and is not negotiable.

Does Multilarm have a drill mode?

Not yet. It is listed as absent in the feature matrix and is on the roadmap.

Sources

Everything stated here about another product is taken from that vendor's own public documentation on the date shown, and is limited to what they publish about themselves. Products change; if something below is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Where we could not find a published answer the table says so rather than guessing.

Alertus product pages

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