As I’ve met with many of our customers one question everyone has is — “what’s the difference between MAS90, MAS200, MAS200 SQL and MAS90 Online”?

I thought I’d take just a minute to explain the differences between the four current flavors of MAS90.

What Is The Difference Between MAS90, MAS200, MAS200 SQL and MAS90 Online

MAS90: This is the most common version used by our customers. The program is based on a business basic database language (Providex) and is typically used by companies with up to 20 concurrent users (although this is not a hard and fast rule).

The current version of MAS90 is 4.50. Every MAS90 module has undergone an upgrade (details) to reach this version (often referred to as framework because the underlying data tables changed in the upgraded modules) with the exception of the MRP, Work Order, Job Cost, Timecard and Payroll where the UI (user interface) changed but the tables did not.

MAS200: All of the above MAS90 information applies to MAS200. The screens, reports, underlying data tables and functionality of MAS200 is identical to MAS90.

What’s different about MAS200 is speed. The product used to be called MAS 90 Client Server before it was given the name MAS 200.

Processing with MAS 200 is offloaded to a Microsoft Server so every operation within the program usually runs much faster than MAS90.

While there’s no hard and fast rule of when you must use MAS200 (anyone who tells you different is giving a sale pitch) we typically see customers look at MAS200 when they have 20 or more users or significant issues with speed.

Although it appears due to the client server nature of MAS200 that you should be able to have remote users operating over a thin client — in practice most customers run MAS 200 over a remote desktop environment similar to Citrix or Terminal Server.

MAS200 SQL: All of the above applies with the added benefit that an IT department can make use of SQL data tables as the underlying file storage. Because of some behind the scenes processing that occurs to get the data between native Providex and SQL we have NOT heard that MAS200 SQL is a faster alternative than ‘regular’ MAS200.

MAS90 Online: This is MAS90 hosted by Sage in a secure data environment. For a fee of about $ 170 per user per month you access most MAS90 modules (notably absent is Payroll) and eliminate the need to maintain your own server to run MAS90.