Athena staffs one seat brilliantly. We staff the rest of your back office too.

At a glance

Both companies sell a dedicated full-time person on one flat monthly fee, and both employ the person rather than handing you a contractor to manage. What separates them is how many roles you can buy, how long you are committed, whether you meet anyone before you decide, and what is written down when it does not work out.

Where Athena is the better choice

Athena is the name most people say first when you ask about executive assistants, and that is earned. Their pricing page reads like a product with a price on it rather than a gate in front of a salesperson. You can see what a seat costs before anyone calls you. In this category that is rarer than it should be, and we would rather compete with a company that publishes than one that does not.

Their security paperwork is heavier than ours, and pretending otherwise would be a waste of your time. Athena publishes its security certifications, provisions and manages the assistant's device with endpoint protection, and runs dedicated InfoSec and IT teams (read on their pricing page on 17 September 2026). Our answer is contractual rather than certified. We sign an NDA before anyone gets access, the logins stay in your name and under your control, and we offboard the same day you ask. If your security review treats a formal certification as a hard line, raise it on the first call.

The Partnership Manager is genuine ongoing management, not a monthly check-in email. Every account gets one, and their job is to work a performance problem with you instead of leaving you alone with a remote hire you have never met in person. Small companies consistently underrate how much that is worth the first time something goes sideways in week three.

They also know the craft better than most of the field. The delegation training they put in front of clients is aimed at teaching the executive how to hand work over, which is usually where the real bottleneck sits. Their page says the average client refers 2.1 peers a year, which is the sort of figure a company only puts in public when the service is genuinely landing with the people using it.

The core difference

One role against a whole bench

Athena sells executive assistants. That is the catalogue. No finance seat, no operations coordinator, no SDR (read on their pricing page on 17 September 2026). If an EA is the only gap you have, that focus is a feature, not a limitation.

Most companies we talk to have three gaps at once. The founder is still running her own calendar, the books are two months behind, and nobody has followed up on the inbound from last week. Solving that with Athena means buying an assistant from Athena and then finding two more vendors, signing two more contracts and reconciling two more invoices. We place the whole set: bookkeeping, AP/AR, month-end close and reporting, operations and admin, executive and virtual assistants, SDR, BDR and CSR. Engineering and AI seats get scoped and priced on the call.

Matched against chosen

Athena matches you to a person. You complete an intake survey, take a 60-minute onboarding call, and their team pairs you with an EA and a Partnership Manager. You meet the assistant after the decision has been made on your behalf, by people who have known your business for about an hour.

We do it the other way round. You give us the brief. Within 48 hours you get three people whose availability we confirmed that week, with real names attached, and you interview them. You pick one, or you tell us all three are wrong and we go again before a dollar moves. There is a fair argument for either model. Ours assumes you are the best judge of who fits your company, and that the ten minutes you spend on a call with a candidate tells you more than any matching algorithm can.

What you get for the money

Here are both of their numbers, stated plainly. On 17 September 2026, Athena's pricing page showed $3,000 a month on the annual plan and $3,600 a month on the monthly plan, with the monthly figure marked as the rate that applies after an initial 90-day commitment. The page loads on the annual view, so a quick visit reads as $3,000 when the flexible price is 20 per cent higher.

Ours are published the same way, on the page, with no form in front of them. Executive and virtual assistants from $2,400 a month. Operations and admin from $2,500. SDR, BDR and CSR from $2,500. Finance and accounting from $2,800. Every one of those is a full-time, dedicated person working your hours, and the figures live on our pricing section.

So on the assistant seat you are comparing from $2,400 against $3,000 if you sign for a year, or against $3,600 if you want to keep your options open. Across twelve months that is somewhere between $7,200 and $14,400 on a single seat. We are not the cheap option in this market and we never say we are. There are offshore providers selling assistant hours for a third of our rate, and if price is the only variable you should buy from them.

The comparison that decides most of these calls is not Athena against us anyway. It is either of us against a domestic hire. A US executive assistant at the national median salary of $76,590 comes to about $101,800 in year one once employer taxes, health insurance, a 401(k) contribution, recruiting and equipment are counted, every line sourced and dated on our cost calculator. Run it with your own salary figure first. The gap between either vendor and a US payroll seat is much wider than the gap between the two vendors.

Speed, and who you actually meet

Athena publishes its onboarding path, which is more than most do: an intake survey, a 60-minute onboarding call, matching with an EA and a Partnership Manager, then a kickoff call. They put one to two weeks on the whole sequence (read on their pricing page on 17 September 2026). For a process built around fitting a person to a personality, that is a fair timeline and they are straight about it.

There is no candidate stage anywhere in it. Because the model is matching rather than shortlisting, there is no time-to-first-candidate to publish, and no assistant profiles appear on the site before you have spoken to sales.

Our number is 48 hours from the brief to three availability-confirmed candidates. On recent placements, four to seven days from the brief to the person's first day of work. We define time-to-fill as brief to first day and we say so on the page, because a fair number of published speed claims in this category quietly mean brief to shortlist, which is a different thing.

You can test the claim before you ever speak to us. The featured people on our front page are public and dated, and we re-confirm availability every week. No call, no form, no email address. It is a selection rather than the whole bench, but you see real people with real dates in ten seconds rather than after an intake survey and an hour-long onboarding call.

How your risk is covered

This is where the two offers are furthest apart, and it is worth reading both sets of words yourself rather than taking ours for it.

Athena publishes no named guarantee and no refund policy. Their FAQ says a Partnership Manager will work through concerns and performance issues with you, and that they will partner you with a different Athena EA if things do not improve (read on their pricing page on 17 September 2026). In practice that probably works out, because the Partnership Manager layer is real and the incentive to keep you is obvious. But it is a description of intent rather than a commitment you can hold them to. There is no window, no limit and no refund attached to it.

Ours is written down and you can read it before you sign. Free replacement, as many times as it takes, with four conditions published on our guarantee section: the replacement is for the same role and scope, you gave the person defined work and written feedback, the request comes at least 10 working days into the placement, and after three replacements either side can walk away on the standard 30 days' written notice.

The conditions are the point, not the asterisk. A guarantee with no conditions is either unenforceable or entirely discretionary, and from the outside a buyer cannot tell which. Ours state what we need from you, which is the half most replacement promises leave out, and it is the half that decides whether the promise is worth anything at 4pm on a bad Friday.

Underneath all of it sits the commitment. Athena's monthly plan carries an initial 90-day commitment, so roughly $10,800 is spoken for before you know whether the match works. We bill month to month, in advance, with 30 days' written notice to end. You pay nothing until the person actually starts, and your first month is charged on their start date. No placement fee, no setup fee.

Think about a bookkeeper who starts on the 3rd and quits on the 28th, or an assistant who is technically capable but never quite gets the calendar right. Most vendors, Athena included, will be reasonable about that when you call them. We would still rather you had something written to point at, because the moments when a guarantee matters are the moments when goodwill has already been spent.

Which one should you pick?

Questions people ask when comparing

Sources and how this page was written

We read Athena's public pages ourselves on 17 September 2026 and quote what they publish, not what a third party says about them. We describe their claims rather than reproduce their copy. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. Our own numbers come from our pricing section and our published guarantee.

1. 01Athena pricing, plans, onboarding timeline, security and training, athena.com/pricing, read 17 September 2026
2. 02Athena home page, positioning and client proof, athena.com, read 17 September 2026
3. 03Contractanaut prices and replacement conditions, contractanaut.com/#pricing and contractanaut.com/#guarantee, published 17 September 2026