I thought i answered but most have forgotten to send it.
Batrium do so much more than you can imagine or atleast can do... Because it is of course up to the user to set it up properly. Without doing that you only get a fancy unit sitting there doing nothing. It wont even balance efficiently...
I would define that this is the order needed
1. Protection
2. Monitoring or allerting
3. Balancing
And its pretty simple. Do you want safety at all? A balancer can never ensure you are in balance and never get issues. Monitoring/allerting can but you need to be around then.. Protection is what you look for.
In Batrium you can run it in such a way that batrium can fully controll your charger or inverter to limit the charge and even disable things if soc falls low. This is rather complex and its just a function in the middle. The protection you set up with the outputs on the batrium for instance controlling a cut off switch on your system or a trip-shunt like most of us do. A trip shunt is also an over current protection.
The batrium have mosfet and relay output that you utilize for this and they can be based on all from temperature, voltage, current or even soc to mention a few variables to protect based on.
It can then also report the values to any other system and yes they can balance.
I run 100kwh++ system and i can easy balance my system with less than 100mA... When you need to balance with high current you have a system that most likely is failing or wrongly put together. In cars for instance you dont have many mA balancing and yes thats new cells but that doesnt hinder us from doing the same in building phase.
What you need on the balancer is to be able to set the range when to balance and how. Preferable with a system that can limit the charge current when doing that. Once again BAtrium can do that the others dont...
With that said there are multiple BMS systems out there that can do the full range that every people should have on their powerwall but they also cost ALOT. Functions like this arent cheap and may not suit everyone in the overall project.
Most people do make do with the simple protection and balancing function and yes it works as long as you considered this during the build and know about it.
Yes packs drifts somewhat but they do not have to drift much if you made your homework. A pack that drift have uneven packs and that is a fact
I have uneven packs to but during my last 3+ years now I still run them with a very very low balance current.