IT Asset Management
5 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
 Snipe-IT A free open source IT asset/license management system | 14.8k | - | 67 |
 GLPI GLPI is a Free Asset and IT Management Software package, Data center management, ITIL Service Desk, licenses tracking and software auditing. | 6.2k | - | 62 |
 Ralph Ralph is the CMDB / Asset Management system for data center and back office hardware. | 2.5k | - | 61 |
 iTop A simple, web based CMDB & IT Service Management tool | 1.2k | - | 47 |
 OCS Inventory Webconsole for OCS Inventory NG | 251 | - | 42 |
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Our Analysis
Snipe-IT answers one question well: who has which laptop, and when does the warranty run out. It tracks hardware, licenses, accessories and consumables, with checkout and check-in against real people. Self-hosting is free forever, unlimited users and unlimited assets, with no feature gate. Running it yourself means PHP, MySQL and a mail server. Nothing exotic, but you own backups and upgrades. Budget an afternoon for the first install and an hour a month after that. LDAP and SAML work in the free version, which is exactly where most asset tools start charging. Hosted plans start at $39.99/mo and climb to $7,500/year for a large dedicated server. You are paying for automatic backups, upgrades, TLS and someone to email. Solo and small teams: self-host, the free version is the whole product. Large teams: buy hosting if nobody wants to own the upgrade path. The catch is depth. Snipe-IT is asset tracking, not a CMDB. It will not model service dependencies or run change management, so if you need that, look at GLPI or iTop instead.
GLPI is three products in one: asset inventory, an ITIL service desk and a CMDB that links them together. That breadth is why it turns up across European public-sector IT more than anywhere else. The core is GPL and free, with no asset or user ceiling. Self-hosting means PHP and MySQL, and the inventory side expects agents deployed to endpoints. Plan real setup time. GLPI is configurable to the point of being fiddly, and the default interface shows its age. The payoff is that you stop paying for three separate SaaS products. GLPI Network is the paid layer from Teclib. Self-hosted subscriptions run from EUR 100/mo (about $110) for 10 agents to EUR 4,500/mo (about $4,900) unlimited, and cloud starts at EUR 19/user/mo (about $21). That buys exclusive plugins, automatic updates and support. The catch is the plugin split. Some connectors live only behind GLPI Network, so the free version can leave you writing glue you assumed was included. Check the plugin you need is in the free tier before you commit.
Ralph came out of Allegro, one of the largest e-commerce operations in Europe, and it shows. This is a data-center CMDB built by people who had to track thousands of servers, racks and back-office hardware, not a general-purpose asset app retrofitted for infrastructure. It is Python and Django under Apache 2.0, free with nothing held back. There is no paid tier and no company selling a hosted version, which cuts both ways: nobody upsells you, and nobody picks up the phone either. Data-center modeling is where it earns its place. Racks, physical assets, deployment and a transitions system for asset lifecycle, all with a usable API. Solo and small teams: heavier than you need, use Snipe-IT. Large teams running real physical infrastructure: worth a serious look. The catch is momentum. Development is steady rather than fast and the community is small next to GLPI or NetBox. Confirm the integrations you depend on are still maintained before you commit a hardware estate to it.
iTop models IT the way ITIL says to: configuration items, the dependencies between them, and the incidents and changes that touch them. That makes it the closest open source structural match to ServiceNow, and also the most work to set up. Combodo releases the core under AGPL, free and self-hosted, with the CMDB, ticketing and change management included. Paid editions and the iTop Hub add extensions, connectors and support, sold by quote rather than a published price list. The dependency graph is the reason to choose it. When a database goes down and you need to know which twelve services just broke, iTop can actually answer that. Snipe-IT cannot. Small teams: overkill. Large teams with a real change-management process: this is the fit. The catch is the data model. iTop is only as good as what you feed it, and populating a CMDB honestly is a months-long project that never entirely ends. Teams that skip that work end up with an expensive list of servers nobody trusts.
OCS Inventory does discovery, not management. Agents sit on your machines, report hardware and installed software back to a central server, and the web console shows what is actually out there. It pairs with GLPI so often that plenty of teams run both without realising they are separate projects. GPL and free with no paid tier. The server is PHP and Perl on a MySQL backend, and agents cover Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. Setup is dated but well documented, and the network discovery feature will find devices nobody told you about. Reach for it when you need to answer "what software is installed across 400 machines" and you no longer trust the spreadsheet. Solo: skip it. Small teams: only worth it if you already run GLPI. Large teams with a real endpoint estate: automatic discovery pays for itself quickly. The catch is the pace and the interface. This project dates to 2001 and looks it. Development continues but slowly, and Fleet covers similar ground with far less friction if you can run osquery instead.