EZOfficeInventory alternatives, without a monthly bill

EZOfficeInventory is a polished, mature asset tracking product, and if you have landed on comparisons you have almost certainly got it open in another tab. It is not a bad tool. This page is about the shape of what it asks for, which is rarely the thing you compare.

I am not going to quote prices — they change, and a stale number about someone else's product is worse than no number. What does not change is how each option charges, and that is what decides whether it still fits you in three years.

What EZOfficeInventory actually asks

A subscription metered on how many items you track — and, to their credit, unlimited users on every plan. Their pricing page is built around a slider where you type in your item count; the number of people who log in does not change the bill.

That is the right way round, and it is worth saying so plainly. An earlier version of this page said EZOfficeInventory charged per user. That was true once and it is not true now. They changed it, and a comparison page that never gets re-checked becomes a liability rather than a help. If you are choosing today, the seat-count objection people still repeat about them does not apply.

So the real question is not who gets a login. It is the two things a per-item subscription still asks of you:

• Your bill is tied to how much you own. Buy more equipment and the cost of keeping track of it rises with it — not because tracking got harder, but because the meter counts things.
• It is a subscription, so the cost never ends. Three years in you have paid for three years, and stopping means walking away from the system your records live in.

When you should buy it anyway

Genuinely, if any of these is true, go and buy a hosted tool and stop reading:

• Several people need to edit at the same time. This is the real dividing line. A file — any file, on any sync service — does not merge two simultaneous edits, and the loser is silent.
• You need roles and permissions, so some people can see but not change.
• You need alerts that arrive by email or push when you are not at the screen.
• You need integrations — SSO, an API, syncing with Intune or Active Directory.

Every one of those needs a server. If you need them, buy the server. I would rather you found this page and bought the right thing than bought something from me that does not fit.

The other options, and their shapes

Snipe-IT or GLPI

Free and open source, which is a real gift to the industry. The ask is infrastructure: a web server, a database, PHP, and someone who keeps all three patched. Excellent if you already run a Linux box and enjoy it. If standing that up is the reason asset tracking has been on your list for two years, that is the ask.

AssetTiger

The free tier people remember is gone. Checked on their own pricing page in September 2026: what used to be free forever below a couple of hundred assets is now a 30-day trial, capped at two users. After that it is a subscription metered on how many assets you hold. Paid plans do include unlimited users, which is the right way round — but “AssetTiger is free” is advice that has expired.

A free Excel template

The honest baseline. It asks nothing and gives you a list of columns. No dashboard, no check-out log, no depreciation, and critically no history — edit the “assigned to” cell and last month's answer is gone.

Where the third option fits

Between “run a server” and “pay per person, forever” there is a gap, and it is a big one: the business with twenty to a few hundred devices, one person who is IT-ish, nobody editing simultaneously, and no appetite for either.

That gap is what this was built for. One Excel file with a dashboard on top — check-out to real people with a name and a date against it, locations, depreciation and book value, warranty alerts colour-coded before they lapse, due-back dates with an Overdue filter, barcode scanning, and printable labels generated from your own list.

What it asks of you, stated as plainly as the rest

It would be dishonest to list everyone else's trade-offs and not my own. So:

• One editor at a time. It is a file. Two people editing at once will lose work. This is the biggest limitation and it rules out some teams entirely.
• No permissions, no SSO, no audit certification. If you need a tamper-evident trail with access controls, this will not satisfy an auditor.
• Nothing can be sent to you. Overdue items are colour-coded on screen, but no email or push notification exists, because sending one needs a server and there isn't one.
• Camera scanning only works on Android. Chrome and Edge on Windows do not support the barcode API, and neither does Safari on an iPhone or iPad. A USB scanner works everywhere and costs about $25.

In exchange: one payment, unlimited assets, unlimited people looking at it, no server, no account, and your data stays in an .xlsx on your own disk. Stop using the dashboard tomorrow and it is still just a spreadsheet you own.