Snipe-IT and AssetTiger alternatives, from someone who used them

If you are reading comparisons of asset management tools, you have probably already found the same four or five names. I have used them, across twenty years of doing IT in the corporate world. They are good products built by people who know the problem. None of them is a scam and none of them is badly made.

But each one asks you for something, and the thing it asks is rarely on the pricing page. That is what this is about. 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 the shape of what each one wants from you.

What each one actually asks

Snipe-IT

Free and genuinely open source, which is a real gift to the industry. What it asks for is infrastructure: a web server, a database, PHP, and a person who keeps all three patched. If you already run a Linux box and enjoy that, Snipe-IT is excellent and you should use it. If standing that up is the reason asset tracking has been on your list for two years, that is the ask.

GLPI

Powerful, mature, and far broader than asset tracking — it wants to be your service desk too. The ask is the same as Snipe-IT plus a steeper learning curve. Worth it at the scale it is built for. Heavy if you have forty laptops.

AssetTiger

Free below a certain number of assets, then a yearly bill. The ask is that your data lives in their cloud, and that your costs step up as your estate grows. If you are comfortable with both, the free tier is a genuinely good deal and you should take it.

EZOfficeInventory

Polished and full-featured. The ask is per-user, per-month pricing that grows with your team — which means the more people you want looking at your inventory, the more it costs to let them.

Reftab

Clean and modern, and the onboarding is the least painful of the hosted options. Same underlying ask: a subscription for as long as you use it, and your records in someone else's system.

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.

The two questions that actually decide it

Question	What it means
Do several people need to edit at the same time?	If yes, you want a hosted tool. A file — any file, on any sync service — does not merge two simultaneous edits, and the loser is silent. This is the real dividing line.
Do you need automatic discovery?	Agents that scan the network and find machines by themselves. Past a few hundred devices this stops being optional. Under that, walking round with a label printer once is faster.

If either answer is yes, buy one of the tools above. I mean that — I would rather you found this page and went and bought Snipe-IT than bought something from me that does not fit.

Where the third option fits

There is a gap those two questions leave behind, and it is a big one: the small business with twenty to a few hundred devices, one person who is IT-ish, nobody editing simultaneously, and no appetite for either a server or a permanent subscription.

That gap is what I built for, after two decades of watching it go unserved. Three things kept being missing or locked behind a tier I did not otherwise need:

• Real people, and checking things out to them — not just a list of what you own, but who has it, stamped with a name and a date, so a month later you can still answer.
• Locations — which office, which floor, which store room, and the ability to move something when it moves.
• Scanning — because typing a twelve-character serial to look one item up is what quietly kills the habit.

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 are working towards ISO 27001 or SOC 2 and need a tamper-evident trail with access controls, this will not satisfy an auditor.
• No automatic discovery. You add assets yourself, or bulk-import them from CSV.
• Camera scanning does not work on iPhone or iPad, because Safari does not support the API. A USB scanner works everywhere and costs about $25.

In exchange: one payment, no server, no account, no per-asset fee, no seats, and your data stays in an .xlsx on your own disk where you can open it with anything.