Free IT inventory management software: 6 options compared

Search for free IT inventory management software and you get a list of products. What you do not get is the thing that decides the outcome: the word free means four different things across that list, and two of the best-known options are not free at all in the sense most people mean.

This comparison sorts six options by what the free version actually gives you, where each one stops, and what happens next.

If you are still working out what the system needs to do rather than which one to use, what IT asset management covers sets out the process first. This article assumes you know you need an inventory and want to know which free option survives contact with your device count.

The four kinds of free

Getting this straight first will save most of the evaluation.

Permanently free tier. A paid product with a free plan that does not expire. Usually capped by assets or users, and usually missing some features. It keeps working indefinitely at that size.

Open source. The software is free to license and yours to run. That is not the same as free to operate: you supply the server, the database, the backups, the upgrades and the person who does all of that.

Free edition of a paid product. A vendor's cut-down build, permanent but deliberately limited, usually intended as an on-ramp to the paid version.

A trial. Full features, fixed number of days, then it stops. Frequently marketed with the word "free" in a way that makes it look like the first category.

Two of the six below are in that last group. That is the single most useful thing to know before you spend a weekend importing devices.

Quick comparison

Product	Kind of free	Free limit	What it costs after
AssetCenter	Permanent free tier	25 assets, reports excluded	From $39/month
Snipe-IT	Open source, self-hosted	Unlimited assets and users	Free to license; hosting from $399.99/year
GLPI	Open source, self-hosted	Unlimited, community edition	Free to license; cloud from €19/user/month
Sortly	Permanent free tier	100 items, 1 user, 2 active jobs	From $49/month
ManageEngine AssetExplorer	Trial, then a free edition	250 IT assets for 30 days	Cloud from US$955/year for 250 assets
AssetTiger	Trial	250 assets for 30 days	From $20/month for 500 assets

Prices are in the currency each vendor publishes and were checked on 26 August 2026. A starting price is not a total cost: hosting, migration, integrations and support all sit outside these figures.

How we chose the products

We included products that a small IT team could realistically run as their inventory system of record, and that publish a free option on their own site. We read each vendor's current pricing page and recorded:

1. Whether the free option expires, and if so after how long
2. The binding limit — assets, items, users, or agents
3. Features held back from the free tier
4. The first paid step, and what it costs
5. Who operates the software — the vendor, or you

We did not deploy all six, test their import tooling, measure discovery accuracy, evaluate support quality, or run them at scale. Nothing here is a performance or reliability claim. Treat it as a shortlist built from published facts, then trial your final two with real data.

Products appear grouped by the kind of free they offer, not in a rank order.

Permanently free tiers

AssetCenter

The Free account covers up to 25 available or deployed assets, with no time limit and no credit card. It is a permanent plan rather than a trial, and it is separate from the 14-day trials on the paid plans.

The honest limitation is twofold. Twenty-five assets is genuinely small — it suits a team getting a category under control, not a company inventorying its estate. And the reports are the one part of the product the Free account does not include, so depreciation, asset aging, recurring subscription cost and the map reports need a paid plan. Paid plans start at $39 a month.

Free is the right choice here if you want to test the record-keeping model on a real subset before committing. It is the wrong choice if you have 200 laptops today.

Sortly

Sortly's published pricing puts its free plan at 100 unique items, one user licence and two active jobs, without barcode label creation or purchase orders.

The item count is more generous than it first looks, but the one user limit is usually what ends it. An inventory that only one person can open is a personal record, not a team system, and IT inventory is rarely a one-person job for long. The first paid tier, Advanced, is $49 a month for 500 items and two users.

Worth knowing: Sortly's roots are in general inventory rather than IT specifically, so it thinks in items and quantities more than in devices, custody and lifecycle.

Open source

Snipe-IT

Snipe-IT is the name that comes up most in the community threads on this topic, and for good reason. Per its pricing page, the self-hosted version is free with unlimited users and unlimited assets, capped at 120 API calls per minute, with community support through GitHub and Discord.

Unlimited assets for nothing is a real offer, and it is why Snipe-IT dominates these lists. The cost is elsewhere: no automatic backups, no automatic upgrades, no email support. You are running a PHP application and a database, patching it, backing it up, and being the person who fixes it when an upgrade goes wrong.

If that describes work your team already does competently, Snipe-IT is very hard to beat on price. If it does not, the hosted plans start at $399.99 a year, at which point it is a paid product and should be compared as one.

GLPI

GLPI is open source with a large installed base, particularly in Europe. The community edition is free to download and run.

Its pricing page shows what the commercial side costs if you want support: self-hosted GLPI Network subscriptions start at €100 a month for up to 10 IT agents, and GLPI Network Cloud is €19 per user per month with a 45-day trial.

GLPI is broader than an inventory — it carries a help desk and ITIL-style processes too. That is an advantage if you want one system for both, and a drawback if you want an asset register and now have a service-desk deployment to configure.

The two that are trials

ManageEngine AssetExplorer

AssetExplorer's pricing page advertises a 30-day fully functional free trial covering up to 250 IT assets, after which the licence downgrades to a free edition.

The free edition is real, but note what the pricing page does not do: it does not state the free edition's limits. If your plan depends on running the free edition permanently, establish exactly what it includes before you migrate anything into it. Paid cloud pricing starts at US$955 a year for 250 assets.

AssetTiger

AssetTiger is the product most likely to come up first when someone searches for free asset management software, and it has a long-standing reputation for a generous free allowance. That reputation is why the current detail matters.

As checked on 26 August 2026, its pricing page presents the free offering as a "30-day free trial · Up to 250 assets · No credit card required" rather than as a permanent free plan. Paid tiers begin at $20 a month for 500 assets and scale to $275 a month for 250,000, with unlimited users throughout.

Per-asset pricing with unlimited users is a genuinely good structure for IT teams, and $20 a month is inexpensive. Just do not plan around the free tier being permanent without confirming it directly with the vendor, because the published page does not say that it is.

The limit that will actually bite you

Every free tier has several limits and usually only one of them matters. Working out which one is yours takes a minute and prevents a migration.

• Asset or item caps bite immediately and predictably. Count your devices, compare, done.
• User caps bite later and hurt more. A system one person can open cannot take over custody handoffs, and custody is most of the value.
• Feature holdbacks bite at the least convenient moment — usually when someone asks for a report at the end of a budget cycle.
• Operational load is the open-source version of a limit. It does not appear on a pricing page and it never stops being charged.

The practical test: take your device count, double it, and ask which of these six still works. Free tiers are cheap to enter and expensive to leave, because the leaving happens after all your data is inside.

When free stops being the right question

Free is a legitimate starting point and a bad destination for most teams past a certain size. The tell is usually not the asset count. It is when the inventory starts being used for decisions — renewals, budgets, audits, offboarding — because at that point accuracy matters more than cost, and accuracy comes from the workflow around the record.

IT asset lifecycle management covers the stages that turn a list into something trustworthy. If you have reached the point of comparing paid options on capability rather than price, seven IT asset management platforms compared covers the field by operating model.

How AssetCenter fits

AssetCenter is one of the six above, with a permanent Free account for up to 25 assets and paid plans from $39 a month. We are not going to pretend that beats unlimited self-hosted Snipe-IT on price, because it does not.

What it offers instead is the thing self-hosting costs you: nobody on your team runs it. There is no server, no upgrade night, no backup to verify. For a small IT team, the honest trade is a monthly fee against the hours that would otherwise go into operating the tool that tracks the hardware.

AssetCenter also does not do automated discovery. It will not scan the network and find devices for you — records come from import, from directory sync, or from people. If your requirement is "find everything on the network without being told", that is a discovery product and the comparison above points at the ones that do it.

Where it fits is custody, cost, subscriptions and lifecycle history for an estate someone is actually maintaining: which laptop is on which desk, who signed for it, what it cost, what happened to it, and what came back at offboarding. The IT inventory tracking page covers that scope in detail.

Next step

Do this before importing anything anywhere.

1. Count the devices you need in the system today, and estimate the number in two years.
2. Cross off any option whose free limit is below the second number.
3. For anything open source, decide who operates it, and put a real number on their hours.
4. From what is left, pick the two whose paid step is affordable at your two-year size.
5. Trial both with a real subset of devices — not sample data — and check import, custody handoffs, and getting your data back out.

Step 5 is the one people skip, and export is the one to test hardest. The cost of a free tool is rarely the licence. It is what it takes to leave when you outgrow it.