Open-source alternatives to Lansweeper and IT asset trackers

Ask a small business how many laptops it owns and who has them, and you'll often get a spreadsheet from 2023 and a shrug. Then a member of staff leaves, or a Cyber Essentials assessment comes up, and someone spends a week walking around with a clipboard.

Lansweeper is a serious tool for this, and it's built for serious estates. Its free plan covers up to 100 assets, which might be plenty for you. Above that, Starter and Pro begin at 2,000 assets, Enterprise at 10,000, and you need to ask for a quote. That's a lot of tool if you have 40 laptops.

Most small businesses don't need network scanning across thousands of devices. They need a tidy record of what they own, who has it, and when the licences run out. There are two good open-source ways of doing that.

Snipe-IT

Snipe-IT does one job and does it nicely. It's a web-based asset register built around a simple idea: things get checked out to people, and checked back in.

• Check-in and check-out for laptops, phones and anything else, so one item can't be given to two people.
• Licences, accessories and consumables as well as hardware, from software seats to keyboards and toner.
• QR code labels, which work with barcode scanners and phones.
• Quick audits, with email reminders when they're due.
• EULA acceptance, so staff can confirm when they receive kit. That's a useful record when someone leaves.
• Alerts and reports, including expiring licences and overdue returns.
• Active Directory and LDAP for login and user sync, plus Slack and Teams notifications.
• A REST API that lots of third-party tools are built on.

What it doesn't do matters. Snipe-IT doesn't discover your devices automatically. It's a register, so somebody has to put the information in. Third-party connectors exist for tools such as Jamf and Kandji, and there are community agents for Windows, but those aren't supported by the project itself.

If your team is small, that's often fine. You buy a laptop, you add it, you hand it out.

It's a PHP application that needs PHP 8.2 or newer and MySQL or MariaDB, and it runs on Linux, Windows or Mac. The self-hosted version is free, and the project says it always will be. If you'd rather not run it, hosting starts at $39.99 a month.

GLPI

GLPI is a much bigger thing: a full IT service management system that has been around for many years. Asset tracking is one part of it.

• Inventory of computers, monitors, software, licences, network kit, printers and phones.
• A helpdesk, with tickets, problem and change management, and SLAs.
• Contracts, suppliers, budgets and documents, all linked to the kit they belong to.
• A knowledge base and a self-service portal for staff.
• Email to ticket, so messages to your IT address become tickets.
• Projects and reservations, for sharing loan laptops, say.
• LDAP login, a rules engine and a plugin marketplace.

The big difference from Snipe-IT is automatic inventory. Install the GLPI Agent on your Windows, Mac and Linux machines, and they report their own hardware and software to GLPI. That's much closer to what Lansweeper does, though Lansweeper's discovery is its whole purpose. The agent also has network discovery and SNMP inventory tasks, which you should check against the current GLPI documentation for your version.

It's a heavier thing to live with. The current GLPI 12 needs PHP 8.3 or newer and MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.0 or newer. There's a lot of it, and a lot of settings, so expect to spend time deciding what you want and hiding what you don't.

There's a paid side too. GLPI Network offers hosted plans from 19 euros per IT agent a month and support plans for self-hosted users, starting at 100 euros a month. Some plugins are only available through those subscriptions.

The UK angle: Cyber Essentials

This is the UK angle that really matters here. Cyber Essentials requires software to be licensed and supported, removed when it goes out of support, and updated within 14 days for critical or high-risk fixes. You can't do any of that well without knowing what you've got.

The NCSC's requirements (v3.3, April 2026) are clear that asset management isn't a specific control, but that doing it well helps you meet all five. A proper asset list gives you a head start on the assessment. Neither tool makes you compliant by itself.

On data, an asset register doesn't hold much that's sensitive. It's staff names and which laptop they've got, so a US-hosted tool would be fine for most small firms. Under UK GDPR you still need to treat that as personal data, but it's a small job. If you run GLPI's agent, you'll be collecting more detail about each machine, so mention it in your staff privacy information.

Honest drawbacks

• Snipe-IT relies on people. With no discovery built in, your register is only as good as whoever keeps it up to date.
• GLPI is big. If you only want an asset list, you'll be working around a lot of features you never use.
• Neither scans like Lansweeper. For finding unknown devices across a large network, a dedicated tool is much stronger.
• Agents need rolling out. With GLPI, that's another piece of software on every machine, and it needs keeping up to date.
• Lansweeper's free plan may be enough. If you've got under 100 assets and want automatic discovery, try it first.
• Someone has to run it. That's fine for an IT team, less so if it's the office manager's side job.

Which one?

My pick is Snipe-IT. It's simple, cheap to run and easy for non-specialists to keep up to date, and it's what most small businesses really need. The main drawback is that it doesn't discover devices itself, so the list is only as accurate as the people updating it.

• Under 100 or so devices, just want to know who has what: Snipe-IT.
• Want a helpdesk and automatic inventory too: GLPI.
• Under 100 assets and want network discovery with no server to run: Lansweeper's free plan.

If you want your asset records tied into HR, purchasing or your own systems, the team at Dev Partners can build that as custom software.

Sources

• Snipe-IT on GitHub
• Snipe-IT features
• Snipe-IT overview
• Snipe-IT requirements
• Snipe-IT hosted pricing
• GLPI on GitHub
• GLPI features
• GLPI Agent on GitHub
• GLPI Network subscriptions
• Lansweeper pricing
• NCSC: Cyber Essentials requirements for IT infrastructure v3.3