Free IT asset inventory management software: Is it worth it?

If you’re spending too much time figuring out which IT asset is used where, when, and by which team members, you’re not alone. IT teams everywhere are transitioning from spreadsheets to software to track their assets, automate mundane tasks, and know which proactive actions to take to keep their environment as healthy as possible.

But is free IT asset inventory management software the right solution?

Understanding IT asset inventory management

IT asset inventory management is the process of tracking, managing, and optimizing all IT assets within an organization. This includes hardware, software, network resources, and even cloud-based services. 

Effective asset management helps businesses:

• Reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary purchases and optimizing resource allocation
• Improve security by identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring all assets are properly protected
• Enhance productivity by ensuring employees have the tools they need
• Facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements and software licensing agreements
• Support better decision-making through accurate data on IT resources

Key considerations for choosing and implementing IT asset inventory management software

When selecting and implementing an IT asset inventory management tool, consider the following factors:

• Scalability: Ensure the tool can grow with your organization and handle your current and future asset volume.
• Ease of use: Look for intuitive interfaces and workflows to encourage adoption among your team.
• Integration capabilities: Consider how well the tool integrates with your existing systems and workflows.
• Customization options: Choose a solution that allows you to tailor fields, reports, and workflows to your specific needs.
• Automation features: Prioritize tools that offer automated IT asset discovery and inventory updates to reduce manual work.
• Reporting capabilities: Ensure the tool provides the insights and reports you need for decision-making and compliance.
• Security features: Evaluate the security measures in place to protect your asset data.
• Community and support: For free tools, a strong user community can be invaluable for troubleshooting and sharing best practices.
• Hardware requirements: Consider the hardware resources required to run the tool effectively, especially for larger networks.
• Future development: Look for tools with active development and regular updates to ensure long-term viability.

Potential risks of a free IT asset inventory management software

While free IT asset inventory management tools offer significant benefits, it’s important to be aware of potential risks associated with their use. Understanding these risks can help you make informed decisions and implement appropriate mitigation strategies.

Limited features and functionality

• Free versions often have restricted capabilities compared to paid alternatives.
• You may encounter limitations in areas such as the number of assets you can track, reporting options, or integration possibilities.
• As your organization grows, you might outgrow the free tool’s capabilities, necessitating a potentially disruptive switch to a paid solution.

Lack of professional support

• Many free tools rely on community support rather than dedicated customer service.
• This can lead to longer resolution times for critical issues or bugs.
• You may need to invest more time in troubleshooting and problem-solving.

Security concerns

• Free tools may not have the same level of security features as paid enterprise solutions.
• There could be vulnerabilities that aren’t quickly patched due to limited resources.
• Open-source tools, while benefiting from community scrutiny, may also be targets for malicious actors looking to exploit widely-used software.

Data privacy issues

• Some free tools may collect data about your usage or assets for analytical or advertising purposes.
• Ensure you thoroughly review the privacy policy and terms of service to understand how your data is handled.

Reliability and stability

• Free tools may not undergo the same rigorous testing as paid enterprise solutions.
• You might experience more frequent bugs, crashes, or performance issues.
• Updates and bug fixes may be less frequent or timely.

Hidden costs

While the software itself is free, there may be associated costs such as:

• Hardware requirements for running the software efficiently
• Training for staff to use the tool effectively
• Time invested in setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

Lack of customization

• Free tools often offer limited customization options.
• This lack can make it challenging to tailor the software to your organization’s specific needs and workflows.

Discontinuation risk

• Free tools—especially those from smaller developers—risk being discontinued if they’re not financially viable.
• A discontinued tool could leave you scrambling to find an alternative and migrate your data.

Compliance concerns

• Free tools may not have built-in features to support specific compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
• Compliance concerns could potentially expose your organization to regulatory risks.

Essential features to look for—whether free or paid

If you’re going to invest resources into purchasing, onboarding, and using a tool, you want to ensure you get the most out of it. 

Here are the recommended features to consider when picking an IT asset inventory management tool. 

Please create a visual with this copy:

Looking for asset inventory management software?

Key features to look for:

1. Asset tracking and discovery
2. Software licensing management
3. Health rules
4. Automation

Asset tracking and discovery

Automatically discover assets across your network, their version, purchase information, where they’re located, who’s using them, and how. This is necessary for both your hardware and software assets, and is made easier with hardware monitoring software that provides real-time insights and detailed tracking of your devices.

Source: Atera’s dashboard

Software licensing management

Verify assets are operating according to their licenses, that they’re being used to the max, that they’re compliant with industry regulations, and that the licenses your company needs won’t expire without proper renewals.

Health rules

Among the alerts you might get, make sure your software keeps you on track by defining rules for alerts. When you have software that enables this, you can understand asset performance, security, or challenge status. Learn about it early enough, take proactive action before it escalates, and you’ll become everyone’s hero or heroine.

Automation

Ideally, you’ll invest in a tool that allows you to automate as many mundane tasks as possible. Examples include counting inventory assets and checking their current health status, distributing MS Office, and running antivirus software on devices.

Source

5 free IT asset inventory management software

Sometimes, the best way to know whether something works for you is to test it—or at the very least, do a deep dive on the available benefits and limitations.

That said, here are five tools you may want to test out free of charge. Some are completely free, while others offer a freemium model.

Spiceworks

Spiceworks provides a unified platform to keep track of all your devices, their identifying information, their usage, and potential challenges that might come up. This allows you to get ahead of any significant problems.

Spiceworks also allows you to automate inventory management processes and produce detailed reports, so you’ll be fully ready for the next budgeting meeting. And it’s easy to onboard—you can run your first analysis within minutes of setup.

Benefits:

• A simple dashboard that makes it easy to understand your inventory. You can see who uses your software and hardware, which asset, where, and for how long.
• Effective, customized reports that provide valuable intel for decision-making processes.

Limitations:

• It’s sometimes slow or even unresponsive.
• Deleted devices might reappear.
• Cross-team visibility, routing, and overall collaboration aren’t easy to pull off.

How is it free?

There’s only one pricing tier at Spiceworks: free. The company can support millions of free IT users because the platform is ad-supported. This large user base allows Spiceworks to attract thousands of tech vendors who want access to this highly relevant audience.

Lansweeper

Achieve visibility into all your software, hardware, user, and public cloud assets in a single place. Whether you’re seeking information about Mac, Windows, Linux, OT devices, virtual environments, printers, routers, apps, licenses, versions—you name it, Lansweeper likely covers it and the way it’s been used.

It also connects to the rest of your tech stack, so any IT scenario can be powered by your inventory data.

Benefits:

• Strong scanning and data analysis capabilities. Customers appreciate the efficient insights provided by the platform.
• It offers a ton of features, and it’s easy to customize the platform to your specific needs.

Limitations:

• The free version includes community support, not standard customer support. But even those who receive customer support say the team is unresponsive and often sends out knowledge articles instead of just helping.
• The on-premises version barely gets new updates. When it does, it comes with a big learning curve.

How is it free? 

Lansweeper offers a freemium business model. This version is available for an unlimited number of users, managing up to 100 assets, for an unlimited amount of time. They enable this free model by not providing customer support for the free tier. Members on that subscription plan can refer to its user community instead.

Premium plans start at 199 Euros a month, billed annually.

Snipe-IT

Snipe-IT is a user-friendly, open-source asset management software. It offers a free version if you host it yourself and don’t need official customer support (there’s community-based support).

Those who choose the cloud-hosted version get a 99.99% uptime guarantee, frequent updates, a powerful API, and cybersecurity capabilities.

Benefits:

• Migration from other tools is simple.
• Customers appreciate the ability to add features through the open-source code.
• The tool makes it easy to tag and manage assets.

Limitations:

• It’s not always easy to add and track users and suppliers.
• Some important notifications aren’t received (e.g., licenses that are about to expire).
• The dashboard is outdated, according to user reviews.

How is it free? 

The company provides a freemium model. This self-hosted version comes with minimum features and community-based support. You can also pay for premium subscriptions. Pricing starts at $39.99/month.

CMDBuild

CMDBuild is an open-source environment that helps you build customized asset management apps. You can configure dashboards, operational schedules, workflows, document management, reports, and much more.

CMDBuild provides enterprise architecture with advanced design criteria for a multi-platform system that can operate in multiple languages.

Benefits:

• You can create your own customized asset management app without coding.
• It’s easy to track assets’ entire lifecycle.
• There are many options to integrate with additional tools, to empower your capabilities further.

Limitations:

• Installation is hard to do, even more so for less experienced team members.
• According to user reviews, documentation is lacking—especially for the more advanced employees. 

How is it free? 

The company’s website explains why it offers a free product. “CMDBuild is released under the open source AGPL (Affero GPL) license: Anyone can download it, install it, and freely use it.”

That said, the company does charge for customer support. It also allows you to buy a subscription, a support hour bank, and training.

AssetTiger

AssetTiger aims to save you money and simplify your IT asset management life.  It offers unlimited custom reports about asset maintenance, check-out times, depreciation calculation, and who comes in contact with your assets.

The tool also allows you to schedule regular maintenance to get ahead of problems, configure email alerts, and easily scan barcodes to get asset information.

Benefits:

• You can start using it within minutes of installation. No need for lengthy onboarding processes.
• Add an unlimited user number at no additional cost.
• The platform is indeed as simple to use as promised.

Limitations:

• Customer service isn’t responsive enough. When it does come through, it’s still challenging to resolve issues.
• Some customers complain that they must do manual tasks because the platform won’t let them perform bulk actions.
• The search option isn’t as smart or thorough as you’d expect.

How is it free? 

AssetTiger advertises itself as free software to manage your IT assets—but in reality, it’s got a freemium model. That said, its free members can use the platform as much as needed to manage up to 250 assets. Paid subscriptions start at $120/year.

AI-powered IT asset management with Atera

While several leading IT asset management platforms offer similar core functionalities, Atera stands out with its advanced AI-driven capabilities. Atera’s AI Copilot goes beyond basic IT tasks by streamlining the entire process of managing an organization’s IT infrastructure. Additionally, Atera provides comprehensive software inventory reporting, allowing users to view detailed information about installed software across devices, ensuring better oversight and compliance.

The AI Copilot assists technicians in troubleshooting IT issues, generating context-specific scripts, and creating knowledge base articles directly from tickets. It also provides access to ActionAI™ which enhances customer support, operational efficiency, and the quality of work.

It’s not free, but it’s got a fair pay-per-technician pricing model (no matter how many assets or endpoints you manage). You can try it risk-free and payment-free for 30 days.