Buyer's guide
Best IT asset management for SMBs
You've outgrown the spreadsheet, but you're not ServiceNow. Here's how to pick a tracker for the messy middle — dozens to a few thousand assets, a small team, often a team of one.
What actually matters when you're small
Hosted, or your server to run?
Free self-hosted tools are genuinely free — until you count the hours you spend patching, backing up, and upgrading them. If nobody on your team wants to own a server, a hosted tool is the honest cheaper option.
Does it pull from your MDM?
The difference between a tool you maintain and a tool that maintains itself is device sync. If it can't read from Jamf, Kandji, or Intune, every laptop is a manual entry — and the ledger drifts out of date the week after you build it.
Does offboarding happen on its own?
Ghost assets are almost always offboarding failures. If the tool syncs with your directory over SCIM, a departure deactivates the person and flags their gear for return automatically, instead of relying on someone remembering.
Will the bill balloon as you grow?
Per-asset and per-seat pricing quietly punishes you for hiring and buying laptops. Flat pricing is predictable — you know next year's bill today.
How fast are you actually live?
For a small team, a six-month rollout is a non-starter. The realistic question is whether you're tracking who-has-what by the end of the afternoon.
The honest landscape
There's no single “best” — there's the right fit for how your team works. Here's where the common options land.
A spreadsheet
Free and genuinely fine — until “who has the loaner?” stops fitting in your head. If you've got five laptops, stay here. Come back when tracking them turns into detective work.
Snipe-IT
Free and capable if you'll self-host and patch it; cloud hosting starts around $39.99/mo. Its barcode workflow is excellent. The catch: no automatic device discovery — every asset is entered by hand. Pulse vs Snipe-IT →
AssetTiger
Cloud-based and easy on the budget — free up to 250 assets (2 users), then tiers priced by asset count. Good value for a straightforward database, but no native MDM or directory sync, so it stays a manual system. Pulse vs AssetTiger →
Pulse
Hosted, so there's no server to run. It syncs devices from Jamf, Kandji, and Intune and people from your directory over SCIM, so the ledger keeps itself current. One flat price per plan — never per asset, never per seat. Built for the messy middle.
Where Pulse fits
Pulse isn't for everyone, and we'd rather say so. If you've got five laptops, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. And if you need a full CMDB, change-management workflows, and five thousand endpoints, that's ServiceNow, not Pulse. Pulse is for the messy middle — a small team that's outgrown the sheet but doesn't want a six-month rollout: hosted, flat-priced, and kept current by your MDM and directory instead of by hand.
Common questions
- What is the best IT asset management tool for a small business?
- It depends on who runs it. If you're happy hosting and patching a server, Snipe-IT is free and capable. If you want a cheap cloud database and don't need integrations, AssetTiger's free tier covers up to 250 assets. If you want a hosted tool that pulls devices from your MDM and people from your directory automatically, on a flat price, Pulse is built for that.
- When should a team stop tracking IT assets in a spreadsheet?
- Roughly when "who has the loaner?" stops fitting in your head — usually a few dozen assets, or the first time an audit or an offboarding turns into an afternoon of detective work.
- What's a good Snipe-IT alternative?
- If the appeal of Snipe-IT is that it's free, the honest tradeoff is that you self-host and patch it, and enter every device by hand. Pulse is a hosted alternative that syncs devices from your MDM automatically. See the full comparison on the Pulse vs Snipe-IT page.