Comparison

AssetTiger vs Lansweeper

Two tools districts shortlist for device tracking and IT operations, compared the way a buying committee actually reads them: what each is, what each does well, and what to check before signing. We build Chalk, a third option in this space — that context is worth knowing as you read, and it is why every claim below carries its basis.

AssetTiger

The cheapest per-asset tracker a district will find, with no feature gating and unlimited users — and no ticketing, no roster, and no way to see a Chromebook that did not arrive on a spreadsheet.

Pricing: Subscription metered purely on asset count across published tiers, with unlimited users on every paid plan and yearly billing discounted against monthly — the vendor's own framing is 'pay for assets, not seats.' Stock inventory is a separate small add-on. Note a correction to widely repeated third-party claims: the free plan is now a 30-day trial capped at 250 assets and two users, after which the account becomes view-only. It is not free forever. The pricing FAQ raises the question of school and nonprofit discounts; we could not read the answer, so ask them directly.

Where AssetTiger is strong

  • The lowest per-asset cost in this comparison by a wide margin, on a clean single meter.
  • No feature gating between paid tiers — the vendor states explicitly that you upgrade to track more assets, not to unlock capabilities. That is unusually honest packaging and worth conceding.
  • Unlimited users on every paid plan, so every building secretary and tech can have an account for free.
  • Native iOS and Android apps with barcode and QR scanning, plus label printing from any printer — from a company whose main business is asset tags.
  • Check-in and check-out with due dates and overdue alerts, which is more custody machinery than most trackers at this price.
  • Deep reporting for the category — a large library of report types and a very granular permission model.

What to check before you buy

  • No ticketing or help desk of any kind, and no connectors to one. A district running AssetTiger buys or keeps a separate service desk, and the two never see each other.

    Basis: No ticketing capability or integration appears anywhere in AssetTiger's feature list.

  • No MDM or device-management ingest at all — nothing pulls from Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf. Every Chromebook enters by CSV import or by hand, and nothing detects a device you did not know about.

    Basis: AssetTiger publishes no MDM connectors; this is the largest functional gap for a Chromebook district.

  • No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, or PowerSchool — and no student, guardian, or family concepts. Nothing notices a transfer or a withdrawal.

    Basis: None appear in AssetTiger's features or integration documentation.

  • No parent e-signature on a device agreement and no student fee assessment or family balances, so damage at collection time is handled outside the system.

    Basis: Absent from AssetTiger's documented feature set.

  • Fund tracking exists, but it is generic budget allocation rather than grant-program aware — it will not produce the ESSER, Title, or E-Rate attribution an audit asks for without you building the structure by hand.

    Basis: AssetTiger lists a fund-tracking feature with a per-plan cap; no grant-program or funding-source-restriction concepts are documented.

  • The weakest identity story in this comparison: two-factor plus Google SSO only, with no evidence of SAML support, and certainly no ability to act as an identity provider itself.

    Basis: AssetTiger's feature list names 2FA and Google SSO; no SAML or OIDC support is documented.

  • The free plan is a 30-day trial, not a free tier. After it lapses the account is view-only, and it is limited to two users during the trial.

    Basis: AssetTiger's pricing table labels that column a free 30-day trial; third-party review sites still repeat a legacy free-forever claim that the vendor's page contradicts.

  • Stock inventory is a separate paid add-on, and there is no documented link between it and repair records, so consuming a part against a specific repair is not a supported workflow.

    Basis: Inventory is listed and priced as an add-on; no repair-to-parts linkage appears in the documentation.

How Chalk compares with AssetTiger →

Lansweeper

The strongest network discovery engine in this comparison — it will find every device on your wire, including the ones nobody told it about, and it will not know that any of them belongs to a seventh grader.

Pricing: Quote-and-portal, not a published ladder. Lansweeper meters by licensed asset count: its documentation states that most subscriptions limit the number of assets you can scan, and that scanning of new and existing assets may stop once you hit the limit. Plan changes and asset-coverage increases run through a Self-Service Subscription Portal with live price previews; upgrading to a Pro plan is self-serve, Enterprise is explicitly 'Talk to Sales', and downgrades are not available in the portal at all. The one fixed figure Lansweeper publishes at a retrievable URL is in its own online store: a Lansweeper Classic Helpdesk Agent license at $120.00 per agent per year. No education discount is documented.

Where Lansweeper is strong

  • Genuine network discovery, which almost nothing else in this category has: agentless scanning of Windows over WMI, Linux and macOS over SSH, and printers, switches, routers, firewalls and NAS over SNMP, so the inventory includes devices no one ever entered.
  • A passive traffic sensor that discovers assets from network communications, catching devices that active scanning misses entirely — the closest thing to a real answer for shadow IT and unmanaged OT gear.
  • An IT Agent for Windows, Linux and macOS endpoints that rarely touch the LAN, and Cloud Discovery across Azure, Intune, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, AWS and GCP — with a reconciliation engine that merges the same device seen through several sources into one asset record instead of three.
  • Vulnerability detection built on CPE correlation and VulnCheck, with CVSS severity and patch status against the software and OS actually in your inventory, alongside hardware and software lifecycle tracking for end-of-sale and end-of-support dates.
  • Deployment packages in Lansweeper Classic — install software, run scripts and make remote changes on Windows machines from the same console that inventoried them.
  • A full built-in help desk in Classic: tickets from the web console, email, API or import, dispatching rules, SLAs, teams, internal notes and a knowledge base.

What to check before you buy

  • Lansweeper is two products with a documented feature gap between them — Lansweeper Platform in the cloud and Lansweeper Classic on-premises — and which capabilities you get depends on which one you deploy.

    Basis: Vendor's own 'Comparing Lansweeper Platform and Lansweeper Classic' documentation page, which lists discovery targets and features per product.

  • ChromeOS discovery is a Lansweeper Classic capability. In the newer Lansweeper Platform the vendor's comparison table marks Chrome OS as 'Planned (Cloud Discovery)'. For a district whose fleet is Chromebooks, that is the whole fleet sitting on the older product.

    Basis: Vendor comparison table lists Chrome OS as supported in Classic scanning and Planned for Lansweeper Platform.

  • Even in Classic, ChromeOS scanning is work you do yourself: your license must support Chrome OS scanning, and you build a Google Cloud project, enable the Admin SDK, create a service account and grant it scopes before a single Chromebook appears.

    Basis: Vendor's 'Chrome OS scanning requirements' documentation page.

  • The help desk is licensed per agent. Unlimited users can file tickets, but exactly one agent license is included, and every additional technician who answers tickets is a paid seat at $120 per year.

    Basis: Vendor's 'Manage helpdesk agents' documentation plus the listed price in Lansweeper's own online store.

  • That help desk belongs to Classic. The cloud Platform documentation covers no ticketing module of its own — service management appears as connectors to Jira Service Management, ConnectWise, Zendesk and Freshservice, meaning a second vendor.

    Basis: Lansweeper's documentation index places every help-desk article under Classic, and lists ITSM tools as integrations under Platform.

  • The asset meter has teeth: reaching your licensed asset limit can stop scanning of new and existing assets until you delete assets or upgrade.

    Basis: Vendor's 'Manage your licensed asset limit' documentation page.

  • No student, guardian or enrollment concepts, and no SIS or rostering connectors — the identity sources documented are Active Directory, Entra ID, Intune and Microsoft 365. Students arrive by CSV, if at all.

    Basis: Absent from Lansweeper's documentation index, which covers directory and cloud identity sources only.

  • Nothing models the 1:1 program itself: no device agreement, no parent signature, no fee for a cracked screen, no family balance, and no funding-source dimension for ESSER, Title or E-Rate reporting.

    Basis: Absent from the vendor's documented feature set, which is discovery, inventory, risk and deployment.

How Chalk compares with Lansweeper →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing AssetTiger against Lansweeper, Chalk belongs on the same shortlist. It is the open-source K-12 IT stack: device inventory that fills itself in from Google Admin, Intune, and Jamf against a roster synced from your SIS, a 1:1 circulation desk with agreements and fees, repairs with parts and costs, a help desk that already knows who is asking, and a built-in SAML/OIDC identity provider.

  • Self-host it free forever under AGPL-3.0 — the entire feature set, one binary, your infrastructure — or use the hosted version, priced by fleet size with no per-seat or per-student fees and the price ladder published.
  • Built only for K-12: students, buildings, custody, funding sources, and ChromeOS auto-update expiration are native concepts, not custom fields.
  • Writes back to Google Admin as a reviewed diff — every OU move, disable, and deprovision previewed before it executes — and serves a OneRoster 1.1 API so other district systems can pull the roster from Chalk.
  • Fees are assessed and tracked without touching payment cards, keeping the asset system out of your PCI scope.

See all three on your own roster.

Chalk installs to a populated inventory in about 30 minutes. Self-host free under AGPL-3.0, or let us run it — priced by fleet size, never per seat.