Chalk

Comparison

AssetTiger vs Zoho Desk

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 →

Zoho Desk

One of the cheapest real help desks you can buy — and the wrong product in Zoho's own catalog for a district that needs to track devices.

Pricing: Per-user, per-month, billed annually: Free for three agents on email ticketing, Express $7, Standard $14, Professional $23, Enterprise $40, with a 15-day trial on any plan. Zoho says annual billing saves up to 34% against monthly, but does not publish the monthly rates. Two cautions. The pricing page geolocates, so the currency and figures you see depend on where you are — the dollar figures above come from Zoho's own comparison pages. And the tier gating is where the real cost sits: the knowledge base starts at Standard, Zia AI and multi-department at Professional, and live chat only at Enterprise. For a district this is genuinely inexpensive — four technicians on Professional is a rounding error in an IT budget, and requesters are free. Chalk's argument here is not price.

Where Zoho Desk is strong

  • The lowest published entry price of any mature help desk here, with a permanently free three-agent tier and no trial clock on it.
  • Broad channel coverage for the money — email, web forms, self-service help center, community forums, instant messaging including WhatsApp, social, telephony, and live chat at the top tier.
  • Blueprints, Zoho's visual process builder, let a small team encode a real approval or escalation flow without code — a genuinely strong feature at this price.
  • Zia AI for sentiment, tagging, and reply assistance, plus 30-plus built-in reports and 10-plus dashboards out of the box.
  • A well-documented REST API, an extensions framework, and mobile apps for agents; Zoho claims integration with 360-plus applications.
  • Ten regional data centers with residency chosen at signup, which is a real answer for a district with a data-location clause in board policy.

What to check before you buy

  • Zoho Desk has no IT asset management, no device inventory, and no CMDB. It is customer-service software; the only inventory-adjacent integration is Zoho Inventory, a commerce stock product for sales orders and shipments.

    Basis: Zoho's Desk features and integrations pages contain no ITAM, inventory, or CMDB capability; Zoho Inventory is listed as a separate commerce application.

  • The IT product from Zoho Corporation is ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, sold by a different division with its own pricing and its own on-premises option. Buying Zoho Desk for a district IT department means buying the customer-service half of the catalog.

    Basis: ManageEngine describes itself as 'the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corp'; ServiceDesk Plus combines ITSM, ITAM, and CMDB and is available on-premises and in the cloud.

  • No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward — and no student, guardian, or family data model. The entities are contacts, accounts, and tickets.

    Basis: Zoho Desk's published integrations page lists Zoho apps, telephony partners, and general business tools only, with no SIS among them. Verified against the published integrations page rather than an exhaustive crawl of the extension marketplace.

  • No 1:1 device custody of any kind: no check-out to a student, no due dates, no overdue handling, no parent-signed agreement, no loaner pool, no lost or stolen lifecycle, and no damage fees.

    Basis: Absent from every Zoho Desk feature page; the product has no asset primitive to attach custody to.

  • The features districts assume are standard sit several tiers up. Knowledge base requires Standard, multi-department and Zia require Professional, and live chat requires Enterprise at $40.

    Basis: Zoho's published plan comparison on the Desk pricing page.

  • No education page and no published education discount for Zoho Desk. Zoho's nonprofit program exists but its eligibility is written around trusts, societies, and registered nonprofits rather than public school districts.

    Basis: The URL a district would expect for a Zoho Desk education page returns 404, and the nonprofit program page does not list educational institutions among qualifying organizations. Do not read this as 'no US program exists' — read it as nothing published that names schools.

  • Zoho Desk is not an identity provider. Single sign-on for third-party applications comes from Zoho Directory, a separate product with its own tiers, whose free plan covers three applications.

    Basis: Zoho Directory is marketed and priced separately as a workforce identity and access management platform; Zoho Desk's own material describes no IdP capability.

  • Cloud-only. There is no on-premises Zoho Desk, which is a sharper contrast than usual because the same parent company does ship an on-premises service desk under the ManageEngine brand.

    Basis: No on-premises edition appears on any Zoho Desk page; ManageEngine's ServiceDesk Plus page advertises on-premises deployment explicitly.

How Chalk compares with Zoho Desk →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing AssetTiger against Zoho Desk, 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.
Chalk vs AssetTiger → Chalk vs Zoho Desk →

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.

See pricing Self-host on GitHub