GLPI vs HappyFox Help Desk

GLPI

The one product in this comparison that shares Chalk's whole premise — free, open source, self-hostable, with a real ITIL service desk attached to a real asset inventory — and none of its K-12 model.

Where GLPI is strong

• ● Genuinely free and genuinely open: GPL-3.0 on GitHub, downloadable and self-hostable with no license fee, no crippled community edition, and two decades of production use behind it.
• ● A full ITIL service desk — tickets, problems and changes, with planning, statistics and dashboards — sitting on the same database as the asset inventory rather than integrated with it.
• ● Very broad inventory coverage: computers, monitors, software, network equipment, printers, phones, cartridges, consumables, SIM cards, cables, PDUs and datacenter infrastructure, plus a CMDB over the relationships between them.
• ● Financial management most asset trackers do not attempt — budgets, contracts, suppliers and license tracking as first-class objects, so the cost side of the estate lives with the asset side.
• ● GLPI Agent does automated inventory across platforms, so hardware and software data arrives without anyone typing serial numbers.
• ● A multi-entity model with granular profiles and access control that maps naturally onto a district of many schools, plus a large plugin ecosystem — and both deployment shapes are real and priced openly, self-hosted or hosted GLPI Network at a published per-user rate.

What to check before you buy

• The free download and the product Teclib' sells are not the same surface. OAuth SSO, SCIM, GLPI AI, the advanced dashboard and whole tiers of official plugins are bundled into paid GLPI Network subscriptions.

  Basis: Vendor pricing page lists these as contents of the Basic, Standard and Advanced subscription tiers.

• Self-hosted support starts at €100 per month even for a small installation, and the meter is IT agents — the technicians who answer tickets — with tiers stepping to €300, €1,000 and €4,500 per month.

  Basis: Vendor pricing page, self-hosted subscription tiers with per-tier agent limits.

• It is a general ITIL tool with no K-12 model: no student, guardian or enrollment concepts, and no SIS or rostering connectors — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus or Skyward. Students arrive by import.

  Basis: Absent from GLPI's published feature set, which describes users, groups and entities rather than students.

• No 1:1 circulation machinery. GLPI can reserve and assign equipment, but there is no student device agreement, no parent e-signature, no overdue on a school-year loan, no damage fee and no family balance.

  Basis: Absent from the vendor's documented modules, which cover assets, helpdesk, CMDB and financial management.

• No ChromeOS story. Inventory comes from GLPI Agent and network scanning; Google Admin, Intune and Jamf ingest are plugin or integration territory rather than documented core modules, and there is no ChromeOS AUE surface.

  Basis: Core inventory is documented as GLPI Agent-driven; no first-party MDM connector appears in the published feature list.

• It is not an identity provider. GLPI authenticates against directories and external providers — and OAuth SSO is itself a subscription plugin — rather than issuing SAML or OIDC to your other vendors.

  Basis: Vendor pricing page lists OAuth SSO and SCIM as plugins included with paid subscriptions, positioning GLPI as the consumer of identity.

• Self-hosting GLPI is a PHP and database deployment plus agent rollout that you patch and upgrade yourself, unless you buy a subscription or engage a partner. That is a real operations line, not a download.

  Basis: GLPI is distributed as a PHP application released on GitHub with a separately versioned GLPI Agent; the vendor routes implementation through its partner network.

• Pricing, documentation and support are anchored to a European vendor and priced in euros, so a US district is usually buying implementation through a partner rather than from the vendor directly.

  Basis: Vendor site publishes euro pricing and directs implementation to its Platinum Partner network.

How Chalk compares with GLPI →

HappyFox Help Desk

A polished multi-channel help desk sold per agent, with a genuine education landing page and Google Endpoint and Jamf integrations — but the vendor says plainly it is the service layer, not an SIS or an MDM.

Where HappyFox Help Desk is strong

• ● A mature, well-designed ticketing product with the full table stakes done properly: email-to-ticket, self-service portal, knowledge base, SLAs, canned responses, automation rules, and reporting.
• ● Real multi-department structure — IT, Facilities, HR, and Student Services can hold separate queues with routing by campus and issue type while leadership keeps one view across them.
• ● Integrations with Google Endpoint Management and Jamf that attach device data to a ticket, so a technician sees the machine alongside the request.
• ● An unlimited-agent pricing model as an alternative to per-seat, which is unusual and genuinely useful for a district where lots of people touch tickets occasionally.
• ● Named K-12 and higher-ed deployments on the vendor's education page, including a district handling 25,000+ tickets a year — this is not a corporate tool with an education stock photo bolted on.
• ● Asset management exists in the HappyFox product family, tracking assets across IT, facilities, and HR from procurement to retirement.

What to check before you buy

• Hosted SaaS only. There is no self-hosted or on-premises edition, so the software cannot be run on district infrastructure or inspected independently.

  Basis: HappyFox publishes only cloud plans; no self-host or source distribution appears anywhere on the vendor site.

• Asset management is documented as a HappyFox Service Desk feature, and on the help desk side asset tracking lands on the higher-priced tier rather than the entry plan — so the districts most likely to be price-sensitive are the ones who do not get it.

  Basis: HappyFox's asset management feature page is published under Service Desk; the vendor's pricing announcement puts the top per-agent tier at $99 per agent.

• Per-agent pricing is the wrong axis for a district. A K-12 IT shop has a handful of technicians and tens of thousands of devices, so the bill is set by the number you have least of while the number you have most of goes untracked.

  Basis: Vendor pricing is stated as a monthly price per support agent actively managing tickets.

• The vendor states directly that HappyFox is the service layer and not an SIS or MDM replacement. Device and roster truth has to live somewhere else, and you maintain the seam between the two systems.

  Basis: Stated in those terms on HappyFox's education solutions page.

• No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward. Users arrive from a directory, not from the system of record, so a mid-year transfer or withdrawal is invisible.

  Basis: None appear on HappyFox's education page, integrations listing, or pricing page.

• No 1:1 device circulation: no check-out to a student with a due date, no overdue workflow, no parent-signed agreement, no loaner pool, and no lost or stolen lifecycle.

  Basis: Absent from the published asset management feature page, which is framed around lifecycle from procurement to retirement rather than custody.

• No student fee assessment, no family balances, no purchase orders, no repair records consuming parts stock, and no funding-source tracking for ESSER, Title, or E-Rate money.

  Basis: None of these concepts appear in HappyFox's published product documentation.

• It consumes SSO but is not an identity provider — it cannot issue SAML or OIDC to your other vendors, and it cannot give students a portal identity.

  Basis: SSO is described as sign-in into HappyFox; no IdP capability is published.

How Chalk compares with HappyFox Help Desk →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing GLPI against HappyFox Help 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.