GLPI vs Jira Service Management

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 →

Jira Service Management

The most capable ITSM platform a district can actually afford — Atlassian gives K-12 a 50% academic discount — but self-hosting has closed to new customers, and its CMDB is an empty box you have to model yourself.

Where Jira Service Management is strong

• ● The deepest ITIL process set of anything on this page: incident, problem, change, and request management, service catalog, approvals, SLAs, on-call schedules and alert routing, and deployment gating tied to CI/CD.
• ● A real academic discount that names K-12 districts and boards of education — 50% off Jira Service Management on Cloud, 75% off Confluence, and Atlassian Guard free.
• ● The Free plan is genuinely usable for a small shop: three agents, unlimited customers, and an embedded knowledge base included, with no trial clock.
• ● Assets is included from Standard upward with 5,000 objects, rising to 50,000 on Premium, plus basic network discovery on Premium and 30-plus import adapters.
• ● An enormous marketplace and an excellent API, so almost any workflow you can describe can be built — by you, by a partner, or by an app someone already wrote.
• ● Atlassian is not going anywhere, and if your district already runs Jira for other departments the service desk shares the same platform, permissions, and automation engine.

What to check before you buy

• You can no longer buy self-hosted. Atlassian closed Data Center to new customers on 30 March 2026, stops selling expansions to existing customers in 2028, and takes Data Center read-only at end of life on 28 March 2029.

  Basis: Atlassian's own Data Center end-of-life page states each of those dates and defines new customers as organizations that never owned paid Data Center seats before 30 March 2026.

• Assets is a flexible CMDB, not an ITAM product. It ships empty — you author the object schemas, types, and attributes yourself before it holds a single Chromebook, and Atlassian's own copy jokes that it can model 'people records? Fish?'

  Basis: Atlassian's asset and configuration management feature page describes it in exactly those terms; discovery is IP-network scanning, listed as a Premium addition.

• No device custody as a product concept — no check-out to a named student, no due date, no overdue list, no parent-signed agreement, no loaner pool, no lost or stolen lifecycle, and no damage fees. You would model all of it yourself in objects and workflows.

  Basis: None of those terms appear on the Assets feature page; ownership is an attribute you define, not a transaction the product understands.

• No SIS or rostering integration exists. Marketplace searches for ClassLink and Skyward return zero results, and searches for OneRoster, PowerSchool, and Infinite Campus return only unrelated token matches.

  Basis: Queried directly against the Atlassian Marketplace REST API. Atlassian also publishes no education vertical page — /solutions/education and /industries/education both 404.

• No student, guardian, or family concepts. The only end-user primitive is 'customer,' an unlicensed requester. There is no enrollment, no grade, no guardian relationship, and nothing that notices a mid-year transfer.

  Basis: Atlassian's pricing and feature documentation define customers as unlicensed users who can raise requests; no education-specific data model exists.

• Change management — the single capability districts most often cite as the reason to choose JSM — sits on Premium, at roughly two and a half times the Standard rate.

  Basis: Atlassian's plan comparison lists change management, advanced incident and problem management, the virtual service agent, and asset discovery as Premium additions.

• SAML SSO is a separate purchase. Enforced SSO, SCIM provisioning, and password policies come from Atlassian Guard, priced per user across your whole Atlassian estate — not per agent.

  Basis: Atlassian's JSM pricing FAQ states SAML SSO is enabled 'with a subscription to Atlassian Guard.' Guard Standard is $4.20 per user per month, bundled into Enterprise, and free under the academic program — so for a qualifying district the cost is nil, but it is still a second product to apply for and administer.

• Two metered dimensions make the bill non-deterministic: Assets objects past the plan allowance and virtual-agent conversations past 1,000 a month. A district that models every Chromebook, charger, and hotspot as an object should count objects before signing.

  Basis: Atlassian's pricing page publishes $0.02 per object per month and $0.30 per conversation over allowance.

How Chalk compares with Jira Service Management →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing GLPI against Jira Service Management, 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.