GLPI vs osTicket

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 →

osTicket

The open-source ticketing system a lot of school districts already quietly run — GPL2, free, self-hosted on a LAMP stack, and very good at tickets. The comparison with Chalk is about scope, not cost.

Where osTicket is strong

• ● Genuinely free and genuinely open source under GPL2 — no seat cap, no ticket cap, no trial clock, and the source is yours to read, patch, and keep running.
• ● One of the longest-running and most widely deployed ticketing systems anywhere, which means a large body of community documentation, forum answers, and people who have solved your problem already.
• ● A deep, well-worn ticketing core: custom fields and forms, custom columns and queues, ticket filters and routing, help topics, SLA plans, agent collision avoidance, assign/transfer/referral, auto-responders, internal tasks, and advanced search with CSV export.
• ● A customer portal and knowledge base for self-service, so end users can check status and find answers without opening a ticket.
• ● An official OAuth2 plugin covering Microsoft, Google, and Okta sign-in for both agents and end users, plus modern OAuth email authentication for system mailboxes — which matters now that basic auth is gone from Microsoft and Google mail.
• ● A working plugin surface and developer documentation: S3 attachment storage, audit logging, two-factor authentication, password policies, an API, and published database ERDs.

What to check before you buy

• No asset or inventory management at all. osTicket is a ticketing system — there is no device record, so a ticket cannot tell you which machine the student is holding, what its serial is, or whether it is under warranty.

  Basis: Asset and inventory management appear nowhere in osTicket's feature list or documentation index.

• 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 — and no native mobile app or barcode scanning to run a rollout or an audit with.

  Basis: There is no asset model in the product for these workflows to attach to, and the documentation has no mobile application section.

• No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward — and no student, guardian, or enrollment concepts. Users are created by sign-in or import, not sourced from the system of record.

  Basis: No SIS connector exists in osTicket's plugin set or documentation.

• No ChromeOS, Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf ingest, so nothing reconciles anything against what the fleet actually reports.

  Basis: No MDM connector appears in the plugin listing or documentation.

• No repairs with parts stock, no student fee assessment or family balances, no purchase orders, no warranty tracking, and no funding-source reporting for ESSER, Title, or E-Rate money.

  Basis: All absent from the published feature list and documentation.

• SSO is consumed, not issued, and SAML is not covered by an official plugin — the supported providers are Microsoft, Google, and Okta over OAuth2, with SAML available only through an unofficial community plugin on GitHub.

  Basis: osTicket's OAuth2 documentation names Microsoft, Google, and Okta; the SAML plugin in circulation is a third-party repository, not a vendor-maintained one.

• Reporting is thin. There is a dashboard tab, but no reporting or analytics section in the documentation, so trend reporting past ticket exports usually means querying MySQL yourself.

  Basis: The documentation index has no dedicated reporting or analytics section.

• You operate a LAMP stack, not an application. PHP 8.2–8.4 plus MySQL plus a web server means patching three moving parts, and a PHP major-version bump is a real upgrade project rather than replacing one file.

  Basis: Requirements published on osTicket's download page and repository.

How Chalk compares with osTicket →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing GLPI against osTicket, 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.