GLPI vs SysAid

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 →

SysAid

A capable ITSM suite with real asset discovery and a working Chromebook sync — priced at $89 per agent, positioned at universities rather than districts, and quietly steering its on-premises line toward the exit.

Where SysAid is strong

• ● A full ITSM process set for the price: incident, request, problem, and change management, SLAs, a self-service portal, knowledge base, workflow automation, dashboards, and a developer API.
• ● Genuine IT asset management, not a bolt-on — automatic network discovery, hardware and software inventory, a CMDB with configuration-item relationship mapping, software license management with renewal reminders, patch deployment, and remote control through Splashtop.
• ● A real Chromebook integration that pulls from Google Workspace: model, serial, Chrome version, enrollment time, warranty expiry, asset ID, organizational unit, policy sync status, and CPU, memory, and disk. Most general-purpose help desks have nothing like it.
• ● SysAid Copilot is included in the published tier rather than sold as a per-agent add-on, covering both agent assistance and an end-user chatbot grounded on your tickets, knowledge base, and documents.
• ● Strong independent review standing — 4.5 out of 5 across 522 Capterra reviews, with automation, integrated asset management, and responsive support named repeatedly as strengths.
• ● SysAid handled its 2023 zero-day well: it learned of the issue on 2 November, published an advisory with indicators of compromise on 8 November, and shipped a fixed release. That is the behavior you want from a vendor.

What to check before you buy

• 250 managed assets are included at $89 per agent. A 1:1 district counts devices in the thousands, so the fleet becomes a negotiated line item immediately — the one axis a district has most of.

  Basis: SysAid's pricing page lists 'Managed assets (250 included)' under the Professional plan, with no published rate for additional assets.

• The education positioning is higher education, not K-12. The customer logos on both education pages are universities, and the claims are framed around students, faculty, and campus asset variety.

  Basis: SysAid's higher-education and service-desk-for-education pages name University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Queen's University, and University of West London. Neither page mentions school districts.

• No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward — and no student or guardian data model. Identity sync is enterprise-shaped: Entra, Google Workspace, Okta, ADFS, CAS, Shibboleth, OneLogin.

  Basis: None appear on either education page or in SysAid's integration catalog; the user repositories SysAid documents are corporate directories.

• The Chromebook integration reads, it does not write, and its user handling is shallow — it maps the most recent recent-user into an Owner field. There is no OU move, no disable, no deprovision, and no annotated-field write-back.

  Basis: SysAid's own Chromebook documentation describes a one-way pull from Google Workspace inventory and the recent-user-to-Owner mapping; the catalog entry is titled Chromebook (Beta).

• No device check-out to a person as a transaction. Ownership is a synced field, not a custody event, so there are no due dates, no overdue list, no parent-signed agreement, no loaner pool, no lost or stolen lifecycle, and no damage fees.

  Basis: None of those concepts appear anywhere in SysAid's asset management documentation or marketing.

• On-premises is no longer marketed, and its feature set is visibly thinner. SysAid's own cloud-versus-on-premises comparison documents no Teams integration, no Power BI extract, no Zapier, no SSO connector, no sandbox, and mobile at extra cost — with releases two to three times a year against fortnightly on cloud.

  Basis: SysAid's published cloud-vs-on-prem comparison PDF; its on-premises plan URL now redirects to cloud pricing. We could not verify whether a new on-premises license can still be purchased — treat it as unmarketed rather than proven discontinued.

• That matters because the security history sits on the self-hosted line, where SysAid's own document says security updates are manual and performed by the customer. CVE-2023-47246 was a critical remote-code-execution flaw in SysAid On-Premise, exploited in the wild and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog; three XXE flaws in 2025 followed, two of which also reached that catalog.

  Basis: NVD entries for CVE-2023-47246 and CVE-2025-2775, CISA KEV listings, SysAid's own advisory, and Rapid7's analysis. Fair reading: SysAid patched each promptly, and security press reports no public exploitation of the 2025 XXE issues — the durable point is patch cadence and who is responsible for applying it, not that the product is insecure.

• Recurring review themes are consistent: an interface described as dated and not very intuitive, configuration of advanced automation that is time-consuming for new administrators, and built-in reporting that most reviewers end up customizing.

  Basis: Capterra's aggregated review themes across 522 SysAid reviews. G2, TrustRadius, and Gartner Peer Insights block automated reading, so no rating from those sites is cited here.

How Chalk compares with SysAid →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing GLPI against SysAid, 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.