Mojo Helpdesk vs Snipe-IT

Mojo Helpdesk

A simple, inexpensive per-agent help desk with a real K-12 following, a light asset module with check-in/check-out, and a deliberate pitch that you can go live in days because it does not depend on your SIS.

Where Mojo Helpdesk is strong

• ● The lowest published per-agent entry price on most K-12 help-desk shortlists, with the numbers on the page rather than behind a demo request.
• ● An explicit 25% education and non-profit discount, published as a percentage you can actually compute against.
• ● A genuine asset module included with the help desk rather than sold as a separate product: laptops, tablets, servers, and software licenses, with repairs and incidents logged against each item.
• ● Check-in and check-out with return due dates and automated reminders, plus a live view of what is out and what is overdue — closer to a circulation desk than most generic ticketing tools get.
• ● Warranty and license contract expiry tracking with renewal reminders ahead of the date.
• ● Broad sign-in support for districts: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ClassLink, Active Directory, LDAP, and other SAML providers, with staff and department import from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

What to check before you buy

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

  Basis: Only cloud plans appear on the vendor's pricing page; no self-host or source distribution is published.

• Per-agent pricing with hard agent caps per plan. A district with a handful of technicians and tens of thousands of devices pays on the axis it has least of, and growing past 25 agents forces a tier change.

  Basis: Vendor pricing page states $14/$24/$34 per agent per month with 25-agent and 100-agent maximums on the lower two plans.

• The education discount is narrower than it first reads: 25% applies only to Business and Enterprise yearly subscriptions, not to the entry Team plan, and the vendor states discounts do not stack.

  Basis: Stated in those terms on Mojo Helpdesk's pricing page.

• No SIS or rostering connector. Mojo markets 'no SIS dependency' as a launch advantage, which is honest positioning but means students, enrollments, and mid-year transfers are not sourced from the system of record.

  Basis: Mojo's education page names Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ClassLink, AD, LDAP, and SAML for sign-in and user import, and no SIS vendor connector; the K-12 pages present rapid launch without SIS as a benefit.

• The asset module is a light inventory with custody attached, not a 1:1 program: no parent-signed device agreement, no loaner pool as a managed concept, no lost or stolen lifecycle with police report, and no attestation campaign.

  Basis: Absent from Mojo's published asset management page, which covers tracking, check-out with due dates, and renewal reminders.

• No MDM ingest and no documented barcode or QR scanning. Device records are maintained inside Mojo rather than reconciled against Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf, and an August rollout or spring audit measured in thousands of devices has to be typed rather than scanned.

  Basis: No Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf device-sync connector is published on the vendor site, and no scanning capability appears on the asset management page.

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

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

• It consumes SSO but is not an identity provider — it signs users in from Google, Microsoft, ClassLink, or a SAML source rather than issuing SAML or OIDC to your other vendors.

  Basis: SSO is described throughout as sign-in into Mojo from a district's existing provider.

How Chalk compares with Mojo Helpdesk →

Snipe-IT

A mature, genuinely free open-source IT asset manager — it tracks the Chromebook well, but it has no help desk, no roster, and no idea which student is holding it.

Where Snipe-IT is strong

• ● Genuinely free to self-host, AGPL-3.0, with no crippled community edition and no per-asset or per-seat meter at any tier.
• ● Publishes every hosted price openly with no 'contact sales' gate — rare enough in K-12 procurement that it deserves saying out loud.
• ● Over a decade of production asset tracking behind it, with releases every few weeks and a very large install base.
• ● Real identity plumbing for an asset tracker: SAML login, LDAP and Google Secure LDAP user sync, and SCIM auto-provisioning.
• ● Genuine asset-lifecycle depth — checkout/checkin with optional acceptance, asset history, audits, custom fields, requestable assets, and three documented depreciation methods.
• ● Tracks more than hardware: components, consumables, accessories, and software licenses with expiring-license and expiring-warranty email alerts.

What to check before you buy

• No help desk or ticketing of any kind. A district running Snipe-IT still buys a service desk somewhere else, and the two systems never see each other.

  Basis: Absent from the vendor's product page; the feature request on the project's issue tracker has been open since 2015, and the documented answer is to integrate an external tool such as osTicket or Zendesk.

• No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward. Students arrive by CSV, usually exported by hand each August.

  Basis: None of these appear anywhere in Snipe-IT's product page or documentation.

• No student, guardian, or family concepts. Everyone is a 'user' with a free-text field, so a device cannot know the student's school, grade, or enrollment, and a transfer or withdrawal is invisible to the system.

  Basis: Snipe-IT's data model has users, not students; no guardian or enrollment entity exists in the documentation.

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

  Basis: Snipe-IT's SAML documentation describes it exclusively as a service provider consuming Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta, OneLogin, or JumpCloud.

• No purchase orders, and no funding-source or grant tracking. There is a purchase-order-number text field, but nothing that would let you answer which devices ESSER, Title, or E-Rate paid for.

  Basis: Only an order-number field appears in the docs; purchase orders are a long-standing open feature request, and no funding-source concept exists.

• Consumables and components exist, and maintenance records exist, but they are not linked — you cannot consume a part out of stock against a specific repair.

  Basis: No documented linkage between the consumables and asset-maintenance features.

• No native mobile app and no camera scanning from the vendor. The web UI is mobile-friendly and works with handheld scanners; every native scanning app is a third-party API client the project explicitly does not support.

  Basis: Vendor documentation states third-party projects are unsupported and to use them at your own risk.

• No MDM ingest at all — nothing pulls from Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf, and nothing writes back. The vendor confirms there is no network agent and points at the REST API instead.

  Basis: Snipe-IT's FAQ: 'We don't currently provide a network agent, however we do have a robust REST API that can be integrated with agents if you know a little programming.'

How Chalk compares with Snipe-IT →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing Mojo Helpdesk against Snipe-IT, 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.