Comparison
osTicket vs Sortly
Two tools districts shortlist for device tracking and IT operations, compared the way a buying committee actually reads them: what each is, what each does well, and what to check before signing. We build Chalk, a third option in this space — that context is worth knowing as you read, and it is why every claim below carries its basis.
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.
Sortly
The friendliest inventory app in this comparison and the easiest to actually start using — built for supply closets and job sites, priced by how many items you have, which is exactly the wrong meter for a 1:1 fleet.
Where Sortly is strong
- Every price is on the page, including a genuinely free tier, with no demo gate anywhere in the funnel.
- The lowest adoption cost in this comparison by a distance: folders, tags, photos and custom fields, usable by a building secretary in an afternoon without an IT project behind it.
- Strong mobile — iOS and Android with offline access, barcode and QR scanning, and label generation from inside the same app, so counting is a phone job rather than a scanner-hardware purchase.
- Alerting that fits consumables well: low stock alerts for reordering and date-based alerts for maintenance and repair schedules, with in-app and email notification.
- More reporting than the price suggests — activity history, inventory summaries, user activity, low stock and item-flow reports, saved custom reports, and report subscriptions delivered on a schedule.
- Real integration surface for a product this simple: webhooks, an API, QuickBooks Online, and Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications, plus purchase orders, pick lists, and check-in and check-out.
What to check before you buy
Pricing meters unique items, and a 1:1 district's item count is its student count. At 5,000 items the published tier is $299 per month, and anything past 10,000 items is Enterprise quote-only — a mid-sized district is off the published ladder on device count alone.
Basis: Vendor pricing page item limits: 100 free, 500 Advanced, 2,000 Ultra, 5,000 Premium, 10,000+ Enterprise.
User licenses are metered too, and tightly: 1 user free, 2 on Advanced, 5 on Ultra, 8 on Premium. A technician team plus building staff crosses into Enterprise quickly.
Basis: Vendor pricing page user-license limits per tier.
No help desk or ticketing of any kind. A district running Sortly still buys a service desk somewhere else, and the two never see each other.
Basis: Absent from the vendor's published feature list, which covers inventory, alerts, reporting and integrations.
No MDM or device integrations at all. The published integration list is QuickBooks Online, Slack, Microsoft Teams, webhooks and an API — so ChromeOS, Intune and Jamf data is typed or imported, and serials go stale between imports.
Basis: Vendor features page lists no device-management or directory connectors.
No SIS or rostering integration and no student, guardian or enrollment concepts — nothing notices a transfer, a withdrawal or grade rollover.
Basis: Absent from the vendor's feature list and from its industry positioning, which addresses inventory rather than student records.
Check-in and check-out is item custody, not a school-year loan: no due dates on a student device agreement, no e-signature, no damage fee, no family balance and no loaner pool workflow.
Basis: Vendor documents check-in/check-out alongside pick lists and stock tracking, with no agreement or fee concepts published.
It is an inventory product rather than an IT asset lifecycle product — warranty expiry, depreciation, ChromeOS auto-update expiration and refresh planning are not in the published feature set, though generic date-based alerts can approximate some of it.
Basis: Vendor features page covers custom fields, alerts and reports; no warranty, depreciation or lifecycle module is published.
Hosted SaaS only, with no self-hosted option, and no SSO or SAML in the published feature list — so it sits outside your single sign-on estate in both directions.
Basis: No self-host or source distribution is offered on the vendor site, and SSO does not appear on the features or pricing pages.
The third option: Chalk
If you are weighing osTicket against Sortly, 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.
See all three on your own roster.
Chalk installs to a populated inventory in about 30 minutes. Self-host free under AGPL-3.0, or let us run it — priced by fleet size, never per seat.