Open source IT asset inventory

The key facts

• The job: a register of IT assets — serials, assignments, locations, licences, lifecycle state — kept current by discovery or discipline.
• Open source is the standard here: asset-tracking projects are mature and widely run by IT teams who could afford alternatives.
• The ownership cost: hosting, patching, backups, and a named person who reconciles discovery with reality.
• BSimple's boundary: we manage business stock for businesses that sell products — not IT estates. No asset-register features, stated plainly.

What open source IT asset tools do well

The asset-register projects in open source are among the category's genuine successes: serial and licence registers, check-in/check-out to staff, location and state tracking, barcode labels, CSV import of an existing estate, and reporting that answers the audits — what do we own, who has it, what is due for refresh. Network discovery tools complement them by sweeping devices automatically. For an IT team, the free licence plus mature workflows is hard to argue against, and the commercial alternatives in this aisle justify themselves mainly at enterprise scale: agent fleets, automated licence reconciliation, integrated procurement.

The trade is the same one all self-hosted open source makes: the licence is free and the operation is yours. Hosting with tested backups, version upgrades, security patches, and — the one that actually decides success — a named person reconciling the register against reality each month. An asset register nobody owns is not free; it is a snapshot of a past moment, aging quietly.

Choosing within the open-source aisle

• Match the tool to the asset kind: hardware registers, network discovery and licence tracking are different jobs — pick the one whose default shape is closest to yours.
• Count the estate honestly: a tool that is excellent at two hundred laptops may be ceremony at twenty; a spreadsheet with discipline can be the correct answer below that.
• Name the owner before choosing the tool: the reconciliation habit matters more than the feature list.
• Plan the exit: export formats and data access are the open-source promise — verify them in the first week, not the last.

Free computer-hardware tracking, network inventory in open source and free network inventory software cover this aisle corner by corner, and the open-source discussion summary adds the practitioner view.

Why BSimple is not on this list — plainly

We build BSimple, and it is business management software: one record of stock, orders, purchasing and invoicing for businesses that sell products — not a register of assets they maintain. There is no check-in/check-out for staff laptops, no licence tracking, no network discovery, and we would rather draw the boundary than stretch a feature list. It is also not open source: cloud, from $180/month AUD, with a full-product trial.

Where the two worlds genuinely touch: a business that sells IT hardware — resellers, distributors, refurbishers — runs exactly the record BSimple keeps, with quantities, suppliers, batches and invoices. The computer-hardware inventory page covers the selling side, and the inventory management pillar the whole record; the free and open-source comparison covers the software-ownership trade in full.