Snipe-IT Is Free — And It Is Not a Fixed-Asset Register. The Difference Costs People Months.
Most asset software tracks who has the laptop. A fixed-asset register computes depreciation, book value and disposal gain. They are different products and buyers routinely choose the wrong one. Here is the line, drawn clearly.
There are two completely different products that both call themselves "asset management," and choosing the wrong one is the most common expensive mistake in this category.
Product A tracks custody. Who has the laptop, when is it due back, which licences are assigned to whom. Snipe-IT is the category-defining free option here, it is genuinely excellent, and if this is your problem you should stop reading and go install it.
Product B tracks value. What did it cost, what is it worth now, how much depreciation has accumulated, what was the gain or loss when you sold it. This is an accounting artefact. Your accountant asks for it once a year and a custody tracker cannot produce it.
Most articles blur these together. This one does not, because the blur is the problem.
Snipe-IT, credited properly
Snipe-IT is free under AGPL-3.0 with no restrictions on users, assets or functionality — custom fields, barcode generation, licence management, API access, LDAP/SAML integration. Every search we ran on 1 August 2026 for a self-hosted Asset Panda alternative returned it as the leading answer, one of them calling it "the clear pick."
If you need to know who has the MacBook, Snipe-IT is free, mature, and better than anything anyone will sell you. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it does not do is produce a depreciation schedule your accountant can use. That is not a criticism — it is not what it is for.
The other product: a fixed-asset register
This is the one that answers:
- What is the book value of this asset as at 31 March?
- How much depreciation has accumulated, and how much falls in this financial year?
- We sold the van for £4,000 — what is the gain or loss on disposal?
- Show me the whole schedule, per asset, as a document I can hand to an auditor.
For most small businesses, the answer to all four is currently a spreadsheet somebody built in 2021 that nobody fully understands. And spreadsheets have a specific, well-known failure here: depreciation arithmetic that does not close.
Why the arithmetic is harder than it looks
Straight-line depreciation looks trivial: cost minus salvage, divided by useful life. It is trivial — until the division does not come out evenly, which is most of the time.
Spread £10,000 over 3 years and each period is £3,333.33 — three of which is £9,999.99. Your accumulated depreciation is a penny short of the value you were supposed to write off. Repeat that across forty assets and the register no longer reconciles to the accounts.
The fix is not rounding differently. It is deciding, deliberately, where the remainder goes.
Assetora — a self-hosted fixed-asset and depreciation register, $39.00 one time (product page, read 2026-08-01) — states its answer explicitly:
"Every figure is stored and computed in integer cents — floats never touch a value. Straight-line absorbs the rounding remainder in the final period so accumulated depreciation lands exactly on cost minus salvage."
That sentence is the product. Not the feature list — the decision about where the penny goes, made once, consistently, and documented. It is exactly the decision a spreadsheet leaves to whoever last edited the formula.
And it covers reducing-balance as well as straight-line, with book value as at any date, and disposals with gain or loss — which is the calculation people most often get wrong by hand, because it depends on accumulated depreciation being right at the moment of sale.
What the hosted options cost
AssetTiger — from its pricing page (read 2026-07-21):
*"FREE / for 250 Assets"** — "no per-user charges", with paid tiers from about $20 to $275 per month by asset count.
Note the pricing unit: per ASSET, not per seat and not per site. That is a third model, and it suits organisations with many staff and modest asset counts. A free tier at 250 assets is a genuinely good offer for a small business — say so out loud, because most comparison pages will not.
Asset Panda — from Asset Panda’s own pricing page (read 2026-07-21): no public price. Our ledger records it plainly: "the pricing page displays no plan prices — demo and quote CTAs only."
Third-party comparison sites publish specific annual figures for Asset Panda. We are not repeating them, because the vendor's own page contains no such number. A price that exists only on someone else's website is not a price you can rely on in a budget.
The comparison that actually matters
| Snipe-IT | AssetTiger | Asset Panda | Assetora | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custody / check-out | ✅ best in class | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Barcode / scanning | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Depreciation schedule | ❌ | partial | ✅ | ✅ |
| Book value at any date | ❌ | partial | ✅ | ✅ |
| Disposal gain/loss | ❌ | partial | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cost | free | free ≤250 assets, then $20–$275/mo | unpublished | $39 once |
| Deployment | self-host (Docker) | hosted | hosted | self-host (shared hosting) |
Read the top three rows and the bottom three rows as two different products, because they are.
Choosing
Snipe-IT — you need custody tracking, you can run Docker, and depreciation is somebody else's spreadsheet. Free, and the right answer for most IT teams.
AssetTiger — you want hosted, have under 250 assets, and want zero server responsibility. The free tier is real; use it.
Asset Panda — you need one platform doing custody and accounting at scale, and a procurement process that tolerates a quote. Ask for the price in the first email.
Assetora — you need the accounting artefact: a depreciation register that closes to the cent, produces book value at a date, handles disposals, and exports a PDF or CSV your accountant will accept. Your realistic alternative is a spreadsheet, and the failure you are trying to prevent is a schedule that does not reconcile.
And the honest combination nobody sells: many organisations should run Snipe-IT for custody and a separate register for depreciation. They answer different questions to different audiences — IT and finance — and forcing one tool to do both is how you end up with an expensive platform that neither team likes.
The limitations, stated
"Is Assetora tax or accounting advice?" — "No. It records the assets and depreciation settings you enter and computes the schedule from them — but the methods, rates, useful lives, and salvage values are yours to set and confirm with your accountant."
That matters more here than in most categories. Depreciation methods and useful lives are set by your jurisdiction's tax rules and your accounting policy. The software does the arithmetic; it does not know what your regulator permits. Anyone selling you compliance in this category is overselling.
"Does it move money or connect to my bank?" — "No — it moves no money and integrates no bank, payment gateway, or general ledger."
No general-ledger integration means the depreciation journal is a manual entry. For most small businesses that is one entry a month or a year, and acceptable. If you need it posting automatically into your accounts, this is not the tool.
The honest costs of self-hosting
Backups are the register. A fixed-asset register is a multi-year record — losing it means reconstructing years of depreciation from purchase invoices. Test a restore before you rely on it.
No custody, no scanning. Covered above. If you need those, you need a second tool or a different one.
Hosting. "SQLite for a zero-config trial, MySQL/MariaDB for production on ordinary shared hosting." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
"Asset management" names two products. One tracks who has the laptop; the other tracks what it is worth. Snipe-IT is free and excellent at the first and does not do the second.
If what your accountant is asking for is a depreciation schedule that closes to the cent, a book value as at a date, and a disposal gain — that is a fixed-asset register, and the honest comparison is not against Snipe-IT. It is against the spreadsheet you are using now.
Next steps
- Open the live Assetora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Assetora product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — AssetTiger, Asset Panda and 80 others, quoted from their own pages, with the quote-gated ones recorded as quote-gated
Depreciation methods and useful lives are matters for your accountant and your jurisdiction. This article is about software, not tax.