IT Asset Management Software for a Company Under 200 People

TL;DR

• Most IT asset management software is built for enterprises with dedicated asset managers, and a 200-person company buying it inherits complexity it will never use.
• If you have forty devices and one person who knows where they all are, do not buy anything. A spreadsheet maintained by that person is more accurate.
• There is a genuinely free option that is a real asset register rather than a limited trial, and it is the right answer more often than vendors suggest.
• Be careful with products described as free. One widely recommended tool's free tier is a 30-day trial on its own pricing page.
• Price by asset count rather than by user where you can. Per-user pricing punishes exactly the small team that needs several people to update records.
• The deciding question is not features. It is who maintains it, because an unowned tool decays faster than a spreadsheet.

The Platform That Needed a Platform Administrator

A 170-person company bought a well-regarded asset management platform after an evaluation that went well. It had everything: configurable workflows, custom asset types, a mobile app, contract management, integrations with four systems they used.

Eight months later the register held 230 devices, of which about 90 were accurate. The custom fields somebody had configured during implementation were empty. The approval workflow had been switched off in month three because it was blocking people. Two of the four integrations had never been connected, because connecting them required a consultant and the budget for that had been spent on the licence.

The tool had not failed. It had been built for an organisation with somebody whose job is asset management, and the company had bought it for a person whose job is everything, and that person had correctly prioritised the things that break when ignored. An asset register does not break when ignored. It just quietly stops being true.

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So the question for a company this size is not which platform is best. It is which one survives having nobody dedicated to it.

When You Don't Actually Need Any Software

When the manual way is genuinely fine

Under about fifty devices, one location, one person who can see them. A spreadsheet with six columns is more accurate than any database here, because its accuracy comes from the maintainer's direct knowledge rather than from a process. Buying software at this point moves the record further from the person who knows the truth and adds a login.

When friction starts appearing

Somebody asks a question the sheet cannot answer in under a minute. How many machines are over three years old, who has the devices from the 2024 purchase, how many are sitting unissued. That is a fields problem rather than a tracking problem, and it is the first genuine reason to look at a tool.

When it becomes a liability

When you give a confident answer that turns out to be wrong. An insurance schedule, an auditor's sample, a security questionnaire. The cost is not the error, it is that every subsequent answer from the same source gets double-checked, which is slower than having no register at all.

The edge case that forces it

Devices in places your maintainer cannot walk to. This is the real trigger and it is about visibility rather than count, which is why a 90-person company across four countries usually has a worse register than a 300-person company in one building.

Five Questions People Ask First

"What do we actually need it to do?" Far less than the category offers. For a company this size the honest requirement is: hold a row per device with six fields, let two or three people update it, produce four reports, and be reliable enough that people believe it. Everything else in a typical feature list is for somebody else.

"Is there a genuinely free option?" Yes, and it is a real one. Snipe-IT's self-hosted edition is free and open source and is a full asset register, not a crippled version. The cost is hosting it, meaning a server, updates and backups owned by somebody, which for a team with any technical capacity is a few hours a year.

"What about the tools advertised as free?" Check the pricing page rather than the review site. AssetTiger is widely described as free for up to 250 assets, and its own pricing page presents that tier as a 30-day trial rather than a permanent free plan. That is a meaningful difference if you were planning a budget around it.

"Should we pay per user or per asset?" Per asset, almost always, at this size. Per-user pricing discourages exactly what makes a register accurate, which is several people updating it at the moment they handle a device. If only one person has a licence, every update becomes a message to that person, and messages get missed.

"How long does implementation take?" For the right tool at this size, an afternoon. If a vendor's answer involves weeks, a consultant or a discovery phase, they are describing a product for a larger company, which is useful information rather than a problem with them.

Why Enterprise Products Do Not Scale Down

It is worth understanding why the opening example happens, because the pattern repeats at every company this size and it is not a failure of evaluation.

They assume a role that does not exist here. Enterprise asset platforms are designed around somebody whose job title contains the words asset or configuration. That person defines the schema, maintains the taxonomy, runs the audits and owns the data quality. At 170 people nobody holds that role, so the capabilities that depend on it are inert from day one.

Configuration is sold as a benefit and functions as an obligation. A highly configurable product has to be configured, and the configuration has to be maintained as the company changes. Flexibility is genuinely valuable to an organisation with somebody to exercise it and is pure overhead to one without.

The implementation assumes a project. Discovery, design, build, migrate, train. That shape is correct at 5,000 devices and absurd at 200, where the whole exercise should be an afternoon. A vendor proposing a six-week implementation is accurately describing their product and inaccurately describing your need.

The reporting is built for a different question. Enterprise tooling answers questions about compliance posture across business units. A small company wants to know who has the old laptops and which devices never came back, which a six-column sheet answers and a configurable reporting engine makes surprisingly hard.

And the pricing is per-seat because the buyer has a team. Which produces the single-licensed-person failure described above, where the register is updated second-hand by one person and is therefore wrong.

None of this makes those products bad. It makes them products for somebody else, and recognising that during an evaluation rather than eight months afterwards is most of what this article is for.

The Four Reports That Justify a Tool

If a spreadsheet can answer these in a minute, keep the spreadsheet. If it cannot, that is your requirement, and any tool that produces them is sufficient.

Age distribution, with the oldest decile named. Drives refresh planning and budget. The average is useless; you need the tail and the names. A fleet averaging 2.4 years can contain a dozen machines over five, and those twelve are both your biggest support cost and the ones belonging to people who never complain, which is why the names matter as much as the ages.

Devices with no recent verification. Everything not confirmed in the last twelve months, which becomes your audit scope and is usually a fraction of the fleet rather than all of it. Sorting it by value rather than by age makes it actionable, since the point of an audit is to confirm the things worth confirming rather than to achieve completeness for its own sake.

Devices assigned to people who have left. A join between your register and your leaver list. This is the report that finds missing hardware, and it is the one almost nobody runs. It is also the only report here that produces money rather than information, which makes it the easiest one to get attention for.

Devices with an open data obligation. Issued, never confirmed wiped. This is what a security questionnaire asks for, and most small-company registers cannot produce it because the field does not exist. Deriving it is easier than adding it: a device that was assigned and has no recorded wipe is open, regardless of where it physically sits, which includes everything in your own cupboard that nobody cleared on arrival.

Four reports. If a tool gives you these and nothing else, it has earned its cost at this scale.

The Six Fields, and What Each One Is For

Two of these are routinely missing from small-company registers and both matter more than the four that are always present. Location is absent because everybody was in one office when the sheet was created, and it becomes essential the moment a device needs collecting. Verified date is absent because nobody thinks of a register as something that decays.

Add a seventh field only when a question has gone unanswered twice. The discipline matters because each additional field reduces the chance any given row is wholly correct, and a six-field register at 95 per cent accuracy answers more questions usefully than a twenty-field one at 60.

What to Skip at This Size

Equally important, and rarely said by anybody selling you something.

Approval workflows. At 170 people the approver is in the same chat as the requester. A workflow adds latency and gets switched off, which is what happened in the opening example.

Contract and licence management. A different problem with different data, usually better handled in a spreadsheet or by finance until you are much larger.

Barcode labels, unless devices pass through your hands. Excellent with a storeroom, worthless for direct-ship fleets where nobody will ever scan them.

Custom asset types beyond two or three. Laptops, phones, and perhaps monitors. Tracking every peripheral is a register nobody finishes populating.

Integrations beyond one. Connect your management console, because it is the only source that updates itself. Leave the rest until a real question demands them.

Mobile apps. Useful for warehouse audits, mostly unused by companies that do not have a warehouse.

Self-Hosting, Honestly Assessed

The free option is genuinely free and it is not free of effort, and the honest version of that trade-off is rarely stated by either side. Vendors selling hosted products overstate the burden; open-source enthusiasts understate it.

What it actually involves. A small server somewhere, which for a register of a few hundred devices is the cheapest tier at any cloud provider. A database. Application updates, which arrive periodically and occasionally matter for security. Backups, which need to be both taken and tested. And a certificate, which modern tooling renews automatically until the day it does not.

Time cost, realistically. A few hours to set up if somebody has done it before, a day if not. Then a couple of hours a year, concentrated in the moments an update needs attention.

Who it suits. Any team with an engineer who already maintains something, which at 200 people is almost everybody. The register is not a demanding workload and it does not need to be highly available, since a register that is down for two hours inconveniences nobody.

Who it does not suit. A company with no technical staff at all, or one where the only technical person is the sole maintainer of several other things and this would be the one too many. In that situation the hosted alternative is worth its cost and you should not feel talked out of it.

The risk nobody mentions. Self-hosting puts the register on infrastructure owned by whoever set it up, and if that person leaves without documenting it you have a system nobody can update. Write down where it runs, how to access it, and how backups work, in the same place as everything else. That ten-minute document is the actual difference between a sustainable self-hosted register and a liability.

So the decision is less about budget than about whether one named person will own a small piece of infrastructure. If yes, the free option is excellent and the money is better spent elsewhere. If no, pay for hosting and stop deliberating.

How to Choose: Five Questions Before You Talk to Any Vendor

Who maintains it, and is it in their job description? The most important question in this article. A tool with no named owner decays faster than a spreadsheet, because nobody feels personally responsible for a system in the way they do for a file they built.

Can you import your existing sheet without losing the custom columns? Those columns carry institutional knowledge and no new system has fields for them. Ask to see an import of your actual file rather than a sample.

Does it integrate with your management console? Automatic reconciliation is the only integration that pays for itself at this size, because it is the only one that maintains itself.

What does it cost at three times your device count? Per-asset tiers have cliffs. A tool chosen at 200 devices can be notably more expensive at 600 with no change in what you need.

Can two or three people update it without extra cost? If updates are gated behind licences, the register will be updated by one person from second-hand information, which is the condition that makes registers wrong.

The Options

Figures below were read from each vendor's own pricing page, most recently 9 October 2026.

Snipe-IT

Best for: any company at this size with some technical capacity and a preference for not paying.

Why companies choose it: the self-hosted edition is free and open source and is a genuine register, with check-in and check-out, custom fields, audits, label support and an API. For a 200-person company it is frequently all that is needed. Hosted tiers exist for those who would rather not run it: $39.99 monthly or $399.99 annually for Basic, $99.99 or $999.99 for Small Business, and $249.99 or $2,499.99 for the smaller dedicated plan.

Where it struggles: self-hosting is a genuine commitment, and the interface is functional rather than polished. It does no logistics of any kind.

AssetTiger

Best for: small teams who want hosting handled and pricing tied to fleet size rather than headcount.

Why companies choose it: published pricing by asset count, at $20 a month for 500 assets, $40 for 2,500, $75 for 10,000, $140 for 50,000 and $275 for 250,000, reducing to $18, $37, $69, $128 and $252 on annual billing. Unlimited users on every paid plan, which is the right shape for a small team where several people touch devices. An inventory add-on is $15 a month or $14 annually.

Where it struggles: the 250-asset tier is a 30-day trial on its own pricing page rather than the permanent free plan it is often described as, so plan to pay from the start. Register only, no logistics.

Asset Panda

Best for: teams who want heavy configurability and mobile capture, and have somebody to own the configuration.

Where it struggles: publishes no price, confirmed on its own pricing page 9 October 2026, which is a quote request with a 7-day trial. Configurability is a cost at this size rather than a benefit, and this is the shape of product the opening example describes.

Freshservice

Best for: companies that want a service desk and are happy to have assets attached to it.

Why companies choose it: tiered at $19, $49 and $99 per agent per month, with asset management included at the higher tiers, so tickets and the devices they concern sit together. Its Freddy AI layer is priced separately at $29 per agent per month.

Where it struggles: per-agent pricing means cost tracks your support team rather than your fleet, and the asset capability is a component of a larger product rather than the point of it.

Lansweeper

Best for: finding devices on your network that never made it into any register.

Where it struggles: publishes no figures even in a browser, and it is discovery rather than management, so it tells you what exists without telling you who holds it. Useful alongside a register rather than instead of one.

RemoAsset

Disclosure: RemoAsset is owned by the same people who publish HROpsLab. It appears here because it competes in this category and is assessed against the same criteria as everything else on this page, with its limitations stated in the same detail.

Best for: small distributed companies whose register problem is caused by devices they never physically handle.

Why companies choose it: the record is created when the device is ordered and delivered rather than typed afterwards, which removes the main source of error for a team with no storeroom and nobody to do data entry.

Where it struggles: it publishes no price and requires a demo, which is friction at this size where most buyers want to try something the same afternoon. It is much weaker as a register for hardware it did not supply. And it is not a certified disposal vendor.

The Comparison

The Decision Table

Growing Out Of It

A tool chosen at 170 people will eventually stop fitting, and knowing the signals in advance means replacing it deliberately rather than after a failure.

Pricing cliff. Per-asset tiers step rather than scale smoothly, so crossing a boundary can double a cost overnight with no change in what you need. Check where your next two boundaries sit before you commit, because the cheapest tool at 400 devices is frequently not the cheapest at 1,200.

More than one register appearing. The clearest signal that the central one has stopped serving somebody. When finance keeps a parallel fixed-asset sheet or a regional manager maintains their own list, the question is what the main register fails to do rather than how to stop them.

Questions arriving that need joins. "Which devices in Germany are over three years old and out of warranty" is three fields and a filter. When the questions routinely need data from two systems, you have outgrown a register and want something that integrates rather than something with more fields.

A dedicated person appearing. Once somebody's actual job includes asset management, the calculation changes entirely, and the enterprise products that were wrong at 170 people start being right. That is the honest moment to revisit, not before.

Audit or certification requirements. A formal requirement for evidenced processes is the one external trigger that justifies a heavier tool regardless of headcount.

What to do about it is simpler than it sounds, provided you keep your data portable. Export the register quarterly to a plain file and keep it. A tool you can leave is a tool you can choose freely, and the main thing that traps small companies in the wrong product is realising at renewal that five years of history only exists inside it.

Getting It Running in an Afternoon

At this size implementation should be short, and treating it as a project is how it becomes one.

Import what you can stand behind, not everything. Rows you believe go in. Rows you do not go into a separate list called unaccounted, worked down later. A register that opens with forty known-wrong rows starts without credibility. Put a date and an owner on the unaccounted list so it is a task rather than an archive, and review it monthly until it is empty or everything remaining has been formally written off.

Set up six fields and resist adding more. Serial, model, assigned person, location, issue date, and a verified date with its method. Add a seventh only when a real question has gone unanswered twice. Write the six down somewhere before you start configuring, because the import screen is where good intentions about restraint tend to collapse.

Connect the management console and nothing else. One integration, the one that maintains itself. It is also the integration that produces the most useful single report, which is devices seen on the network that do not appear in the register at all.

Mark everything unverified on day one. This is the best opportunity you will ever have to establish the discipline, because every row genuinely is unverified and nobody can argue otherwise. From that point the verified count only goes up as people confirm things, which gives the programme a visible trajectory in its first month and makes the habit stick in a way that a register starting at a notional hundred per cent never does.

Name the owner and put half a day a month in their calendar. That is the actual cost of this at 200 devices, and it is much less than people fear, which matters because the usual reason it goes unassigned is a belief that it is a big job.

Tell everybody it exists and what it is for. Five lines in a company update: there is now one place that records who has what, here is who maintains it, tell them when a device changes hands. Registers at this size fail far more often from colleagues not knowing to report a movement than from any shortcoming in the tool, and this costs nothing. It also means the owner is asking for cooperation that has already been sanctioned rather than chasing people individually, which is the difference between a two-minute request and an awkward one.

Run the four reports once, in week one. They will be wrong, and the shape of the wrongness tells you what to fix first. A register whose reports nobody has run is a database. Share the leaver-join result with whoever owns offboarding on the same day, because it is the one output that produces immediate action rather than a plan, and an early win makes the next three habits much easier to keep.

Keeping It Accurate With Nobody Dedicated

Everything above assumes the register stays true, which is the part that actually fails. At this size the maintenance has to be small enough to survive a busy quarter, and that means four habits rather than a process.

Update at the moment of movement, by whoever moved it. The single rule that matters. Anybody who hands over, receives or ships a device changes the record then, not later from a note. Later is where accuracy goes, and a batch update written from memory on a Friday is worse than no update because it looks authoritative.

Run the leaver join monthly, not quarterly. It takes five minutes and it is the highest-value check available, because devices become unrecoverable with time rather than suddenly. A device chased three weeks after somebody leaves usually comes back; one chased seven months later usually does not.

Sample ten rows a quarter rather than twenty. Smaller than the number recommended for larger fleets, deliberately, because a check that happens is worth more than a thorough one that does not. Pick them at random, verify physically or by a console check-in, write the percentage down.

Reconcile against purchases twice a year. Anything bought and never registered is the procurement handoff failing, which is the most common source of missing rows at every size and the easiest to fix once seen.

The total is well under a day a quarter. The reason registers decay at this size is not that the work is large, it is that it is invisible and nobody notices its absence until a question cannot be answered, which is typically eight months after the discipline lapsed.

One structural point worth more than all four habits: give the owner the standing to say a device cannot be issued until it is recorded. Without that they are documenting other people's shortcuts, and the shortcuts win because the person taking one has a deadline and the person recording has a preference.

What Getting This Wrong Costs

The direct cost is small and sometimes zero, which is worth saying plainly: the licence is rarely where the money goes at this size.

The second cost is buying the wrong shape of product. An enterprise platform at 170 people consumes the budget, consumes the implementation energy, and then sits at 40 per cent accuracy because it assumes a role nobody holds. That is worse than a spreadsheet, because it also cost money and created an expectation.

The third is the decisions taken on bad data. Insurance schedules overstating the fleet. Refresh budgets built on an age field nobody maintains. A security questionnaire answered from a register that cannot produce the one report it was asked for. None of these show up as asset management failures; they show up as variance and awkward conversations.

The fourth cost is the one that makes the next attempt harder. A failed asset management implementation leaves an impression that lasts years: the team remembers a tool that was bought, configured, half-populated and quietly abandoned, and the next person who proposes fixing the register is arguing against that memory rather than against the status quo. That is why the small, cheap, boring version matters so much at this size. A spreadsheet with a verified-date column that somebody actually maintains builds the case for a tool later. A platform nobody populated destroys it.

So the question to carry into any demo is not what the tool can do. It is what it will still be doing in eighteen months with nobody dedicated to it.

When You're Ready to Move Beyond the Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets last longer than the category admits, and they fail for a reason vendors rarely name. They do not fail because they lack features. They fail when the person maintaining the sheet stops being the person who sees the devices, at which point every entry is second-hand and nobody can tell which entries are current.

That transition is about visibility, not headcount. If your devices are in places your maintainer cannot walk to, you have crossed it already, and no amount of discipline in the sheet will fix what is fundamentally a reporting problem.

The sequence that works and costs nothing: add a verified date with a method to whatever you have now, sample twenty rows and write down the accuracy percentage, and run the four reports manually once to see which you actually need. Then pick the cheapest tool that produces those four, price it per asset rather than per user, name the owner, and put the half day in their calendar. At this size the tool is the easy part, and the half day in somebody's calendar is the decision that determines whether any of it works.

Frequently Asked Questions

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