5 Best IT Asset Management Tools Compared

An IT asset management tool(ITAM) ensures that organizations get a complete overview of their IT infrastructure. It reveals all the IT assets the company owns, how they’re being utilized, and if any physical asset became obsolete and needs replacement. It also recognizes any underperforming software so your money isn’t spent on its renewal.

Moreover, it facilitates proactive maintenance through which companies not only save 12-18 percent on their maintenance cost but also minimize the chance of asset failure, increasing asset performance, life and reliability. Leading to less disruption in the business processes.

The IT asset management tool shows how assets are in place with well-functioning security measures during the audit and regulatory reviews. The data produced by the system leads to greater financial accountability and better budgeting as finance and accounting teams get to sort out project costs per team.

With IT asset management tools holding such importance for businesses, we have analyzed over 15 IT asset management tools against top features and come up with these 5 best IT asset management tools.

But before moving to the review let’s delve into the

No matter what your specific business needs are, these features are a must in ITAM software-

1. Easy Integration:

The IT asset management tool should easily integrate with your other existing tools such as workstation monitoring, PSA software, server, remote access, and control tools. A unified ecosystem of tools improves efficiency and productivity as you get to work out of one centralized dashboard.

2. Real-Time Information:

The efficiency of daily tasks and operations is improved when the ITAM tool gives real-time info on an asset’s current location, who’s currently using it and when it’ll be in a free state. It also makes planning and scheduling of projects easier.

3. Entire Lifecycle Management:

The IT asset management software should give a complete overview of an asset’s life cycle, from planning and procurement to disposal. It facilitates conclusive decision-making.

4. A Native Mobile App:

Your team gets to track IT assets and obtain asset detail on the go with a native mobile app of the IT asset management tool. They can also put small details about the asset while being on the asset’s location. These sums up to enhanced flexibility and efficiency in user working.

5. Customer Support and Active Community:

Customer support should be responsive, and supportive in tackling issues. An active community of users who share valuable problem resolution, insights, and information about the product would be great in the long run.

• Asset Panda
• ManageEngine AssetExplorer
• Solarwind Service Desk
• Pulseway
• Lansweeper

Asset Panda is a cloud-based IT asset management tool that’s highly flexible and customizable to fulfill the asset tracking and management needs of businesses of any niche. It offers the option to configure asset access and usage permission, modify asset field requirements for existing assets, and provide truly customizable reporting capabilities.

Your technicians can add assets manually or by scanning barcodes on the fly by using the Android/iOS application of Asset Panda. You can also attach video, pictures, audio, or other details through the app for easier identification and faster troubleshooting of the asset later on. The app not only can create reports but also has the ability to facilitate mobile auditing and GPS tracking.

The Asset Panda IT asset management tool is easy to integrate into your existing system with an API, here a little coding is needed.

The learning curve of Asset Panda is quite steeper compared to other IT asset management tools due to its high capacity to customize and configure, but the very responsive, understandable tech support team of Asset Panda makes implementation easy. And once you logged into your account, you’ll get hold of the tutorial videos that come in very handy during implementation.

Key Features:

• Highly customizable and can be configured according to customer’s unique needs
• Android/iOS mobile app having impressive amount of features
• Solid customer support
• Low cost
• Option to define role-based activity so team members interact in tandem

With their responsibilities- aiding in sensitive data protection, improve accountability

Where it lacks:

Users have to manually manage their software licenses. They have to collect usage data manually and they have to add this data to asset fields either manually or through spreadsheets(CSV format).

Pricing:

Asset Panda offers 500 asset management for an annual fee of $1500 with no limit on the number of users. They offer personalized implementation services for $500. Though technical support and demo videos suffice for smooth implementation, companies with no in-house IT staff may need the assistance of someone experienced during the initial works. You can explore the ITAM with their 14-day free trial.

Best for:

Companies with budgetary constraints who need a highly flexible and customizable physical asset tracking system and can do well without the live tracking of software usage and software licensing.

ManageEngine AssetExplorer is a cloud-hosted browser-based IT asset management tool that comes with an abundance of advanced features. It can manage both physical and virtual assets and has unique relationship maps that can easily determine dependencies between your various assets which helps you keep the infrastructure stable during troubleshooting.

Though the ITAM categories assets into IT and non-IT assets, software, and asset components, you can create your own category of assets by product type or product names and include add price, vendor, and warranty details.

AssetExplorer provides complete visibility into software licenses- the number of licenses purchased, if the software installed against those licenses, detects unlicensed and illegal software. Through the new Android/iOS mobile app of AssetExplorer, you can do all the discovering, tracking, and managing hardware and software assets on the go and won’t be compelled to open a web browser for admin work.

The ITAM allows you to set custom or predefined metrics to generate comprehensive reports which then can be scheduled to be delivered to specific recipients.

Key Features:

• Can support Virtual Machines, and virtual hosts and tracks networked and non-networked assets.
• Automatic discovery and management of all the software and hardware deployed in your network.
• Full life cycle asset management from planning and procurement to decommissioning and retirement.
• Software asset management- software usage pattern analysis, informed decision about its renewal, up-gradation, or elimination.
• Relationship mapping
• Easy setup

Where it lacks:

• The single asset management module has extensive features stuffed into it, it has lots of tabs, and drop-down menus so the user interface(UI) is slightly cluttered and unpolished which feels overwhelming and even confusing.
• The limited remote control tools the ITAM has only work for Windows and Mac-based machines.

Pricing:

Pricing is based on the number of IT assets( having IP addresses) managed. It starts at $795 for 250 IT assets with no limit on the number of technicians. Explore the ITAM with a 30-day free trial.

Best for:

ManageEngine Asset Explorer is best for enterprise-class businesses that need a feature-rich ITAM solution and has in-house IT professionals to manage the system.

Solarwind Service Desk is a combination of an IT asset management tool and an IT help desk tool available either as a cloud-hosted or on-premises web server. The ITAM on-premise version has several ways for asset discovery like using asset synchronization tools or tools that support WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). For the cloud-hosted version, assets need to be added manually either one at a time or via CSV file or spreadsheet.

Once added, the ITAM tool tracks the entire lifecycle of each of your assets. Though it can’t track licenses and software usage, the tool ensures software license compliance and track contracts and purchases. It can show the entire ticket history of assets and when an asset was moved to a different location along with its expiration, renewal dates, purchasing data, and warranty.

The additional service desk management part helps in ticket routing, and ticket automation where you can categorize and subcategories those tickets based on priority for faster resolution. As an IT asset management tool, the reporting capabilities are a little basic yet the reports can be easily created and are simple to view and print. Moreover, report generation and dispatching can be automated with scheduling features.

Key Features:

• Real-time value display of total IT assets.
• Complete IT asset lifecycle management
• Informed decision making about hardware and license purchase
• Easy report scheduling and repository of reports
• Easy to set up and easy navigation

Where it lacks:

• The ITAM doesn’t have a native depreciation feature
• It can’t track installed software licenses and software usage

Pricing:

The price depends on the type of deployment of the software- on-premises or cloud-hosted. It charges based on the number of technicians using the system.
In the cloud-hosted version,
Number of Seats                                                                             Per seat cost per year
1 to 5                                                                                                          $842
6-10                                                                                                            $820
11 or more                                                                                                  $795

In the on-premise version, the pricing starts at $700 per seat.

They provide a 14-day free trial on-premise version where you’ve to install it on your own server. If you lack back-end hardware for installation, you can use online demos for the ITAM tool exploration.

Best for:

IT companies looking for a lightweight combination of asset management and common help desk functionality that’s easy to use and comes at a modest price. This combo tool is ideal for companies providing outsourced help desk for MSP.

MMSoft Pulseway is a mobile-first IT asset management tool that lets the user perform administrative tasks from the mobile app itself. The user can troubleshoot operating systems and cloud-based servers directly from the mobile app. The mobile app also empowers the user to kill processes, log out, restart, and freeze non-windows-based assets from the mobile client.

Whether used from mobile apps or web applications, this cloud-based solution offers a state-of-the-art intelligent user experience. The simple and attractive interface gives access to the entire range of system functionalities. You can get live status updates about networked devices, workstations, and server modules like IIS, Microsoft Exchange, SQL server, and more from the mobile app.

The reporting module of this IT asset management tool has customizable and white-labeled templates for reporting on system status and incidents. These reports can be generated and dispatched to recipients either manually or automatically through customized scheduling.

Key Features:

• Ultra-modern and intuitive User experience( UI)
• Full feature set accessible from iPad
• The mobile client is very powerful and easy to use
• Customised instant alerting system if something goes wrong about the asset
• Auto discovery of assets in the network

What it lakes:

• It has a small number of pre-built reports makes the reporting capabilities limited
• Users may face some problem during SNMP Device detection and Configuration

Pricing:

MMSoft Pulseway pricing is very flexible and transparent. After the one-time fee of $149 for advanced onboarding and best practice session, you have to pay for the number of endpoints or devices you manage and monitor. The more the number of monitored devices the better discount you get at pricing. For example, for 100 endpoint/device monitoring you need to pay $160/month($1.6 per endpoint)while for 500 it’s just $645/month($1.29 per endpoint).

You have to pay extra for 3rd party patching and endpoint protection features. That is also charged per endpoint or device.

Best for:

Pulseway is best for midsize or large businesses having complex asset monitoring and management requirements and who have lots of mobile devices like smartphones, laptops, and others to monitor.

LANsweeper is a cloud-based IT asset management tool that automatically scans your network to find info about your assets- hardware specs, software installed, and user details. It develops and maintains a centralized inventory out of this information so that you get a comprehensive view of your IT environment at a glance.

Due to the centralized inventory, information such as the location of assets, which users have access to, and who’s using them currently are readily available. The IT asset management tool performs regular automated scans of the network to keep this info up-to-date.

It regularly scans software assets to give notification on new software installations, marks unauthorized software for security screening, and helps in managing license compliance for auditing purposes.

Key Features:

• Instant detection of assets in the network using Asset Radar and Agent-based scanning for difficult-to-scan devices.
• Visibility over machines hosted on cloud platforms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure
• Built-in Reports
• Integrated IT service desk
• Secure and centralized database and overview of relevant data through a customized dashboard

Where it lacks:

• Doesn’t have a longer historical view of software.
• Cluttered interface with too many menu options showing upfront on the screen.
• Less user-friendly GUI with many visible options

Pricing:

Upto 100 assets can be monitored and managed for free with unlimited users.
1 Euro per asset per year with unlimited users and no limit for the number of assets is available in Business class. In enterprise-class, you have to get a custom quote.

Best for:

LANsweeper is best for large, medium, and small businesses who are looking for a low-cost solution that doesn’t require a lot of customizations and whose assets don’t move around a lot.

The first step towards selecting the right IT asset management tool involves understanding your business’s asset monitoring and management needs. You’ll have to find which features and functionalities of an ITAM tool are most required to fulfilling that need. It can be mobile capabilities or ease of operation or a great software asset management feature.

The best IT asset management tool for your business would be the one that provides the best performance for the selected features. So go through online reviews for these features and find out the right one.