Snipe-IT

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 861 words

The moment you have more than about 30 devices, three people who can walk away with them, and a spreadsheet nobody trusts, you want Snipe-IT. It tracks hardware, software licences, accessories and consumables, records who has what and when it is due back, and has been doing so since 2013 with about 14,900 GitHub stars and a paid hosted tier funding the development. It is AGPL-3.0, PHP on Laravel, wants MySQL or MariaDB and around 1 GB of RAM, and the interface looks like an admin panel from 2015. That last point stops bothering you in week two, because the data model is the product.

Model the world before you import a single asset

Snipe-IT will not let you create an asset without a model, and a model without a category and manufacturer. Resist the urge to click through with defaults. Sit down first and define: companies if you track more than one entity, locations as the physical places things live, categories such as laptop, monitor, phone and dock, manufacturers, then models with their fieldsets for things like CPU and RAM, and finally status labels that mean something to you: deployable, pending, archived, lost. Do this in an hour with the whole list on paper and the CSV importer will take your spreadsheet cleanly. Do it ad hoc and you will spend a month merging duplicate categories called "Laptops" and "laptop".

Check-out is the workflow, not the asset list

The asset table is a database; the check-out and check-in actions are why you run it. An asset can be checked out to a user, a location or another asset, so a dock checked out to a laptop follows the laptop when it goes to a person. Users receive an email on check-out and can be required to accept a EULA, which gives you a record when the laptop comes back with a cracked screen. Expected check-in dates generate overdue reports. Audits let you scan an asset tag and confirm it is where the system thinks it is, and the printed labels carry QR codes that the mobile browser reads straight into the audit form. If you set up nothing else, set up labels and audits: physical reality drifts from the database within months otherwise.

Licences, accessories and consumables are different things on purpose

Licences have seats, each seat checks out to a user or an asset, and expiry dates feed the alerts. Accessories are countable items like keyboards that are checked out and expected back. Consumables like toner are counted down and never return. New users file everything under assets and lose the distinction; the reports only make sense once each thing is in the right bucket, because "how many Office seats are free" and "who has the spare chargers" are different queries.

Setup: one image, one database, one URL that must be exact

The official snipe/snipe-it image runs alongside MariaDB. Generate an application key with docker run --rm snipe/snipe-it php artisan key:generate --show and set it as APP_KEY; lose that key and encrypted custom fields become unreadable, so back it up with the database. APP_URL must match the public address exactly, scheme included, because Laravel builds every redirect, asset link and email link from it, and a mismatch presents as broken CSS and a login loop rather than a clear error. Configure mail before the first check-out or the notifications you built the workflow around will silently not exist. The image runs the Laravel scheduler, which handles expiring-licence alerts and the built-in snipeit:backup command, but you still want the database dumped externally every night.

LDAP, SSO and the API

LDAP sync pulls users from Active Directory or a lightweight server such as LLDAP, and SAML lets Authentik or another identity provider handle login, which is how you avoid a second password for every staff member. The REST API uses personal access tokens and covers everything the UI does, so onboarding scripts that create a user and check out a laptop kit in one go are a short afternoon of work. That API is why Snipe-IT stays ahead of prettier tools: it has been stable for years and third-party integrations rely on it.

Snipe-IT versus GLPI

GLPI does asset management and also helpdesk, projects, contracts and automatic inventory through an agent. If you need tickets, GLPI is one system where Snipe-IT would be two. If you need the asset side done clearly, with fewer menus and better documentation, Snipe-IT is the one people recommend without caveats, and the rest of the CRM and ERP category is heavier still.

What I'd do

Snipe-IT in Docker with MariaDB, APP_KEY and the database in nightly backups, SAML to the existing identity provider, labels printed the first week and a full audit every quarter. Model the categories on paper before the import. For an organisation of 20 to 500 devices that needs to know where the laptops are and when the licences expire, I would not look at anything else.