Anyone looking for a Lansweeper alternative usually has one of three reasons: the bill has grown with the network instead of with the team, the product can do more than the actual problem calls for, or the question that lands on the desk every day is not "what is on the network?" at all, but "who has the device, and when is it coming back?".

This post does not freeze any prices — they change, and a comparison that pins them down is wrong a year later. What it looks at instead is the structure: what Lansweeper does, what it bills for, and how you can tell whether an alternative is the right thing for you at all.

What Lansweeper is — and is genuinely good at

Lansweeper has been around since 2004, developed by a Belgian company, and at its core it is a platform for IT discovery and inventory: it searches the network and finds what is on it. Windows, Linux and macOS, plus every IP-addressable network device. Either agentless via credentials or with an agent, and the agent is recommended for more complex environments.

That is no small thing, and it is worth saying plainly: if you want to know what is actually hanging off your network — switches, printers, OT devices and cloud workloads included — then that is exactly the job Lansweeper was built for. It scales a long way, it finds things nobody remembered existed, and it does so without anyone having had to maintain a list beforehand.

It handles the obvious follow-up question too: an asset can be linked to a user, an AD group or an OU, with a relationship type and a start and end date. Anyone claiming that Lansweeper cannot record who has a device has not looked.

What it bills for — and why that is the real point

Lansweeper bills per asset, not per user. The free tier covers 100 licensed assets; beyond that it keeps scanning, but according to the documentation the additional devices only show "basic details such as name, type and IP address". Users are not the limit here: the documentation explicitly names "unlimited users invited to your site".

What is decisive is what counts as an asset. Lansweeper's documentation says it word for word: "Computers, servers, network devices, OT devices, OT cards, Public Cloud workloads, and manually created assets count toward your limit." Monitors without extended display data do not count towards it.

Do the sums for your own organisation once. A company with 80 employees may well have 80 laptops — but on top of that switches, access points, printers, a few servers, the firewall and everything else that has an IP. The number you are billed on is not the number of people, and it grows even when the team stays the same size. For a company with a lot of network and few staff that is expensive; for one with little network and many people it is cheap. That is not an accusation but a model — it suits some organisations and not others.

The current prices are on Lansweeper's pricing page. Check them there, not in a blog post.

The question that makes the difference

Before you compare tools, answer one question: is your problem called discovery or process?

Discovery is: I do not know everything that is on my network. There is shadow IT, old servers, network devices with no documentation, and I need a complete picture first of all. For that you need a scanner.

Process is: I know which devices we have. What I am not sure of is who currently has the MacBook with serial number XY, whether it came back at the offboarding in July, in what condition, and which licences still run in the name of someone who left four months ago. For that you do not need a better scanner but a dependable process with responsibilities and evidence.

Many organisations need both. But they rarely need them equally urgently, and the order decides what you spend money on first.

What an alternative has to be able to do

Instead of a feature table that is out of date tomorrow, here are the questions you should put to every vendor — us included:

  • What is the billing based on? Per asset, per user, per site? And what exactly counts towards it?
  • Does the price grow with what grows in your organisation? If your network grows but your team does not — or the other way round — which of the two numbers ends up on the invoice?
  • Is there an assignment record with a return date? Not just an "owner" field, but an assignment with an expected return date, condition and evidence.
  • What happens when someone leaves? Is there a process, or do you have to build one out of filters?
  • Do the devices come from the MDM? Intune, Jamf, Kandji — or do you have to import and maintain them?
  • Where does the data sit, and is there a data processing agreement? For a company subject to GDPR, that is not a footnote.
  • How do you get out again? Export, API, self-hosting — what is left to you if you leave?

Where AssetNode is different

AssetNode is not a network scanner, and we do not pretend it is one. It is a system for who has which device, what the device cost, when it is coming back and what has to happen when someone leaves.

Three things differ in concrete terms:

The billing. With us, assets are unlimited on every plan — the free one included. What is limited is how many people work with it. Whether you keep 200 or 20,000 devices makes no difference to the price, and your switch costs nothing.

The assignment. An assignment record links device and person, holds an expected return date and notes, and when someone leaves it starts a return flow from there that carries the status forward automatically. The change history records who did what and when.

The data location. The primary cloud runs at Hetzner in Germany. If you would rather hold the data entirely yourself, you can self-host AssetNode free of charge under the Sustainable Use License — with unlimited assets and users.

The devices do not come from a network scan but from the MDM: Intune, Windows Autopilot, Jamf Pro, Jamf School, Kandji and Mosyle sync on a schedule. That finds less than a scanner does — it finds exactly the devices that belong to someone.

Where Lansweeper remains the right choice

A comparison that points in only one direction is not a comparison. There are cases in which you should stay with Lansweeper, or move to it:

  • You have to inventory OT and network infrastructure, not just the endpoints on people's desks.
  • You have no reliable list and need a complete picture of the network first.
  • You work in a large, distributed environment with many sites and thousands of devices.
  • Your estate is device-heavy and people-light — in which case per-asset billing is not necessarily a bad deal, and you should do the sums rather than switch.

For some organisations the right answer is simply both: discovery for the network, an asset system for the people and the devices assigned to them.

How to find that out without migrating

You do not have to switch anything off to compare. Create a workspace, import an XLSX file with the devices that really are assigned to people, and see whether the process fits yours. The import gives feedback row by row, and the sample data can be removed again.

The free plan includes unlimited assets and five users, with no credit card. What the paid plan costs and what it contains is on the pricing overview; if you would rather read another comparison first, the comparison with Snipe-IT sits alongside it.

Information on Lansweeper as of September 2026, from the vendor's public product documentation. Check prices and feature scope on the vendor's own pages before making a decision.