GLPI is open source software for managing an IT team’s support work and equipment. One system holds the help desk and its tickets, the inventory of computers and servers, licenses, contracts and projects.
The name comes from the French Gestionnaire Libre de Parc Informatique, roughly “free IT asset manager”. Developers from the INDEPNET association created it in 2003, and since 2015 it has been maintained by Teclib’, a French company. It’s released under the GPL license: you can download, install and modify it without paying for licenses.
What GLPI is used for
GLPI solves two problems that often go together in IT: keeping track of users’ support requests and knowing what equipment you have, where it is and who uses it.
- Help desk and tickets: every request is a ticket with a number, an owner, a priority and a status. Tickets come in by email, through the portal or entered by a technician.
- Service levels (SLAs): response and resolution times, with alerts before they’re breached.
- Problems and changes: incidents grouped by root cause and planned changes with an impact analysis, following ITIL practices.
- Inventory: computers, servers, printers and network equipment. With GLPI Agent, each device’s hardware and software stay up to date on their own.
- Licenses and contracts: quantities, installations, expiration dates and vendors.
- Projects: tasks, owners, dates and progress.
- Self-service portal: a form for each type of request and a knowledge base. Since GLPI 11, forms are built in and the Formcreator plugin is no longer needed.
- Reports and dashboards: open tickets, response times, recurring issues and each technician’s workload.
Everything is connected. A ticket is linked to the user’s device, and from that device you can see its past tickets, installed software and warranty.
What is GLPI Agent and what is it used for?
GLPI Agent is the official program that handles automatic inventory. You install it on each computer or server running Windows, Linux or macOS; it collects the hardware and installed software and sends the data to GLPI. After the first full inventory, it only sends what changed. Without the agent, devices can be added by hand or imported from a spreadsheet.
Since GLPI 10, inventory is native: the agent sends data straight to GLPI, without the FusionInventory plugin that earlier versions required. With the GLPI Inventory plugin, the same agent can also discover devices on the network, inventory printers and switches over SNMP, add VMware ESX hosts with their virtual machines and deploy software.
It’s a free download from the project’s GitHub releases page, with installers for each operating system. On Windows you can roll it out to many machines at once with a Group Policy Object (GPO) or a deployment tool, passing the GLPI server address during installation. For end users there’s also GLPI Agent Monitor, a graphical interface that lets them force an inventory, view the agent log or open a ticket.
Is GLPI free?
The software is: it’s open source and has no license fees, per user or per technician. Installed on your own servers, what you pay for is the server and the work to implement, configure and maintain it.
Teclib’ also sells subscriptions with vendor support and a cloud version it hosts and manages. According to its pricing page, the cloud plan starts at 19 euros per user per month, excluding taxes, as of October 2026.
The choice depends on who will run it. If someone in your organization can maintain a server, self-hosting is usually cheaper; if not, the cloud version takes that work off your plate.
GLPI requirements and installation
GLPI is a web application: you use it in a browser, and it’s installed on a Linux server with a web server, PHP and a MariaDB or MySQL database. Version 12, released on October 7, 2026, requires PHP 8.3 and MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.0.
You can download it from the official site or from GitHub, and there’s also an official Docker image, glpi/glpi. Installation is completed in the browser or from the command line.
The supported versions are 11 and 12. If you’re on an older one, we explain how to upgrade in GLPI 10 end of support.
Plugins, API and integrations
GLPI can be extended with plugins installed from its marketplace, right inside the console: additional fields, data import from spreadsheets, reports and much more. Before adding one, check that it has a version compatible with your GLPI.
To connect it with other systems, there’s a REST API. Users can come from Active Directory or LDAP, and the mail collector reads the support mailbox and turns each email into a ticket.
When it makes sense, and when it doesn’t
It makes sense when an IT team of any size needs to organize tickets and inventory and wants control over its data and configuration. It also makes sense when the system needs to be adapted with plugins or custom development.
It’s not the best option if nobody will run it and you won’t hire someone who can. A GLPI that’s installed and then left alone ends up with messy categories and tickets with no owner. In that case, Teclib’s cloud or a support service covers that part.
How to get started
- Decide what to solve first: the help desk, the inventory or both.
- Choose where it will run: your own server, Docker or the cloud.
- Set up the basics: users and groups, or the Active Directory connection; categories, priorities and the mail collector so emails become tickets.
- Install GLPI Agent on a group of devices and check the data before rolling it out everywhere.
- Pilot it with a group of users and adjust before opening it to the whole organization.
If you’d like us to implement it or review the GLPI you already have, see GLPI consulting and support.