Free calibration management software: free plans, open source and spreadsheets

Yes, free calibration management software exists, with limits. On October 29, 2026, four calibration tools offered a free plan with a published cap: Axiospec (50 active instruments, unlimited users), Gaugify (30 assets, unlimited users), GageList (25 gages, 5 users) and CalibraCore (20 instruments, one user). LabCalibrate says it is currently free without stating limits. Beyond those, you have three other routes: free plans of generic maintenance tools, which don’t mention calibration on their pricing pages; open-source projects, where the two built for calibration and in active development have been public for only a few months; and a controlled spreadsheet with free tools such as our record template and label generator. Free means no license fee, not no cost: someone has to maintain the tool, and if you work under FDA rules or ISO/IEC 17025, validate it.

This page is about managing the calibration of measuring instruments (gages, meters, standards). If you are looking for free software to calibrate a monitor or display, that is a different product category.

The free options at a glance

What each free option covers, as its vendor or project states it. A dash means the pages we read don’t say, not that the feature is missing. The two “do it yourself” rows are what we know of our own tools and of a plain spreadsheet, and the only rows where “no” appears.

And what each free plan allows, in the vendor’s words:

Three things stand out:

• The caps are small. Twenty to fifty instruments covers a small shop or a pilot, not most quality departments. If your master list is longer, a free plan is a trial that doesn’t expire, not a long-term home.
• Free plans differ in what they leave out. Axiospec says every plan includes the full platform except the API and priority support. GageList’s free plan doesn’t include automatic notifications, which start on its Core plan, and offers its mobile app only as a 30-day trial. Fiix’s free plan has no database export. CalibraCore limits the free plan to one team member.
• Generic tools are not calibration tools. Fiix, MaintainX and Mitti offer free plans, but none mentions calibration on its pricing page. They can remind you that a task is due; whether they can hold as-found and as-left results against a tolerance is something to test, not assume.

Free plans of calibration software: read the limits

A free plan is the cheapest way to see whether a dedicated tool fits how you work. Before you load your real master list, check five things:

1. What counts toward the cap. Axiospec counts active instruments and says archiving never deletes the history; other vendors say “assets” or “gages” without defining them. Ask whether retired, spare and reference items count.
2. Users. Unlimited at Axiospec and Gaugify; one at CalibraCore; five at GageList. If the person who borrows a gage or approves a record needs a login, count them.
3. Features held back for paid plans. Reminders, e-signatures, gage R&R, the mobile app and the API are the usual candidates. The vendor’s plan table is the only reliable source, and it changes.
4. The terms themselves. Gaugify’s pricing page showed no free plan when we read it on October 9, and a free plan for 30 assets on October 29. LabCalibrate says it is “currently” free and publishes no limits or future price; its terms promise notice before any fee applies. Free plans are a vendor decision and can change; plan for that.
5. Who runs it and where your data is. If you are an ISO/IEC 17025 lab, a cloud provider that holds your records is an external provider: you must make sure it meets the requirements that apply (clause 7.11.4, as summarized by PJLA), and European Accreditation adds that it is evaluated like any other external supplier (EA FAQ 36.1). CalibraCore and LabCalibrate don’t state a legal company name on the pages we read; ask who you would be contracting with. Their terms, read on October 29, 2026, are worth a look too: LabCalibrate’s terms of service describe themselves as a template to be adapted and are governed by Polish law, and CalibraCore’s terms let it suspend or end access at its sole discretion for conduct it judges harmful and name no governing law.

Some vendors also offer a time-limited trial of their paid product: Axiospec starts every new workspace with 45 days of its Professional plan, and Calibration Control has a 30-day trial of its Windows software, which also allows free read-only users once licensed. Our calibration software comparison lists the trial or demo offered by 13 tools.

Free maintenance and asset tools

If your plant already uses a maintenance system, its free plan may be tempting. What the vendors publish, on October 29, 2026:

• Fiix Free (Rockwell Automation): unlimited assets and work orders, up to 25 active preventive maintenance schedules and a limited number of users; the free plan has no audit trail or e-signature.
• MaintainX Basic: unlimited work orders and procedures, but only 2 active repeating work orders and a limited number of assets.
• Mitti Free (by SafetyCulture): up to 10 seats and 5 active inspection templates, with basic data history.

None of the three pricing pages mentions calibration. A recurring work order can remind you that a gage is due. A calibration record needs more: the result at each test point against a tolerance, as found and as left, the reference standard used, the certificate, and what you did when a result failed (see what a calibration record must contain). With 25 or fewer active schedules, a free maintenance plan also runs out of room faster than its “unlimited assets” suggests, if each instrument gets its own recurring schedule. Our comparison explains the difference between a CMMS and dedicated calibration software in more detail.

Is there open-source calibration software?

A few, but none with a track record yet. We searched GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge on October 29, 2026, for calibration, gage and metrology management projects:

• Calibra Fácil describes itself as open-source software (MIT license) for calibration laboratories under ISO/IEC 17025: calibration workflow with review and approval, GUM uncertainty calculations, certificates with Brazilian (ICP-Brasil) digital signatures, a client portal and an offline desktop app. Its interface is in Portuguese. The README says it began as a commercial SaaS used by accredited labs in Brazil and is now maintained by its community “on a best-effort basis”, and that each lab must validate it for its own use. The public repository dates from October 2026, its latest release was 0.4.0 on October 28, 2026, and almost all commits come from one developer.
• Open Gauge describes itself as a self-hosted platform (AGPL-3.0) for sensors, instrumentation assets, calibration records and coefficients, certificates and traceability data. The repository was created in July 2026, has no release yet, and its last commit, on October 17, 2026, came from its only contributor account.
• Kalibro describes itself as open-source software for calibration and maintenance records of devices and tools (GPL-3.0, Windows and Linux). Its SourceForge page was last updated on April 21, 2018.
• Snipe-IT is a large, actively maintained open-source project (release 8.8.3 on October 22, 2026) for IT asset management. “Calibration” is one of its maintenance types, but it is built for laptops and licenses, not tolerances and test points.
• Atlas CMMS is an actively maintained, self-hosted open-source maintenance system (release 1.9.0 on September 22, 2026; AGPL-3.0, with a commercial license for some features). Its README doesn’t mention calibration.
• The rest were personal or student projects with few or no stars and no stated maintenance.

Practitioners hadn’t found one either: in a 2025 r/Metrology thread asking for open-source calibration software for about 500 instruments, nobody pointed to a ready-made open-source project, and the replies described in-house databases, Access, a ticketing system with custom fields, and spreadsheets (r/Metrology thread). A 2026 post about a home-made desktop app drew questions about whether it was on GitHub; it wasn’t (r/Metrology thread).

Self-hosting open source is free in license only. You run the server, the backups, the updates and the security patches, and if your records fall under ISO/IEC 17025 or FDA rules, the validation is yours too. A project that depends on one developer carries the same single-person risk as a home-made spreadsheet.

Doing it yourself: a controlled spreadsheet and free tools

For a small inventory under ISO 9001, a spreadsheet is a legitimate choice. ISO 9001 clause 7.1.5 asks for documented evidence that measuring equipment is fit for purpose and, where traceability is required, calibration or verification at specified intervals against traceable standards, identified status, and protection against adjustment and damage. It doesn’t say what medium to use (ISO/TC 176 N1286; ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group). Practitioners on r/Metrology describe controlled spreadsheets running inventories in the hundreds (r/Metrology thread). What makes a spreadsheet work is control, not formulas:

1. 1

   One master list, one owner

   One row per item: asset ID, description, serial number, location, owner, tolerance, interval, last calibration, certificate number, next due date and status. One named person maintains it, with a deputy who knows how.

2. 2

   A record for every calibration

   A due date is not a record. Keep the results of each calibration, as found and as left, with the reference standard and who did it, on a form like our free record template, filed by asset ID with the certificate.

3. 3

   Protect and back up

   Lock formula and history columns, limit who can edit, keep a dated backup outside the working file, and never overwrite a past result: add a correction row that says what changed, who changed it and why.

4. 4

   Review what is due, every month

   Filter the next 30 to 60 days, schedule the work and pull overdue items from use. A spreadsheet doesn't remind anyone on its own.

5. 5

   Standardize from day one

   Same ID format, same units, dates as dates, one row per item. It is what makes a later move to software a one-day import instead of a project.

Our free tools cover parts of the job, without an account and without storing anything:

• Calibration record template: a printable form for one calibration (equipment, method, results as found and as left, decision), plus the columns for the master list.
• Calibration label generator: six status labels (calibrated, limited, do not use and others) with a computed due date, on Avery Letter or A4 sheets or a label printer.
• Calculators for the questions a spreadsheet gets wrong most often: the TUR calculator, the uncertainty calculator and the gauge R&R calculator, each checked against published worked examples. The last two export CSV.

What they don’t do: they don’t keep your inventory, don’t send reminders, don’t store certificates and keep no audit trail. They complement a spreadsheet or a free plan; they don’t replace calibration software.

What the standards ask of a free tool

A free tool is held to the same rules as a paid one. What changes is who provides the evidence.

Two facts about Excel matter here. Microsoft states that worksheet-level protection is not intended as a security feature and that a password-protected workbook should not be assumed secure (Microsoft, Protection and security in Excel). And Excel’s Show Changes pane, which lists who edited which cell and the previous value, covers the past 365 days, doesn’t track every kind of edit, and is cleared by edits made in older or one-time-purchase versions of Excel or by saving a copy (Microsoft, Show changes made in a workbook; Get help with Show Changes). It helps you see what happened. It is not, on its own, an audit trail kept for the life of the record.

The hidden costs of free

The license is the smallest cost of a calibration program. These are the ones free tools leave with you:

• The owner’s time. Someone keeps the list current, files certificates, reviews what is due and chases overdue items. That work exists with any tool; with a spreadsheet, it is all manual.
• Dependence on one person. Forum users describe calibration programs that depended on a setup only one departed colleague understood (r/Metrology thread). The same happens to a home-made database when its author moves on. Name a deputy, and write down how the file works.
• Validation. If you work under ISO 13485, FDA rules or ISO/IEC 17025, you must show the tool does what you rely on it for. Vendors of paid plans often sell help: GageList includes a validation kit from its Plus plan, and Ape Software lists a custom validation report at $500 (October 29, 2026). With a free tool or your own spreadsheet, you write that evidence yourself.
• Migration later. Moving to software means cleaning and mapping your data. Vendors publish what that costs when they do it: with a new license, Ape Software charges $99 an hour for a database import, about 3 hours ($297) on average, and GageList charges $150 per hour beyond the migration hours included in its plans. Some free-plan vendors offer to load your data at no charge: Axiospec on every plan, including Free, and LabCalibrate while the product is free (all October 29, 2026). Standardized data from day one keeps this small.
• The way out of a free plan. Before you rely on it, export everything (records, history, attachments) and open the file without the vendor’s tool. Ask what happens to your data if the free plan ends or you stop using it.

When to move to a paid tool

There is no instrument count at which a standard requires software; thresholds you see online (20, 50 or 500 instruments) are opinions. The signals that matter are the ones in our comparison: your records are FDA-required, you are an accredited lab, corrections leave no trace, recall depends on one person, or audit preparation takes days. Our comparison of 13 tools shows prices as published by each vendor; if you mostly manage gages that are checked out to the floor, see gage management software, and for gauge R&R studies, MSA software.

Whichever free route you take, run through this list first:

How we compiled this page

• Scope. Free plans of dedicated calibration software that state their terms on an official page, free plans of three generic maintenance and inspection tools (Fiix and MaintainX, which our comparison covers, and Mitti, which appears in search results for free calibration software), open-source projects found on GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge, and the do-it-yourself route. Tools that offer only a time-limited trial are in our comparison.
• Facts. Read on each vendor’s site or project repository on October 29, 2026, and paraphrased. Repository activity is the latest release or update date shown on October 29. We did not install or test any product.
• Prices. Only those published on the vendor’s own site, in USD. We don’t use prices from software directories, vendor-written rankings, videos or forums.
• Requirements. ISO/IEC 17025 clauses as summarized by accreditation bodies (PJLA, SADCAS, European Accreditation), ISO 9001 through ISO/TC 176 guidance, and FDA regulations and guidance. We don’t reproduce standard text.
• Forum anecdotes. Paraphrased, labeled and linked, without usernames. We don’t quote forum praise or criticism of any named product.
• Our own tools. The label generator, record template and calculators are ours and are free; we describe what they don’t do as plainly as what they do.
• Independence. No affiliate links, payments or free licenses from any vendor, and no vendor reviewed the page (editorial policy; methodology).

Vendors and readers: if something here is wrong or out of date, write to hello@acribi.com with a link to the page on your site that shows the correct information. We correct confirmed errors and log them in our corrections log.