Spiceworks Reviews

I used a free version of Spiceworks for several years. Installation of the application only takes few minutes. In just a few clicks you have a full robust system for ticketing and inventory. Another great perk is Spiceworks community, merely priceless resource where all the IT folks share their knowledge and can help you with random IT dramas. Great way to keep an eye on the hardware inventory. Getting it configured and working properly can be a challenge, but the results are well worth it. Not to mention great helpdesk ticketing functionality, that allows to put an order on how your service requests are processed on a daily basis.

I've only used a free version of the application. As I mentioned, one of the key reasons why I got it was for inventory purposes. Getting it work was a challenge. A lot of tweaking had to be done on the network to be able to query all of my PC and Mac workstations and servers. Nevertheless, the result was well worth it. Additionally, while the inventory is running, the system would be somewhat slow, but still managable. Great product! I highly recommend it to all IT admins out there.

If you chose the cloud way, there's nothing you need to install: just register and you're u and running.
The ticketing solution is simple and quite basic, but definitely easy to use and simple to manage: forget advanced automation, multiple queues and automated workflows, but you can define some rules and automatically assign or categorize your requests quite easily and effectively.
You also don't need to add users, just technicians: they're added as soon as they submit a request, and that simplifies user management.
It integrates with other Spiceworks tools such as Inventory, and that's quite useful.

There's almost no automation (really basic), and you cannot manage different queues to route tickets to.

We used Spiceworks for over a year. We lived and breathed in the Help Desk environment. It was great. We had memes on the office, making sure everyone put in our tickets, and tracked everything we possibly could. When techs were in the field, a quick app click, and recording our voices to tickets. It was just awesome.

Then administration wanted to try getting logs / reports from the system. Spiceworks was excellent for IT, but junk for a non-IT administrator wanting oversight. The reports were too techy, too details, no summary. EG: Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, and fluff. Spiceworks was all business, which was the problem, I needed to show a little fluff.

The advertisements also made it a little, meh, for when other users were posting tickets. Lets face it, they weren't the kind who were looking for datacenter solutions (typical ads we saw).

It's extensible and easy monitoring for use

It's will be eventually replaced by new cloud developers, because it development phase is slowly shelving momentum.

Inventory management is the one of the best feature in this software. Can able to scan the devices in the network and keep track of all the information of each and every devices.

Less customization option available for this software, so in some places have to follow the common standards instead of customized functions depends on the user needs

With spiceworks CM version I was able to register all the devices on my network, monitor their performance and record all my assets. My users can open tickets oriented to our services.

It can be a bit lengthy to configure all the tools since it has a high number of variables. Ads hide good design. The translation is not entirely good.

Spiceworks is a totally free piece of software if you choose to self-host. Getting things up and running is pretty easy, and it doesn't involve a huge amount of upkeep to keep the inventory data up to date. It also comes with access to the Spiceworks online community. This is a gathering place for a large array of computer savvy folks who help each other out with questions, answers, and access to pieces of software that make life easier. I have reached out to the community many times, and gotten some great feedback on issues I have had, and suggestions on hardware and software purchases. I also like the ability to build my own help desk portal where end users can submit tickets for easier tracking and resolution.

I have had some issues with the self-hosted software crashing from time to time. I have not been able to figure out why it needs a random reboot to keep it happy, but it only happens every couple of months, so it really isn't a huge issue to me.

As I said above, it's FREE. For lower volume IT houses it's pretty great. We have a basic setup where emails sent to a support address automatically open a ticket. I operate almost exclusively from my phone and we've never had an issue creating, working on or closing tickets in the field or in the office.

Nothing more serious than the occasional hiccup when an update is released for the mobile app and features are either shuffled around or changed so much they aren't easily uncovered again. Also, if it did more to auto-populate the fields for the name of the person who submitted it, what it pertains to, which software or hardware they're looking for help with, that would be great.

Automatic updates and notifications through email are great for us to keep on top of requirements and notify customers of progress.

Customers do not get regular updates summarising their open tickets and monthly closed tickets. Also the UI could be improved to make it easier to view tickets and update them in order.

Great asset tool and management for the IT department

I don't have any cons about this software

The ticketing system works great you can set categories and customize the SLA's at your convenience and with the reporting tool you can build your own Ticket time tracking charts and accomplishment report of tickets assigned and complete that works great for newly IT departments that want to leverage their support standards. It includes a user portal so people can keep track of their tickets but also allows tickets creation/update via email which makes things so simple for the end user you can customize this portal with the company logo and preset the auto response message using HTML code.
We have been using the inventory feature which is really robust gives plenty details about the IT assets and their warranties. You can set networks scans and Spiceworks will give you very detailed information about everything on your network.

Spiceworks software network management needs a lot of the time it is discovering items that you have no interest in managing remotely and yet it keeps finding stuff and bringing it to your attention. The ability to manually add inventory items gets overlapped for the constant network scanning.
Spiceworks could open up their code a bit more. Since some specific needs that wouldn't be difficult to integrate/allow but that aren't done with the OpenSource collaboration to add more features and solve the lack of some specific UX desirable features.

Community forum. Personally, I consider forums a waste of time since you normally have to look for ages and still never get the answer you need. Communities are based that "someone has experienced this problem before" and is willing to share in all detail what the problem (can be awkward) and share the solution as well.
On the Spiceworks community (cheers!), we have always found answers that you usually only find on paid communities (details, scripts etc). The software (FREE!) gives you a great overview, even if you are spread over multiple locations and/or multiple networks. A complete inventory and a ticketing system that are customisable and ready to integration software and scripts. What more do you want for free?

This is definitely not the worst but it takes a bit of getting used how Spiceworks operates. Like other platforms there is a learning curve. Some integration with other 3rd party software might not be straight forward but then there is the awesome community.

I like that it works well for a small to medium sized environment, I like that it has never crashed or given me a single problem in the five years I've used it as our only help desk ticketing solution, and I like that it costs absolutely nothing. It includes some other features like network monitoring, SNMP monitoring, etc., but we've never used any of those features. If you really need that type of functionality I'd recommend going with a more robust solution built for that purpose. All we needed was something to handle support request tickets and it has been great for that. If you have a very large environment you'll probably want to go with a more robust solution, but for our 100+ users this has been completely fine.

If I had to find something to complain about, I guess I would say that I don't care for the fact that its HTML based and is rendered in a browser window. I'm sure many people don't find this a con, I'm just personally used to working with an application installed locally and find the interface to be a little laggy compared to the snappy performance of something like Autotask. Not much to complain about in a free solution though.

Does a great job of managing our help desk ticketing system. Nobody likes making tickets, but with 4 techs watching the que, problems get resolved faster. We have been using the system for years. Very stable. The inventorying is reasonably robust - will let you quickly spot machines that are not up to spec for a planned upgrade.

The polling and reporting on down devices is weak. You find out a device is down long after it actually went down, and then for DAYS it continues to aleret you the device is down (even though you have brought it back up). If you try and close the ticket, spiceworks gleefully creates another one, even though the problem is long gone.
That said, we did not install this to be a network monitor, so any monitoring functionality is just icing on the cake.

This is a simple software that will allow you to manage the opening and closing of tickets for your organization.

You can keep track of open tickets, assign them and make comments.

All changes in a ticket automatically generate an email to those involved in them.

It also detects on the network new computers, software changes, even can send alerts when there is little tonner in some printer or when there is little disk space on some computer in the network. This can be of great help to an organization's IT teams

It can be difficult to install and configure and help is not always immediate. Apart from this it can be a simple tool for the end user.

Where to begin - there are so many features and services that we have come to rely on in regard to Spiceworks such as:
-Remote data collection on all devices: you can see when a hard drive is out of space before it becomes a problem
-Remote data collection on logs: you can see when someone had some log errors and they don't know about it and you catch a system-wide upgrade issue before it affects everyone
-Software reports: see who has what installed and if it fits in the companies guidelines
-Seamless integration between ticket creation and purchasing.
Also, Vendor participation that allows vendors to directly communicate with the whole community and help out, without all the trouble of phone calling and long wait times.

The only thing we have identified that Spiceworks doesn't do is patch management but word is they are working on that.

Myself and my team have been using Spiceworks for the last 2 years now as our Help Desk Ticketing software solution. We have now also recently changed over to their cloud version of this software which incredibly is also free and still have zero issues with the software. To date, it has never let us down. Spiceworks software delivers all the functionality we need out of a Help Desk Solution and is still running strong for us. We manage over a 500 tickets daily through this software and have never found to have had any technical issues with it.

I do however have only one small issue and that is I wish it had better sorting of submitted tickets and improved search capabilities. Otherwise this software is amazing and only look forward to any future updates they may have for us.

Extremely easy to use as a user and an administrator. Users simply send an email to a pre-defined email address ([email protected]) and a e-ticket is automatically generated. My IT staff receives notifications via email as well as the mobile app. IT Staff is able to assign tickets, respond to users, set categories, etc. very easily. Best of all, it's FREE.

Set up was very difficult. It took us a few attempts to get it working. But once it was up and running, it keeps on going.

The ability to respond to tickets via email with particular commands (such as assigning to a particular person, closing a ticket, etc) is very nice, and the web portal for end users to request support is nicely customizable.

Two features of Spiceworks stand out as the least polished and most frustrating. First is the way the software deals with custom attributes for tickets. This information is tucked away in a secondary menu, cannot be easily included in email notifications of a new ticket, and is very difficult to export in any format that makes it remotely usable. Second is the confusing way that IT staff received notifications about activities on particularly tickets, and the inability of the software to consistently CC administrators based on the content or attributes of the tickets. I have spend many hours trying to fine-tune the settings to make sure that my fellow admins and IT techs are not bombarded with emails while also getting notifications about tickets that are relevant to their work, but have given up at this point.

It is a Swiss Army knife for network administrators allowing inventory, equipment monitoring and failure tracking and activities within the same package. It is great to be able to have everything you need within reach of an IP address, in addition to being able to receive as many notifications as you want and of what you want within the operation of the network.

The hardware requirements are many, leaving out all those equipment with few features. Although software as such does not merit investment, it concentrates on the necessary hardware.

I like that Spiceworks IT Help Desk lets me work with customers through a ticket system, so I can stay organised versus answering and tracking individual emails. It also gives a notification when there is a new ticket or a message that has been waiting over 24 hours.

It is a little difficult to use and figure out the menus of the helpdesk system, and also every page seems to have to reload and does not work very quickly.

Tickets can be auto-created upon email receipt as well as direct-upload to the Spiceworks portal. The former makes it much easier for users in more of a hurry to get their request in.

Linking tickets to other tickets (sub-tickets) can make for a somewhat confusing ticket tree. Could be more intuitive.

The ease of putting in tickets and meeting resolution target without much communication loss is imperative to all IT operations.

So i used the free version of the software being in a start up environment, that being said the software has a ton of adds.

Its somehow easy to use, as IT Sysadmin level 3, I find it somehow easy to use. But when we gave access to non technical persons they take several days to start getting comfortable with them.

Its quick, has a lot of options and we have it integrated with emails. So, just sending an email to an account will generate the ticket and even assign the IT based on the CC. thats a great time-saving option and super easy for end users to open a ticket. Imaging ask an end user to go to a page, do several clicks, fill a form, to open a ticket about change the computer time. They will never do that. So we love spiceworks.

Not so easy to use for non tech people. Even if you go to the home page and log in, its hard to find the IT Help Desk section, you need to give them the direct link to it, or they will expend an hour to find it. (happen several times).

Spiceworks has an excellent product that is continuously evolving. The full featured suite give any IT professional the ability to use one module, several modules, or all the modules to meet their needs. New versions come out at least once a year with updates more frequently.

Part of the evolution has been to a hosted, cloud based solution as an option for IT professionals who don't want to pay to host the server in their own environment.

The product is and always will be free. The online forum boasts more than 2 million members with the employees actively involved in the social portal. The vendors that are part of the community are very helpful and many have a dedicated employee who actively monitors their portion of the forum, ready to help.

Finally, the company hosts a great convention every year in Austin Texas which is always very well attended.

Spiceworks moves the product forward, but sometimes they don't come back to the basics of what makes the software great. Adding new features can be a plus, but enhancing old features is very important as well.