BMC FootPrints Service Core vs Spiceworks comparison

Why PeerSpot?

BMC Helix and Spiceworks are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. BMC Helix is ranked #29, while Spiceworks is ranked #15 with an average rating of 9.0. Additionally, 90% of BMC Helix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of Spiceworks users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Spiceworks and BMC FootPrints Service Core are both IT service management tools designed to enhance ticket management and infrastructure efficiency. While Spiceworks offers competitive pricing and support options attractive to budget-conscious organizations, BMC FootPrints Service Core provides a comprehensive set of features that appeal to businesses seeking robust capabilities.

Features: Spiceworks is favored for its network monitoring, help desk capabilities, and integrated knowledge base, which are ideal for small to medium enterprises. It offers a simple ticketing system and effective network scanning. BMC FootPrints Service Core stands out with its ITIL compliance, detailed project management tools, and robust automation capabilities, addressing the needs of larger organizations with more intricate requirements.

Room for Improvement: Spiceworks could enhance its inventory accuracy and reporting features, while users note that its user interface could be more intuitive. Integration capabilities with external systems also present an opportunity for improvement. BMC FootPrints Service Core might improve its deployment complexity and provide more straightforward customization options. Additionally, its user interface could benefit from being more streamlined.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spiceworks is applauded for its easy and rapid deployment, supported by a large, active user community. This setup is advantageous for businesses looking for minimal setup time. BMC FootPrints Service Core, although it involves a more complex installation process, benefits from professional customer service that provides guidance and support during the setup phase.

Pricing and ROI: Spiceworks is notable for being a cost-effective solution, offering significant ROI for smaller businesses with virtually no cost barriers. BMC FootPrints Service Core, despite its higher initial cost, provides extensive ROI through its comprehensive feature set, which is valuable to enterprises prepared to invest in enhanced functionality.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. Spiceworks Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. Spiceworks

September 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash

Management Consultant at Accenture

Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions

Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.

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reviewer1765752

System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

A flexible, comprehensive, integrated IT service and asset management platform with good technical support

We use BMC FootPrints Service Core to manage network issues, infrastructure issues, software issues, and ERP. We also use it to manage our facility. So, we do some work orders and also use it as an extra ticketing system Technical support is good. It would be better if it were more…

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Rohit Samel

Account Manager Enterprise Sales at Navdeep Technologies Pvt.Ltd

Cloud storage with no hardware needed and great comprehensive reports

The software is cloud-based, so I do not need to store any data locally. It is a fully software-based solution, eliminating the need for investment in hardware. We have the capability to create reports as needed. It is good software to use, as there were no incidents where I needed to contact technical support. Additionally, it is free software.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"IQ Bots are extremely powerful. We are using them increasingly more where we're about to look through a lot unstructured sources, like PDF documents, scanned images, contracts, etc. We are able to take the data out, then use that toward processing structured data and creating insights for our clients."

"This solution is valuable because it can automate tasks which would otherwise be left for us to process manually."

"It's very easy for business users to learn Automation Anywhere."

"Our workforce has limited capacity, and by adding this solution we can increase the amount of work coming in without adding to our workforce."

"In my case in particular, I come from a business background, not an IT background. So, it sort of speaks for itself that I was able to pickup its functionality and how it works. In the space of two years time, I've gone from a junior developer to a senior specialist. So, it really speaks for itself in terms of being user-friendly."

"Sometimes the customer will not provide any data. Using Automation Anywhere, we can easily automate to capture the customer data. Then, we can use that customer data inside the Cisco Unified Wire Voice Portal."

"Removing manual tasks has been beneficial. It works effectively."

"We offer them a cost and time-effective solution for repeated and time-consuming processes, which surely help a lot in terms of improving quality."

More Automation Anywhere pros

"Technical support is good."

"I like the fact that FootPrints is a relational database, so every item in the database can be linked to another. This helps create history and audit trails for each CI."

"We use BMC FootPrints Service Core to manage network issues, infrastructure issues, software issues, ERP, and our facility, using it for work orders and as an extra ticketing system."

"Implemented system-wide process for approving and tracking "employee move" requests for over 15,000 employees."

"It's extremely stable; we've got customers who are mobile telecommunication customers, hospitals, power companies, and an airport, and we can handle the volume with no interruptions where instability would really be unacceptable."

"I feel confident in saying that BMC FootPrints Service Core is definitely one of the best products in the market."

"Now all IT related issues, problems, changes and even projects are more controlled using Footprints."

"Having a one stop shop for linked assets and tickets has improved end user adoption and led to a reduction in phone/email tickets."

More BMC FootPrints Service Core pros

"Tickets by e-mail, with actions by hastag."

"It’s fantastic because its free to use and easy to set-up in house, but it’s quite sluggish on the administrator end, but considering its free you cannot complain."

"The documentation is also very helpful in figuring out the product."

"The ROI is high as we only divert one small VM server that needs little maintenance and is worry free."

"It shows the users that are currently logged in, which is not something that Active Directory by default will ever let you know up front."

"If you are a small – medium sized business you cannot go wrong with using Spiceworks to help you provide an A+ IT support as it is free."

"It's easy to understand."

"Spiceworks is generic and free."

More Spiceworks pros

Cons

"Automation Anywhere is a fantastic platform, but I rate it nine because I see one scope of improvement."

"The version that I used (10.3) was not that stable. It easily crashed in-between processes."

"From my experience, for a normal automation-related task, Automation Anywhere is a good tool, but currently the world is moving toward AI, Gen-AI, and code-based agents; I feel that Automation Anywhere is lagging behind in the AI realm."

"I really appreciate the user interface of Automation Anywhere, but I would like to see some improvement on some of the automation around screen processing. This includes adding some artificial intelligence on the way that bots actually can read the screen and know when things change and be able to adapt to those changes."

"As far as stability is concerned, there have been some challenges. Sometimes, we experience our computers freezing up for no apparent reason or the network being inaccessible."

"The schedule queue needs improvement. When one task fails, everything else gets stuck, requiring manual intervention to clear the problematic schedule and trigger the other tasks."

"Investment effect is almost none, unfortunately."

"Automation Anywhere can be improved with respect to the user-friendliness of the interface because most of the competitors are now using a flowchart-like structure, thus making it easy for anyone to learn and study it."

More Automation Anywhere cons

"There are still a few odd issues in FootPrints 12.x, which are frustrating."

"Reporting could be improved along with the option to create more fine tuned reports and to create specific fields for each type of ticket."

"Sometimes it is difficult to make the application do exactly what you need."

"The mobile version of this product does not support asset management."

"It would be nice if they added the ability to go directly to a form via a deep link URL."

"It is pretty clunky and not very intuitive. Even though I have used it for many years, I don't think it is a very good ITSM platform in general."

"Hyphens are not allowed in the quick search bar. This has created a problem in our environment where we use hyphens in our asset names."

"To improve the product for our usage, the pricing maybe could be a bit lower."

More BMC FootPrints Service Core cons

"One of the biggest ways in which Spiceworks could improve is by developing better and more automated workflows."

"Once a device was recognized on the network, Spiceworks never got rid of it even after you took it off the network. You had to go in and manually remove it."

"It would be nice to connect multi Spiceworks servers together to get all of the information across different sites."

"I think its monitoring tools could use some improvement."

"Deployment is easy but getting the full details on every networked component can be a challenge."

"The issue that we had, that caused us to stop using Spiceworks, was that it didn’t seem designed for a help desk of our scale, and we're a company with over 2500 employees."

"I would like to see the help desk product be more stable."

"Attachment handling within a ticket could be improved; only one item can be attached at a time unless email is used."

More Spiceworks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I feel the cost of licensing is very high for the A2019 version."

"Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even."

"The Automation Anywhere license is affordable and not complex."

"The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option."

"We're just starting to renew our license, and we were quoted $115,000 without the IQ Bot. The IQ Bot is another $30,000. This is with very limited pages, as we go through our first projects. The majority of the cost was for ten days of onsite training."

"It's the best RPA tool, but the pricing could be improved."

"It is expensive. Automation Anywhere has reduced the price slightly, as we have grown. However, the price is still excessive enough that we are engaged in PoCs on other tools."

"Yearly, our licensing costs are about $90,000 to $100,000. There will be additional licensing costs when we add more Bot Runners to our infrastructure."

More Automation Anywhere pricing and cost advice

"Our costs are well over $250,000."

"Cost was on par with other service desk products, and well below Remedy, while still being a BMC product."

"This solution has good pricing."

"The licensing for FootPrints is a perpetual license with an annual support fee."

"It's free."

"It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."

"The product is free! Get it now."

"The tool is cheap."

"Seeing that it is a low-cost solution, I would advise you to go ahead with Spiceworks and experiment with it to see if you can get things working properly, especially if you currently don't have any existing service desk software in place."

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Comparison Review

it_user174738

IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 31, 2015

Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor

I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Construction Company

20%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

14%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	162
Midsize Enterprise	86
Large Enterprise	564

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...

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How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...

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How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.

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What needs improvement with Spiceworks?

I am unable to provide suggestions for improvement at this moment, however, I can provide feedback later. Currently, ...

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What is your primary use case for Spiceworks?

If our customers need backup support, we can work with them and provide it. Whatever solution the customer requires, ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Spiceworks?

It performs its intended functions. We may use it, but perhaps not for ourselves, but for our customers, potentially ...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automation Anywhere

October 2026

Download Automation Anywhere product report

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

October 2026

Download BMC FootPrints Service Core product report

Buyer's Guide

Spiceworks

October 2026

Download Spiceworks product report

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

FootPrints Service Core

No data available

Interactive Demo

Automation Anywhere

Demo not available

BMC Helix

Demo not available

Spiceworks

Overview

Automation Anywhere offers ease of use, robust system connectivity, and GenAI-driven document automation through a cloud-native platform, significantly enhancing productivity across multiple industries with advanced AI features.

Delivering a comprehensive suite of tools designed for easy integration and rapid deployment, Automation Anywhere drives efficiency by reducing costs and automating repetitive tasks. Its cloud-native platform supports broad industry adoption, including advanced AI features like process automation and Co-Pilot, streamlining complex workflows with minimal technical skills required. Users benefit from robust integration capabilities, which facilitate seamless interaction with multiple systems. However, there is room for improvement in areas such as user-friendliness for beginners, stability, flexible licensing, and enhanced OCR functionality. Organizations in sectors such as banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare gain from the improved operational efficiency and ROI Automation Anywhere offers.

What are the important features of Automation Anywhere?

Ease of Use: Simplifies automation tasks with a user-centric interface.
Robust Connectivity: Provides seamless integration with multiple systems.
GenAI-Driven Document Automation: Leverages AI to automate document management.
Process Automation & Co-Pilot: Enhances workflow automation with advanced AI.
Cloud-Native Platform: Enables rapid deployment and integration.

What benefits should be evaluated in reviews?

Time Savings: Automation drastically reduces manual processing time.
Cost Efficiency: Decreases overall operational costs by automating tasks.
Productivity Enhancement: Streamlines workflows with AI-driven tools.
Improved Integration: Enhances ability to work with multiple systems.
Scalability: Supports growth with a flexible cloud-native architecture.

In the insurance industry, Automation Anywhere is utilized for automating processes such as enrollment management and compliance checks. Its applications extend to supply chain management, financial transactions, and business performance monitoring across sectors like banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, helping organizations to automate routine tasks, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Automation Anywhere

BMC FootPrints Service Core is a comprehensive tool that aids in incident, problem, and change management while offering customizable views and integration options.

Valued for its customizable home views and flexible database relations, BMC FootPrints Service Core excels in stability and responsive technical support. With capabilities for email automation, survey integration, and report creation, it enhances IT service management and business process efficiency. The solution supports ticket status updates with minimal downtime and accommodates multiple administrators across workspaces. Pink Elephant certification and smart IT features broaden its appeal for IT departments.

What are the key features of BMC FootPrints Service Core?

Incident Management: Tracks and resolves service desk tickets efficiently.
Problem Management: Identifies and mitigates underlying issues to prevent recurrence.
Change Management: Helps assess and handle changes seamlessly in the environment.
Customizable Views: Offers tailored dashboards for user-specific information.
Email Automation: Facilitates swift communication and response handling.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Stable Performance: Ensures reliable operation for consistent IT services.
Responsive Support: Provides timely technical assistance to resolve issues.
Administrative Flexibility: Allows versatile control across different workspaces.

In industries like IT services and HR, BMC FootPrints Service Core supports managing service desk tickets, tracking assets, and resolving issues in network, infrastructure, and software areas. Its functionalities also extend to HR issue tracking, service requests, and contract management, facilitating both on-premises deployments and ITIL process implementations such as Service Request and Service Catalog Management.

BMC Helix

Spiceworks is a freeware IT management tool offering efficient ticketing systems and inventory management with Active Directory integration, making it user-friendly and effective for network monitoring.

Spiceworks supports IT teams with device management and network visibility through strong community backing, ease of use, and comprehensive features like reporting and asset tracking. Its cost-effectiveness is attractive, though users seek improvements such as more customization, better ticketing, enhanced stability, and improved integration capabilities. Security, performance, and scalability are key focuses for enhancement.

What are the key features of Spiceworks?

Ticketing System: Simplifies incident logging and service requests.
Inventory Management: Tracks IT assets efficiently.
Network Monitoring: Offers reliable network oversight.
Active Directory Integration: Seamless integration for user management.
Community Support: Access to troubleshooting and insights.
Reporting: Facilitates in-depth analysis through reports.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Cost-Effectiveness: Lowers expenses for IT management.
Ease of Integration: Fits smoothly into existing systems.
Improved IT Support: Enhances incident response and monitoring.
Global Collaboration: Facilitates network management across locations.
Resource Efficiency: Streamlines operational tasks for IT teams.

In many industries, Spiceworks is utilized for managing infrastructure, facilitating network oversight, and documenting IT services. Teams efficiently manage networks globally, monitor devices like routers and switches, and provide IT support without reliance on managed service vendors, making integration straightforward.

Spiceworks

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics

Cast & Crew

Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino

Buyer's Guide

BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. Spiceworks

September 2026

Free Report: BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. Spiceworks

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