"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"It lets us know whether devices are getting out of date and tracked warranties. Spiceworks also gave me visibility in terms of what software was installed on each device and its status."
"The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space."
"Spiceworks is generic and free."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution."
"Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable."
"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."
Pandora FMS is ranked 20th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 2 reviews while Spiceworks is ranked 37th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 3 reviews. Pandora FMS is rated 9.0, while Spiceworks is rated 6.0. The top reviewer of Pandora FMS writes "Super stable, very flexible, feature-rich, competitive price, and does the job". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Spiceworks writes "Helpful for ticketing and visibility, but doesn't remove unused devices automatically". Pandora FMS is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios Core, SolarWinds NPM, Amazon CloudWatch and PRTG Network Monitor, whereas Spiceworks is most compared with Zabbix, SolarWinds NPM, JIRA Service Management, Lansweeper and ServiceNow. See our Pandora FMS vs. Spiceworks report.
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