Spiceworks Reviews

• Network
• Helpdesk

Tracking common issues has been improved.

I don't really use anything besides the free stuff so I can't say. It does, however, require help-desk and minor server/firewall config XP experience to set up.

I've used it for two years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with its stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

I've never had to contact them.

I've never had to contact them.

It's straightforward, anybody with help-desk and minor server/firewall config XP could set this up.

I did it myself after reading the FAQs on their website.

We use the free version.

Start with the free version for at least a month before deciding to buy add-ons.

The price, as it's free.

To be honest, it is better than nothing, but my experience gives me bad feedback for this product.

In our environment, no real improvement. This product is probably very good for a small structure.

Personally more than one year, but my company has used it for three years.

No deployment is needed. Installation when you don’t have a problem is really easy.

Yes, too many. We tried it on a VM, but we had to reboot every 2 days. We migrated it on a real server, new installation, etc., but despite the fact that the server resources are really over-scaled (8GB ram, disk 15,000 rpm, etc.), we still have problems, slowness, stability, crashes, etc. The only positive is that we do not have to reboot every 2 days. It's sometimes 2 weeks before we have a problem.

I should admit that forums are very responsive, even if solutions are not always possible or if, like in the free world, some post/request remain abandoned sometimes for months.

I should admit that forums are very responsive, even if solutions are not always possible or if, like in the free world, some post/request remain abandoned sometimes for months.

I don't know the reason for change. We try now to convince our management to get a real pro product. Many arguments are available.

• Inventory
• Ticketing

We use Spiceworks to inventory all of our workstations. We use a Dymo labeller to print both a bar-code and a QR code that links back to the Spiceworks URL for that device. Our techs can use the Spiceworks mobile app and their phones’ built-in camera to bring up all the details of a machine in under a minute.

The folks at Spiceworks are constantly expanding the capabilities of their product by partnering and integrating with other vendors. I would love for this trend to continue until Spiceworks has ability to act as an IDS/IPS system all in one. Alienvault alerts have recently been added that bring this vision closer to reality. I would also love to see performance monitoring (think Zabbix) capabilities as well.

We've used it for over four years.

We have no issues with the deployment.

We have no issues with the stability.

We had no issues with the scalability. As we’ve expanded, we’ve had to add additional resources to the Spiceworks VM. However, the latter is a very typical scenario when business growth causes the demands on a software application to increase.

10/10 - I haven’t had many issues over the years, but I do remember posting about having connectivity trouble with a Spiceworks remote agent. I received a timely response and the issue was ultimately resolved.

I evaluated Microsoft Service Manager and ZenDesk, but I settled on Spiceworks. The capabilities, ease of use and price point (free) made Spiceworks the obvious choice for us.

The installation was relatively straightforward. I do remember the process for adding an SSL certificate to be a little convoluted.

In house. I recommend dedicating a VM. Use standard ports, 80 and 443 for the webserver and leverage DNS to configure access to Spiceworks via a “user friendly” hostname.

ROI is almost immediate because Spiceworks is free and the only investment is time.

The Spiceworks community is a great value add. It certainly helps our team to keep tabs on the industry as a whole. I encourage IT veterans and newbies alike to join and participate.

The customization of the service desk. We set it up for use by different departments that had specific tracking needs and were able to meet those needs.

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.

It was used for about a year or a year and a half, I think.

We had no deployment issues.

I don’t know the technical details, but I know that stability became a huge issue after about eight months especially as we began to become more sophisticated in how we used the system.

We had issues with scaling it for our company of over 2500 people.

I never really interacted with them.

I never really interacted with them.

I can’t speak about the technical side of the set-up, but the initial customizations were fairly straightforward.

We didn't use it in-house.

The major “selling” point for Spiceworks was that it was free.

It worked for what we needed it to do (short term at least) and had good customization, but in the end it wasn't the right fit for our organization. Perform a lot of testing.

• Change management
• Inventory

It's got great potential, but too many security and resource issues. It needs lower resource consumption at the workstation level, reduced network traffic, better device discovery and identification.

We've used it since 2009.

There were issues with the deployment.

There were issues with the stability.

There were issues with the scalability.

Pretty good, but some issues were unresolvable.

Pretty good, but some issues were unresolvable.

I didn't pick it, it was done by senior IT management.

It's fairly straightforward.

Perform a thorough test and mind your resource usage.

In addition to being free, it has a simple modular design with a lot of extensibility – although the plug-in format has recently changed and it has been difficult getting information on the new process.

When I began my current professional role, there was no formal method for tracking user requests. Exchange Public Folders were used and the promise of SCCM integration was being made. We very quickly needed a low-to-no cost way to improve accountability and tracking of open incidents/requests. Spiceworks offered everything we needed and more, and has improved response times to staff as well as providing an audit trail and growing database of information that can be referenced when similar problems arise.

I would like to see an easier means to customize the user interface, and would gladly pay a reasonable licensing fee if this were available as an additional feature. Attachment handling within a ticket could be improved; only one item can be attached at a time unless email is used. Finally, a way to strip selected blocks of text/images from emails would be huge; graphic attachments in email signatures create a mess in the UI.

We've used it for three and a half years.

The deployment is excellent.

The stability is excellent, but it can be affected by poorly written 3rd party add-ins, so beware.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Tech support - for a free product - is amazing and responsive. They treat me better than some vendors who have expensive maintenance agreements in place.

I have used several ticketing systems in my career, including CA.

Set-up is pretty simple – configuring email is probably the most complex piece.

I personally handled the implementation. Create a special mailbox/mail account specifically for your help desk and let Spiceworks handle the rest. It’s good!

There was no investment, and we did not attempt to measure the cost savings resulting from the implementation.

It's free.

Spiceworks does wonders for a free product. It’s ad supported, so watch for that. It is also flexible and customizable and probably does everything you need. Support is great, and that frankly was a surprise.

The help desk ticketing system is of the most value to us, also the knowledge-base and network scanning is used often.

The ease of using the ticketing system has formalized or project and process work a great deal, because now we have an easy to use central location to store ticket related data.

I’d like to see a more formalized classification system for tickets that would allow me to analyze where (on what functions) our team is spending most of the time and resources.

We have used Spiceworks for three years – transferred from SysAid.

Spiceworks could improve the upgrade procedure. It regularly fails and we have to use the workaround to get a new version installed.

It regularly fails when we're upgrading.

We've had no issues scaling it.

Very good – the community is very fast to respond and is full of professionals.

Before Spiceworks we used SysAid which was quite good also, but not worth the extra money compared to Spiceworks.

Initial set-up is very straightforward – any semi-pro can do it in an hour or so.

We implemented it in-house. There's no ned to use an outside contractor because the setup is very easy and you learn a great deal by doing it yourself.

ROI is very good since this is AdWare software.

Considering this is AdWare this is a very good product with all the right tools for a medium sized IT department. I would recommend it for any IT department that has less than 20 members.

The value is in the free IT help-desk and inventory. All IT departments, big or small, even single man, need to keep accurate records of their work, and Spiceworks polished interface and continued development allow you to setup up a server and scanning with minimal configuration.

Active directory support ensures you can import all of your users, and easily scan your AD assets. You also have a direct feed to the community right in your help desk. The Spiceworks community is one of, if not the best community of IT professionals. More times than I can count, I’ve looked to the community for solutions to problems, proof of concepts, projects ideas and advice.

Even after our organization stopped using Spiceworks, I still encourage my team to frequent the community and look there for ideas, solutions or even feedback.

Before Spiceworks, my current organization used Librum Helpdesk. The last revision for Librum was in 2002, so when we moved to Spiceworks, it was like coming out of the dark ages. Spiceworks allowed us to keep notes on all of our vendors.

These notes slowly turned into our knowledgebase (before Spiceworks developed their *actual* knowledge base). It also allowed us to get an active inventory of most of our assets and be able to add notes to them, such as identify their owner, purchase date and price as well as preventative maintenance frequencies.

The only real gripe I have would be the stability. See below.

We used Spiceworks at our organization for about three to four years, and racked up about 10,000 tickets in the database.

We had no issues with the deployment.

As our database grew in size, so did the frequency we had to restart the application on the server. Spiceworks had a memory leak that would eventually bog down the server it was on and force us to restart the service, which would take about 45 to 60+ minutes. Obviously these restarts never came at optimal times. By the time we were getting ready to retire Spiceworks, we were restarting the service twice a month.

There were no issues with the scalability.

The community is the only way to get support questions answered, as there is no “formal” support. However, the community has a wealth of knowledge, and Spiceworks Professionals do chime in as well.

Eventually we ended up going with BMC Track-It!, as some colleagues had experience with the product and we were looking for something with change management and ITILv3 compliance built in.

I still believe Spiceworks is a great help desk for a Level 1, 2 and even 3 IT department. (See Gartners “Maturity Levels of an Information Technology department.)

The initial set-up is straightforward, however, customizing the program for your organizations needs will take some time. Things like ticket fields, definitions, custom fields in tickets and inventory. While this will take time, it’s also a reason why Spiceworks works so well, it’s very customizable. Start with the help-desk.

The previous IT Manager handled most of the initial setup, but my advice would be to spin up a virtual machine and take a crack at it first. Stay as vanilla as possible. Try reproducing your current solution, or as close as you can get, starting with the help desk. Then move to inventory, user portal, etc. Then start utilizing features you didn’t have and implementing them. It is a very complex process migrating a help desk, so be sure to take your time and test.

Licensing is free and pricing is non-existent, unless you want an ad-free experience. Paid support is not an option, only community support (which is pretty good).

Being a free product, it’s really hard to criticize, as it has many excellent features, such as inventory with asset scanning, purchase tracking and the ability to add plug-in’s created by the Spiceworks community that can add even more functionality. Ultimately, we stopped using Spiceworks, as a new IT Director came on board and we decided to move to a product that supported change management and could conform to ITIL v3 standards. Spiceworks is a great, free product. Any IT department that doesn't have a solid help-desk/knowledge-base solution would be amiss not to implement it.