Spiceworks Reviews

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.

• Help desk/service desk (ticketing tool)
• Inventory
• Reports
• Analysis
• Dashboards
• Device/network overview

• The control over IT organisation, understanding of issues & problems
• Control over change
• Possibility to measure internal SLA's
• Possibility to protectively address issues, and get an understanding of reoccurring problems
• Measures the IT organization and business organization skills
• It's a good tool to build a good foundation for release management on
• It's a good tool to build a good foundation for service management on
• Alerts give us a direct overview of issues in our environment

The social and collaborative tools, such as integration to LYNC, Yammer, or equivalents.

I've been using it for two years, and the Spiceworks Network Monitor (7/10) for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Over 10/10 as the user network is incredibly active.

Technical Support:

I've never had to use it.

It costs nothing, but I see Spiceworks as a gateway tool. Learn the ropes of service & operation management in a free tool, then switch to a more advanced tool afterwards if necessary.

It's totally straightforward, and you can do it with your internal resources, without training or support.

It was all done in-house.

This is difficult too measure as it's a free tool.

It's free.

We also looked at ServiceNow.

Have a good understanding of what you need and for your IT strategy. Focus on service management, train in service management then implement this tool.

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.

SpiceWorks is an easy to install and maintain inventory and help desk system for SMBs and it's free! It provides a portal capability for users to submit tickets and FAQs. On the IT side, the ticketing system is simple to use and allows for basic time and cost tracking. The inventory system scans for hardware and software on the network and is helpful in tracking compliance and warranties. A flexible reporting system allows you to run reports on anything in the SpiceWorks database. It has remote monitors that allow you to inventory equipment in remote offices. The online SpiceWorks community is also fantastic for dealing with all sorts of IT issues.

The help desk ticketing system is functional but fairly basic. You can close tickets but there is no way to indicate whether the issue was actually resolve or not. The hardware and software inventory is decent and doesn't require an agent but it's easy to have some applications counted several times from an inventory perspective because of versions, service packs, and updates. I would like more control over linking updates and service packs back to their parent application.

When I moved from a large organization to a small SMB, I missed our tools that did IT inventory management and help desk ticketing. SpiceWorks has done an excellent job at filling that gap at a near zero cost. It's not perfect but it gives me great visibility into what's happening on the systems on my network and gives me the ability to track and report on IT-related issues. I'm very impressed with the product and highly recommend it to those that don't have a budget for IT inventory control and help desk software.

Spiceworks is for the IT guy that wants to monitor systems that he doesn't have a managed service partner behind him. And that's where Spiceworks has a really good place.

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. This is a nice thing to have. I think it's getting better at discovering network equipment.

There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution. So you don't get near the quality of discovery versus something that's got an agent on it. It's not really multi-tenant, in the sense that you couldn't use Spiceworks to manage multiple clients from the same console. I think if they had a paid subscription for the support it would be nice. I'd rather pay so much per asset per month to be able to pick up the phone and call them.

I have been using Spiceworks for ten years. I know it very intimately.

I think we did have some trouble, but it was not really the fault of Spiceworks. It was more the way that we reconfigured our firewalls and ports, so it couldn't discover the many things. And with all this stuff going on with ransomware and stuff like that, it's going to be challenging for all of those companies to be able to browse a network, including your network equipment, but not allowing any ports open. It's kind of difficult.

It is pretty easy to expand so it is very scalable.

That's another downside with Spiceworks. You can't really call Spiceworks. You can go to the community and you can ask questions, but you can't pick up the phone and call a number. I'd rather pay so much per asset per month to be able to pick up the phone and call them.

I looked at about 10 different systems, Lansweeper being one. SysAid, Samanage.

Very easy to setup, download the install file, it determines the IP range and away you go.

No, the last install I did of Spiceworks, which was for a customer, they're running it no problem. It's self-sufficient.

The cost could be recouped within a few months. I resolved a very critical issue a client was facing after doing a major "non-roll-back" upgrade, comparing working system vs non working systems we were able to determine the a IE patch was causing the issue and through to tool were pushed out the new update and resolved the problem within a few hours. Without SpiceWorks all 300 systems would have had to be touched. 

I have used a product called SAManage and implemented it at a number of clients and it worked really well.

So Spiceworks would have an even more market share if they had a paid subscription model because you could turn off all the advertising that pops up all the time. But I think in general, I would give it a seven on a scale of ten compared to some of the other mid-tier stuff.

On-premises

The help desk feature is by far the most valuable. It is easy to use and offers lots of features for different types of organizations.

I have used this product at two different organizations. At Addison Community Schools I introduced Spiceworks as an easy to use Help Desk solution that came with no cost and minimal setup. It revolutionized the way support requests were handled. Before Spiceworks it was a strictly email or word of mouth support system. Not very efficient at all.

The area I have always struggled with is the network scanning and asset management parts of the program.

I've used it for eight years.

Deployment is simple. It requires installation and some key configs like SMTP/POP services for email interactions.

Stability has been a problem only a few times but barely a blip.

I went from an organization serving 100 employees to one serving over 500 employees and saw no issues.

Most of the tech support for Spiceworks is via their forums which are very active and very helpful.

The initial set-up really is very easy. Again, some SMTP/POP stuff is about as tough as it gets.

I implemented it in-house but there are vendors that will do implementation if you want to pay for it. I think that the typical Spiceworks user is going to end up implementing on their own. My advice is to test it. Everything is free so no harm in downloading and installing on a virtual server.

ROI is hard to determine because the product is free but what I can say is that the value is huge.

I have evaluated several help desk products and it comes down to overall value. I never made the change because the products I looked at didn't offer enough value to justify their cost.

Spiceworks gives you a very good but basic help desk platform that is easy to implement and use. The development is regular and updates happen often. They are constantly adding features and making the product better.

From what I know, the software has a very vast range of functionalities but what we mainly used it for was for incident/ticket management and network hardware & software inventory (workstations, laptops, licenses, IPs, etc.).

Before implementing Spiceworks we had to manage all our incidents through email. This was pretty tiresome and time consuming and so, as time passed and the company grew larger, we realized that we were working in an inefficient manner and that incident management itself was something that was draining precious time. After the software got deployed it all became much faster, easier and more organized. By collecting and classifying emails, it helped us greatly in areas such as: ticket assignment, team & individual workload measurements, incident takeover, information transparency and follow up with the users (clients), etc.

Personally, I haven't used it in over an year, I haven't got to see the latest updates or major releases but if there's something I'd improve about version 5.x is its scalability.

I've used this software for about a year and a half during some of the time I've spent as a HelpDesk Specialist.

Only issue was with scalability. After some time, as the back-end DB grew bigger, the solution started to perform slower. In the end we even had to reset the DB and archive the old one so it could run smoothly again.

I don't really have that much experience on that side with the product, but from what I remember you could usually find a lot of useful tips, tricks and even solutions to issues on public forums and even in the software's documentation.

Before and even after implementing Spiceworks we've been working with HP Service Manager. Although a classic in incident management software, it was sort of avoided by users (clients) because they considered it to be way harder and slower to use than emails. Once we implemented Spiceworks to collect user incident mails, HP Service Manager started to be avoided even more from our internal clients.

I wasn't involved.

Implementation was done in-house by my team's technical coordinator.

If you've got a small to medium sized company (<500 employees and <500 network objects) than this software can really cut time for some of your Help Desk and even Sys Admin operations and optimize Incident Management in your team.