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Spiceworks vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Spiceworks
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
44th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (14th), IT Asset Management (12th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (18th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Spiceworks is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.5%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.5%
Spiceworks0.7%
Other97.8%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Rohit Samel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AS
Consultant at HCLTech
Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 most valuable features are the inventory and personalization."
"Spiceworks managed all tasks of the company on a daily routine, helping track priorities, knowledge base, and manage the incoming tickets from customers and inside projects, giving the employees one place to observe the correct state of the company productivity."
"The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free."
"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."
"SpiceWorks is an easy to install and maintain inventory and help desk system for SMBs and it's free!"
"Tickets by e-mail, with actions by hastag."
"Considering this is AdWare this is a very good product with all the right tools for a medium sized IT department."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"Using Wavefront, we have been able to reduce the complexity of our pipeline."
"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."
 

Cons

"I would like the solution to allow for more direct interaction with computers. I can open tickets and I can see their status, but I can't interact directly with the computers themselves."
"The stability is lacking; we have to restart the software about one or two times a week."
"The customer service is okay, however, I would appreciate much more clarity on what I want to know exactly."
"The only issue encountered was setting up the email server information."
"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 think its monitoring tools could use some improvement."
"The area I have always struggled with is the network scanning and asset management parts of the program."
"The main issue we had with the Spiceworks was always performance related."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"VMware technical support has declined since the Broadcom acquisition. Previously, they were more focused on issue resolution, but now they prioritize licensing verification before providing support."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."
"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's free."
"The tool is cheap."
"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."
"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."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Spiceworks?
I am unable to provide suggestions for improvement at this moment, however, I can provide feedback later. Currently, there do not seem to be any issues.
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, we will ensure it is provided.
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 with Channel Partners. Whenever we are posting any query or reply on a ticket, i...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Spiceworks vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.