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Spiceworks vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

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 (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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%, up from 1.4% 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

"The capabilities, ease of use and price point (free) made Spiceworks the obvious choice for us."
"If you want an all in one solution for your IT to support your company, Spiceworks has a nice built in integrated system."
"Customer Service: Pretty good, but some issues were unresolvable."
"The solution is very stable. It's reliable and efficient."
"The solution is easy to use and easy to manage."
"Well at the end if you are new to the field of IT, and have a small to medium sized company, do not hesitate to give Spiceworks a shot, its real easy (with no steep learning curve as Nagios), with excellent features and support."
"Its perfect for a start-up/small/medium company where you are trying to get the most out of a software package with as little cost as possible; and how can you go wrong with a free, stable and very useful software?"
"This is a great service desk product for SMB's."
"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."
"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."
"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."
"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."
 

Cons

"I do remember the process for adding an SSL certificate to be a little convoluted."
"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."
"Attachment handling within a ticket could be improved; only one item can be attached at a time unless email is used."
"Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need."
"For now this suits our needs, although a Linux version would also be a great improvement."
"I would like to see more information when drilling down into access permissions, assignments management, or tagging."
"I would like to see more information when drilling down into access permissions, assignments management, or tagging. When I click a note or a device, I should be able to see more details about the router and modem. For example, I want to see the version, downtime, availability, latency, etc. I should have easy access to everything about our assets at a glance."
"The stability is lacking; we have to restart the software about one or two times a week."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."
"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."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."
"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."
"The product is free! Get it now."
"It's free."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"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."
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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
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.