Spiceworks vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

Spiceworks and Progress Software are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Spiceworks is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.5, while Progress Software is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.7. Spiceworks holds a 0.5% mindshare in IM, compared to Progress Software’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Spiceworks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

Spiceworks

Read 47 Spiceworks reviews

2,634 Views
1,027 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

WhatsUp Gold

Read 25 WhatsUp Gold reviews

5,476 Views
2,355 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Spiceworks

WhatsUp Gold

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Spiceworks and WhatsUp Gold compete in the IT management and network monitoring category. WhatsUp Gold appears to have the advantage with more comprehensive features suitable for larger networks.

Features: Spiceworks is known for its help desk and inventory management tailored to small and medium-sized businesses. It offers simplicity, network scanning capabilities, and a user-friendly ticketing system. WhatsUp Gold provides detailed network monitoring, server health tracking, and dynamic topology mapping.

Room for Improvement: Spiceworks needs to enhance its monitoring features, refine inventory management, and address performance issues in larger environments. There is also a demand for better reporting tools and IT solution integration. WhatsUp Gold should work on improving real-time monitoring, configuration management, and user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spiceworks can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and relies on a robust community for support, although it lacks direct support. WhatsUp Gold is primarily on-premises with more traditional customer service, which provides valuable assistance to organizations.

Pricing and ROI: Spiceworks offers a strong ROI due to being free, which is attractive to small and medium-sized businesses. The main cost involves setup time and reliance on community support. WhatsUp Gold requires a paid license, with pricing dependent on the extent of monitoring features. It offers valuable capabilities and reasonable pricing for larger businesses.

To learn more, read our detailed Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 881,665 peers since 2012

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

43rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Help Desk Software (14th), IT Asset Management (10th)

WhatsUp Gold

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

24th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (29th), Network Monitoring Software (26th), Server Monitoring (16th), Configuration Management (19th), Log Management (32nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (23rd), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Spiceworks is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 2.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
WhatsUp Gold	2.1%
Spiceworks	0.5%
Other	97.4%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Jeetendar Kumar

Information Technology Analyst at The Aga Khan University Hospital (Pakistan)

Customizable, easy to use, easy to manage, and provides multiple features

I have used many software, but Spiceworks is the best. The tool provides multiple features. It is a valuable product for inventory. It is also useful as a ticketing system. The solution is easy to use and easy to manage. Many people can use it very easily. The features are not complicated. It is very easy to run, install, and understand. That is why my organization decided to use it. The solution’s asset management capabilities have benefitted us in many ways. We are able to manage all the inventory. We have a complete database. We have a record of everything. It is very valuable. I rate the usability of the user interface and dashboard a nine out of ten. The tool is easy to learn compared to other software.

Read full review

Erik Cheng

Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet

Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains

The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Spiceworks' dashboard allows you to drill down to the notes, where I can take an inventory of the network and see the devices I need to monitor."

"The solution is easy to use and easy to manage."

"If you're in the market for a low-cost service desk system, Spiceworks is a good software solution to start out with, especially when it comes to startups and those organizations that don't currently have any existing service desk software in place."

"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."

"It shows the users that are currently logged in, which is not something that Active Directory by default will ever let you know up front."

"The most valuable features are the inventory and personalization."

"Spiceworks is generic and free."

"It's easy to understand."

More Spiceworks pros

"NetFlow monitoring, real-time monitoring, and surveys have been the most valuable features for our business."

"The product is reasonably priced."

"This is a good, stable network monitoring solution for devices."

"It is stable."

"Auto scanning is most valuable. It looks for rogue devices on your network."

"The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery function."

"The most valuable feature of WhatsUp Gold is NetFlow and the virtualized maps."

"It is easy to access and discover devices, as well as monitor them automatically. The topology discover is also a useful feature."

More WhatsUp Gold pros

Cons

"It would be nice to have remote access to the solution via a tablet. They also need remote control from a PC. Right now, to complete the technical support process, you have to have a tool to access the PC, and check the problems."

"Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable."

"Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need."

"The SNMP sniffer requires a lot of work to get right."

"Having an integrated asset management tool, where I can plug in things that are offline, would be good."

"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."

"I am unable to provide suggestions for improvement at this moment."

"One of the biggest ways in which Spiceworks could improve is by developing better and more automated workflows. For example, in another solution called ServiceDesk by ManageEngine, you can have levels of approval in the event that there is a request for new software, or when someone requests a VPN or WiFi connection. This kind of multi-stage approval feature provided by ServiceDesk does not appear to exist in Spiceworks, and it is one of their main shortcomings for me."

More Spiceworks cons

"Regional product team support is not very good."

"We can never achieve or get a good picture of the network topology."

"The technical support does not bother to respond."

"Pricing is too high relative to how many devices we use. The price list is not linear to number of devices."

"The product is old and not updated."

"The pricing for this solution has gone up quite recently, which has led some of our customers to buy an alternative product."

"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user. All the monitoring is from inside out, we need something that also can give us from outside in."

"The interface needs some work."

More WhatsUp Gold cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is free! Get it now."

"The tool is cheap."

"It's free."

"It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."

"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."

"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."

"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."

"The price of WhatsUp Gold is good."

"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."

"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."

"It is per device, per year. The pricing is very clear. If you have a service agreement, you get all of your major upgrades and minor upgrades. It was under $10,000 to go all-in with all of the different add-ons for it."

"There are some subscription charges that are quite heavy. I need to pay for support every year and these charges can be quite expensive. Aside from the initial cost for the tool, you need to pay additionally for support."

"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."

More WhatsUp Gold pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user174738

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Spiceworks?

The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spiceworks?

The tool is cheap.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?

The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one l...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?

Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?

It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.

See all answers

Comparisons

ServiceNow vs Spiceworks

Compared 12% of the time

Lansweeper vs Spiceworks

Compared 11% of the time

Zabbix vs Spiceworks

Compared 9% of the time

Zoho Desk vs Spiceworks

Compared 9% of the time

N-able N-central vs Spiceworks

Compared 4% of the time

More Spiceworks Competitors

PRTG Network Monitor vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 4% of the time

LibreNMS vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 4% of the time

SCOM vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

NinjaOne vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

More WhatsUp Gold Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Spiceworks

January 2026

Download Spiceworks product report

Buyer's Guide

WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

Download WhatsUp Gold product report

Overview

From network inventory and network monitoring to help desk software, and mobile device management (MDM) to cloud services detection, Spiceworks helps you manage everything about your IT workday from one easy place.

Spiceworks

Explore and manage your entire network infrastructure effortlessly with WhatsUp Gold's robust layer 2/3 discovery, creating a detailed interactive map from the edge to the cloud. Monitor devices, wireless controllers, servers, virtual machines, applications, and traffic flows across various environments. Real-time alerts ensure optimal performance, allowing you to meet or exceed SLAs. The platform offers customizable maps, dashboards, and alerts for easy network management. Quickly resolve issues with intuitive workflows, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). WhatsUp Gold's integrated log management provides easy visibility and control of device log data, allowing monitoring, filtering, searching, and alerting on syslogs or Windows logs. Archive logs to comply with regulatory requirements and preserve historical data, all through a user-friendly interface. Streamline network monitoring and issue resolution with WhatsUp Gold, making network management efficient and hassle-free.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino

Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof

Buyer's Guide

Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

Free Report: Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold

Find out what your peers are saying about Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Spiceworks vs. WhatsUp Gold report.

See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.

We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.