Spiceworks Reviews

• 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.

• Network discovery
• Ticketing system

Spiceworks provides a centralized system through which all IT requests are funnelled, with requests being auto-assigned a ticket number, thus streamlining organization and prioritization of requests. Users can track the status of their requests, leading to greater company-wide satisfaction with our IT team. Prior to roll out, IT received requests in person, via email, via phone, sticky note, etc. Now things are in one tidy place, and that has made everyone happy.

The only issue encountered was setting up the email server information. It took a little testing, but got it working in a couple of days.

We've used it for less than six months.

There was an issue with the email server set-up.

There was no issue with the stability.

There was no issue with the scalability.

I haven't contacted the customer service.

I haven't needed to use the tech support.

We did not previously use a ticketing or network monitoring system. I opted for Spiceworks since the non-pro version is free, I briefly used it at a past job, and the network discovery tool is provided.

Everything was pretty straightforward aside from getting the email server settings done, since we are Google apps-centric. There are several Gmail server options to try for incoming/outgoing ports/settings/etc. and it took testing many combinations of settings before finding the best suited.

I implemented it solely, in-house. I had little issue. Best advice I can give is- test, test, test!

Since the version I use is free, the ROI is excellent and I, as well as my company, are very satisfied with the results.

There are other free ticketing platforms available out there. Keep in mind, however, if the network discovery, inventory, of your endpoint and software is critical, then Spiceworks may be best suited for your needs.

I like how all the work notes are all trackable from the main page. It is very easy to manage what has been done on a specific ticket.

Because this is the proper channel for technical troubleshooting, we reduced the possibility of missed communication that is related to tickets.

The navigation is a little heavy and not as smooth as some ticket management software; this must be because it’s web based and has a lot. The GUI can be a little hard to find my way through. I have also used Service Now and it’s very orderly compared to Spiceworks in terms of ticket categorization and management.

The company I worked for have used it for a lot longer but I've only used it for about two to three months.

We didn't have any issues during deployment.

We haven't had any issues with the stability.

We had no issues with the scalability, but I haven't had a chance to use the software version.

I haven’t had a chance to use the customer service for Spiceworks.

I haven’t had a chance to use the technical support for Spiceworks.

I wasn't involved in the set-up.

I wasn't involved in the purchasing of the license.

I was not the one managing the system, I didn't have the chance to see the software version. If you want an all in one solution for your IT to support your company, Spiceworks has a nice built in integrated system. And since it’s web based, it will work on any platform, even mobile.

Automatic inventory of network connected assets and ability to add assets that are not connected to network - such as monitors and docking stations.

Spiceworks replaced our previous attempts to track inventory and Help Desk related issues via spreadsheets. It provides the ability to generate custom, very detailed and on-demand or scheduled asset inventory reports. Help Desk feature was helpful as well, and replaced many walk-ups and tracking of issues via email.

The main issue we had with the Spiceworks was always performance related. A dedicated server would sometimes become unresponsive, and would need to be restarted.

We've used this solution since Spiceworks version 2.0.

We had no issues with deployment.

The server would become sluggish as more assets were populated in the system.

Scalability was an issue. The server would become sluggish as more assets were populated in the system.

Customer support was great, I was always able to find solutions in the forums.

Spiceworks was very active on forums and was always aware of performance issues and included improvements with every version release.

Spiceworks was the best product per our testing, and was recommended by other IT professionals at the time. We evaluated many low cost or free solutions, and none came close to Spiceworks abilities and ease of use. Price was also a big factor during times when management was not looking to spend capital, but still demanded consistent process, asset tracking, and reporting improvements.

Initial set-up is the simplest I've ever seen in such a product. I was able to initiate a discovery network scan in less than a few minutes after initial installation.

In-house team. Just make sure you dedicate appropriately sized server to accommodate the size of your environment.

Other than dedicating an ageing server and some initial set-up and configuration time, ROI for a free product is great.

Be aware that Spiceworks free tier is an ad driven product, but you can remove ads for a reasonable monthly fee if needed.

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.

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.

Spiceworks also has a smartphone app that helps you keep in touch from anywhere.

Most problems are the system bugs and slowness, also because the product has a web interface that makes a lot of problems like refreshing and information loss. I think that Spiceworks need to make a program for PCs and keep the web interface.

I used the Help Desk version on a local server for three months.

I encountered with stability problems, but I suspect that it was a local server issue.

Spiceworks is a free solution and I have never contacted theircustomer service.

I didn’t install spiceworks so I do not know.

I have used Commit CRM for 3 years, that solution isn't free and has a nice customer service, a PC program and a web interface. As I wrote earlier that solution costs and my employer didn't want to pay.

I didn’t install Spiceworks so I do not know.

Spiceworks help desk solution is free.

I would advise you to install the program on the company cloud server and keep a daily backup.