Instana Infrastructure Monitoring vs Spiceworks comparison

Instana Infrastructure Moni...

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86% willing to recommend

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Spiceworks and Instana Infrastructure Monitoring are two competing products in the IT monitoring space. Instana seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and real-time data analysis capabilities.

Features: Spiceworks is known for user-friendliness, strong community support, and emphasis on network monitoring. Instana provides comprehensive APM, infrastructure monitoring, and AI-driven insights. Its features include automated root cause analysis, cloud-native application support, and real-time data analysis.

Room for Improvement: Spiceworks could enhance its feature set, offer more deployment options, and improve scalability for larger networks. Instana could work on reducing complexity, providing more intuitive user interfaces, and offering more flexible pricing models.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spiceworks offers a straightforward deployment process catering to small to mid-sized organizations with community-driven support. Instana uses automated deployment processes suitable for complex IT environments, with responsive vendor support tailored to enterprise needs.

Pricing and ROI: Spiceworks is free, providing impressive ROI for small businesses needing basic monitoring. Instana's higher setup costs are offset by enhanced monitoring precision and optimization for large-scale infrastructures, with a premium pricing model justified by extensive features for complex requirements.

To learn more, read our detailed Instana Infrastructure Monitoring vs. Spiceworks Report (Updated: April 2025).

Instana Infrastructure Monitoring vs. Spiceworks

April 2025

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Helped 848,207 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

Instana Infrastructure Moni...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

33rd

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (25th)

Spiceworks

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

45th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Help Desk Software (17th), IT Asset Management (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spiceworks is 0.4%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Hakimuddin Ronaque

Assistant Manager at Lauren Information Technologies Pvt Ltd

Has the capability to automatically integrate with a large number of products

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I have not worked much on other technologies, like SAP or VMware's virtualization part, on-prem infrastructure, or cloud infrastructure. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is so fast and easy to adapt that it works fine. I have not explored other operating systems or infrastructure solutions because my company doesn't have that customer scale. Most of our customers are on-prem or on AWS or Azure, but Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to their infrastructure very well. My company came to know how well Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to our customers' infrastructures when we take care of the PoC phase. Around 12 to 15 people in my company use the product.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is easy to deploy."

"The product's initial setup is easy."

"The software is cloud-based, so I do not need to store any data locally."

"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."

"The solution is very stable. It's reliable and efficient."

"Spiceworks is generic and free."

"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 can find all asset details automatically, whether it's a Mac address, computer name, IP address, models, etc. It's very helpful."

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

"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."

More Spiceworks pros

Cons

"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."

"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."

"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 GUI must be improved."

"There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution."

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

"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."

"The customer service is okay, however, I would appreciate much more clarity on what I want to know exactly."

"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."

"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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."

"The tool is cheap."

"The product is free! Get it now."

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

"It's free."

"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."

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

University

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?

The product is easy to deploy.

What needs improvement with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?

The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required.

What is your primary use case for Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?

I use the solution in my company, especially if an application is down and it is considered to be a P1 issue or a critical issue. The network team will blame the application team, while the applica...

What do you like most about Spiceworks?

The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spiceworks?

The tool is cheap.

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.

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring

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Compared 21% of the time

Freshdesk vs Spiceworks

Compared 8% of the time

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs Spiceworks

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

March 2025

Instana Infrastructure Monitoring report

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Download Spiceworks product report

March 2025

Overview

Instana ensures that your application delivery organization has the data, visibility and information they need to manage the performance of critical business applications across the DevOps lifecycle. Built to handle the dynamic nature of containerized, microservice architectures, Instana automates infrastructure and application monitoring helping you to ensure the performance and quality of custom applications and accelerate your CI/CD cycle.

Instana

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.

Sample Customers

booxware, drivenow, scopevisio, enevo, TimoCom, mobitech

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