Spiceworks Reviews

I primarily use this solution for the Spiceworks Inventory system, as well as for helpdesk-related stuff. I have used it to find information to fix various issues.

The most valuable features are the inventory and personalization.

Having an integrated asset management tool, where I can plug in things that are offline, would be good. If I have taken a device off of the network then it would be nice to have it included in the same system, and not somewhere separately. That is the only thing that I have to look for outside of this solution.

I have been using Spiceworks for about four years.

I have not had any issues with stability.

This solution does not seem to have any trouble scaling up, or down. I am the only person who is currently using Spiceworks in the company.

I am very satisfied with the community support. I find most of my solutions there.

Prior to using Spiceworks, I used a local tool. I switched because it has the ability to scan the network and find devices. I just have to punch in the credentials for the different devices and it will go off and do all of the scans for you. It will also provide all of the information about purchase dates and warranties.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is nice and easy to follow.

Spiceworks is a system that I recommend for both inventory and helpdesk, although it is good in its entirety. Other than support for integrated asset management, I cannot think of additional features that I would require.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're primarily using the solution so that we have all of the information about our IT assets, and network management. Spiceworks has good tools for that.

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

It would be nice to connect multi Spiceworks servers together to get all of the information across different sites. Currently, Spiceworks works only on a local site, not multiple sites.

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.

The solution is very stable.

Technical support is very good. I'd say we're 95% satisfied with it.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We're using the community edition of the solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

Help Desk, Inventory, Purchases, Reports

We are a IT consulting firm for several companies and implemented SpiceWorks for a centralized help desk solution. Now each customer can submit a help desk ticket, it then is routed to a technician who then contacts the customer. We copy the customer, lead technician, and the account manager to not only close the communication gaps but to hold everyone responsible.

Reporting has been a huge success for our account managers on open tickets, for our IT manager on inventory, time spent on tickets and purchases for our invoicing, and etc.

Purchasing has also been very helpful keeping track of our many purchases. Both real time understanding what the status is on our purchase and to recall past purchases for price comparison or when you need to make the exact same purchase again.

Reporting for any application is a must. Where the reporting is very useful in SpiceWorks, I would like a more powerful reporting tool to better filter what I want and do not want. There are some built in filters, but a simple if-then ability would be incredibly helpful to narrow down my reports.

5 years

Deployment is easy but getting the full details on every networked component can be a challenge. The product has gotten better over the years but there are still some complexities you will more then likely struggle with. There is a client that can be installed to correct this however the client was designed for mobile devices and will categorize them as such by default.

Stability has been solid for all the years I have used this product.

We have taken this from a central location and expanded our reach over 8 different companies with around 1000 devices all reporting to one location. I have had no issues and dont foresee any as we continue to expand and install SpiceWorks at our remaining customers.

I have only used customer service twice and both times they were exceptional.

The initial setup is very easy.

The investment with SpiceWorks is your employee time. The product is free. Our ROI is based on the ability to provide our customers with not only better response times to issues but proactively. Using a product like SpiceWorks helps reveal needs or issues before they become critical. When there are needs for improvement we can bill for that time and look better because our customer networks run more stable.

This product is free.

This is not a true managed service product as many might think at first glance. This product is awesome for help desk, inventory, purchasing and some monitoring. If you are looking for a full managed service product you will need to keep moving to a different solution such as LabTech.

Tracking the work that has been completed.

Our organization improved by using Spiceworks to monitor our network. It sends alerts as necessary, and allows the tracking of both open and closed tickets.

I was never able to properly get the product to monitor our Exchange server or SQL server.

I've used it for seven years.

Initially, the loading of a large network can be a little tedious, but later versions of Spiceworks have done an improved job of the installation.

I almost never experienced problems.

We haven't had problems with 70+ users.

7/10, which is good considering support is only via a forum.

7/10, and it's also via a forum.

We tried a few help desk solutions, but really appreciated the amount of effort put into Spiceworks for a free solution with occasional ads. If anything, I would say they attempt to do too much with their product.

Easy installation. The more difficult aspects are setting up all the devices and alarms, and maintaining the inventory.

In-house. It was a relatively simple installation considering it was done with only two techs over a few days.

Our time was really the only expense and the return isn't easily quantifiable. Suffice it to say it is very, very high.

Other non-descript products. Nothing that matched the ease of use of Spiceworks for free or otherwise.

If you need a help desk, just do it. This also works as a KB and an alarm system. Highly recommended.

We primarily use the solution for asset management of our asset collection.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the asset inventory.

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.

It would be ideal if they could add contract management features into the solution in a future release.

Regarding Contract management, I'd like to register all my support/renewal contracts and reminders for renewal.

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

The scalability is okay, but it could be improved. We have about 800 users currently. We don't plan to increase usage at this time.

We've never reached out to technical support, so I don't have any experience with them.

Previously, we used Manage Engine. It was a bit slow, and a little bit old, which is why we switched.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment typically takes an hour or less. You only need one person to deploy the solution and two people for maintenance.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

The solution is free. We're not paying for any licensing or other costs.

I didn't evaluate other options before choosing Spiceworks.

We use the on-premises deployment solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Tickets by e-mail, with actions by hastag.

We are able to escalate tickets, or shuffle tickets via e-mail, instead of having to login at a location to route things. Clients know immediately what is going on with a ticket.

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

I've been using Spiceworks personally for over seven years, five in my current environment.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There were no issues encountered with the stability.

There were no issues encountered with the scalability.

It's great.

It's great.

I've used and evaluated others - Spiceworks is the best bang for the buck.

Straightforward, aside from the SNMP config.

In-house. I installed and set up.

As a free solution, it has provided us a huge benefit, with the only expense being a virtual machine off of an existing cluster.

It's free.

Take the time to set up the SNMP agents to match up with the hardware you know you have on your network. It is a really great tool when it comes time to inventory or track equipment uptime/age.