Spiceworks Reviews

• Integration with Active Directory
• The ticketing system for the end users
• The ease of making it work the way the IT Support Team want it to

Once the end users got used to the idea of creating an IT ticket, it has made the process of getting the support to them quicker, plus if they come up with the same problem themselves they can look at fixing it themselves as I leave notes in the ticket for them to follow in the future or they can use the Knowledge Base.

Scanning of the network, being able to remove some of the default actions that are in the drop down menu of the tickets. I think they should create a light version just for tickets as this can be used by many different trades not just IT.

I implemented the use of Spiceworks in 2012 when I was employed by my current employer, and we are still using it.

No issues encountered.

We have not encountered any problems.

No problems with scalability.

I have not had to use their customer service. I know people that have, and they have said it is faultless.

I haven’t had the need to request tech support from Spiceworks, however asking a question in the Spiceworks Community is very good, you are guaranteed to get a solution.

My employer used an IT Company for the solution, with me introducing them to Spiceworks we saved over £700 per month meaning we could start to develop the IT infrastructure.

Setting up Spiceworks is simple as long as you follow the instructions. I have even deployed it for the maintenance guys, so they can have tickets for the work to be carried out around the site. (They only get the ticket side of Spiceworks, no network stuff.)

I implemented the use of Spiceworks.

Spiceworks is free so the ROI is unbelievable.

If you are a small – medium sized business you cannot go wrong with using Spiceworks to help you provide an A+ IT support as it is free.

We looked at Solarwinds and a couple of others provided by local IT companies.

As mentioned above if you are a small – medium sized company then I would use Spiceworks.

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.

• 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.

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 inventory management is, and also the alerts that let me know when printers are running low on ink.

Instead of keeping track in a spreadsheet of serial numbers, what software is on what machine, and what machines we have, I let Spiceworks scan our network and figure it out for me.

Mac networking needs improving, as everything has to be manually entered in a Mac environment.

I've used for five years at three different companies.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

No other options were evaluated as it is one of the only 100% free solutions.

It's very easy and has a great community.

Since it's free, and only takes about two hours to setup, it's got a 100% ROI.

It's completely free.

I've not used any other solutions. I used it at the first tech company I worked for, and brought it with me to the new company I work for.

It's the only way to go as far as inventory systems go.

• Inventory
• Ticketing

We use Spiceworks to inventory all of our workstations. We use a Dymo labeller to print both a bar-code and a QR code that links back to the Spiceworks URL for that device. Our techs can use the Spiceworks mobile app and their phones’ built-in camera to bring up all the details of a machine in under a minute.

The folks at Spiceworks are constantly expanding the capabilities of their product by partnering and integrating with other vendors. I would love for this trend to continue until Spiceworks has ability to act as an IDS/IPS system all in one. Alienvault alerts have recently been added that bring this vision closer to reality. I would also love to see performance monitoring (think Zabbix) capabilities as well.

We've used it for over four years.

We have no issues with the deployment.

We have no issues with the stability.

We had no issues with the scalability. As we’ve expanded, we’ve had to add additional resources to the Spiceworks VM. However, the latter is a very typical scenario when business growth causes the demands on a software application to increase.

10/10 - I haven’t had many issues over the years, but I do remember posting about having connectivity trouble with a Spiceworks remote agent. I received a timely response and the issue was ultimately resolved.

I evaluated Microsoft Service Manager and ZenDesk, but I settled on Spiceworks. The capabilities, ease of use and price point (free) made Spiceworks the obvious choice for us.

The installation was relatively straightforward. I do remember the process for adding an SSL certificate to be a little convoluted.

In house. I recommend dedicating a VM. Use standard ports, 80 and 443 for the webserver and leverage DNS to configure access to Spiceworks via a “user friendly” hostname.

ROI is almost immediate because Spiceworks is free and the only investment is time.

The Spiceworks community is a great value add. It certainly helps our team to keep tabs on the industry as a whole. I encourage IT veterans and newbies alike to join and participate.

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 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.