Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Avantages

There is a cloud base version, and it's free.

Inconvénients

The ticket management isn't the best. You don't have options to view another tech's tickets without looking at all the tickets. Generating reports isn't the easiest. There are a lot of key features missing when handling a ticket. You don't have an option to put a ticket on hold or a waiting-for-response option.

Avantages

Tickets can be auto-created upon email receipt as well as direct-upload to the Spiceworks portal. The former makes it much easier for users in more of a hurry to get their request in.

Inconvénients

Linking tickets to other tickets (sub-tickets) can make for a somewhat confusing ticket tree. Could be more intuitive.

Avantages

Our maintenance and IT dept use Spiceworks for staff to put in tickets for requests. It is easy to do and I get alerts when ticket is assigned to a worker.

Inconvénients

It really depends on who is accepting the tickets on the other end. Sometimes I will put in a ticket and it will remain open until a human assigns it or closes it on the other end. This program works great with the help of a real human.

Avantages

Spiceworks works well as a free help desk system. It does what it says on the tin. It has decent audit logging, relatively easy configuration, and a simple user interface.

Inconvénients

It being free holds back some of the functionality, the way statistics are shown on the dashboard isn't consistent, and it's very barebones overall.

Avantages

It was low in cost and easy to customize.

Inconvénients

Spiceworks is not very sophisticated and at the time, was difficult to access remotely.

Avantages

Spiceworks Help Desk is a great tool. It is free, easy to setup, easy to configure, easy to use, It creates a ticket number if setup to do so with an auto reply. Inviting team members is simple and all the history is logged. Very Nice!!!

Inconvénients

Spiceworks Help Desk is a great tool. However the Knowledge Base usually comes up with zero search results.

Avantages

It's cheap and relatively easy to use - good community around it also.

Inconvénients

the system was slow compared to others (on prem version)

Avantages

Spiceworks is more like a service-oriented platform for IT professionals than Techcrunch is inclined towards the media outlet.
It's more like Stackoverflow for IT professionals and has benefitted me in getting my solutions related to actual network troubleshooting. The community has great experts giving you excellent solutions.

Inconvénients

The UI can be a bit better with time and rest it's free to use for everyone.

Avantages

It's very easy to install & configure, their documentation on initial setup is straight forward and overall it's easy to use. It's a very basic ticket solution however it's completely free, if you're without a ticket system and just need something to get you away from emails then you'd be daft not to try it.

Inconvénients

The lack of advanced functionality you find in paid rival solutions, round [sensitive content hidden], holiday rota, multiple teams and advanced reporting / dashboards are none existent.

Avantages

Spiceworks is a high valuable solution with multiple levels, very easy to deploy, it could be setup as a level entry service desk solution but includes great features that you have on hand starting even with the free version.

Inconvénients

As Spiceworks have several modules some of them remains with an effective use and could be great to have a configuration menu that disable that tabs not configured on the setup

Avantages

It offers a free service which is very usable, and an excellent place for any business to start if they current do not have a helpdesk ticket/reporting system. Centrally mange all the helpdesk jobs rather than relying on emails, which can be missed. Can be upgraded with a subscription to get even more features and remove advertisements.

Inconvénients

Only initial downside people might not like is the advertising that is built into the free version, but it is totally understandable for Spiceworks to have this, and it is not intrusive. Some of the features you might want could be only available under a subscription but all worthy ticketing systems are not free. Setup could seem daunting for a novice user but there is plenty of support and guides.

Alternatives envisagées 

Freshservice

Avantages

I liked the ticketing process or features that were available when creating tickets, as well as the email alerts for each follow-up.

Inconvénients

The least i like was server availability, Some times due to work load the server gets crashing and after restarting all the services only it will work without any issues.The initial stage of setup using authentication was difficult.

Avantages

I like the ticketing system. it is the only feature that I used.

Inconvénients

The support wasn't too responsive on my end.

Avantages

It is very useful to share solutions to problems, especially in the forum section.

Inconvénients

Even on the forum page, they may charge a fee for some content.

Avantages

Excellent for ticketing, ease of setup, email alerting, and free of cost, making it a perfect choice for SMBs.

Inconvénients

Inadequate inventory system, lack of cross-team ticket routing, and absence of email alerts are areas that require attention.

Avantages

Typically, it is easy to identify who is responsible for which tickets and what priority they are put at.

Inconvénients

I can't open all the attachments easily in a ticket. I have to go back to the original response to see what attachments are included.

Avantages

The helpdesk is the main feature of Spiceworks and works well, the community as well are very knowledgeable and welcoming which is great when you have any issues or queries, you don't need to directly contact Spiceworks Support but rather you can discuss it with the general community. The software being free is also a big positive because unless you're a big company, it's another expense which you can avoid and still get a great service desk.

Inconvénients

The UI was the most disliked feature of this software, it felt very outdated and the theme customisation was very minimal as well.

Avantages

It's impossible to beat the cost of free. The product is well designed and functions extremely well for the job it is designed for.

Inconvénients

Larger IT departments won't be able to route tickets to specific teams. It would be very nice if spiceworks could expand its offering to include sub service desks etc.

Avantages

For us IT helpdesk/Specialist, this product works like a magic. We can easy monitor and keep track of our ticketing management, we can also check the reports very well and it was so organized.

Inconvénients

Only when I was accessing it with my phone on web, the product seems not be responsive on mobile phone(browser access). Nevertheless, the app is so great and such an important tool to us

Avantages

It allows us to prioritize tickets, identify recurring problems, and prevent requests from "falling through the cracks". It provides our employees a single email address for getting help without them having to know who in IT does what. It is fairly configurable to meet different needs - we use it for warehouse and logistics issues as well as IT Help Desk. Tickets can be assigned, categorized, closed, etc. using "Tickets Anywhere" keywords when replying to the email so you don't even have to open the site to work tickets.

Inconvénients

Emails sent to Spiceworks are converted to plain text with attachments, so tables and in-line images are lost. Due to this we sometimes have to ask the user to forward the email directly to us in order to see the original. There is a delay of between 1 and 5 minutes after an email is sent to Spiceworks before the Spiceworks email is received by team members, so we occasionally have more than one person starting to work on a ticket at the same time - especially if the ticket can be resolved simply by replying to the email.

Avantages

Spiceworks ive used the community for years now so when I found there IT Helpdesk I started to use it but I then stopped for a while until there cloud IT Helpdesk came out which for me works best as I dont need to worry about hosting anywhere. So now I have a great IT helpdesk for my clients to log tickets with all for free!

Inconvénients

The only Con to Spiceworks IT Helpdesk was that I was initially released as a windows installer which didnt really work for my business as I dont have my own servers, it wasnt until the Cloud IT helpdesk version came out that I then started to use Spiceworks IT helpdesk again as my client IT helpdesk solution. Its also lacking some features you would see in premium solutions but it does the basics and works for my IT Consultancy business.

Avantages

There is one feature of Spiceworks which I appreciate the most. It gives you the opportunity to check your network and find out what devices are connected to it. This means that it provides a lot of information about those devices such as their IP addresses. Another advantage of this platform is that it is completely free. If we compare the quality of work of Spiceworks with other platforms, it will become obvious that this help desk can do freely more than other expensive platforms. I think it is hard to find a person who knows everything about his profession or field of work. From time to time everyone needs to look for some help or extra information. In these cases you should at least know where you can find the required information. People engaged with information technologies already know that Spiceworks is their best solution. You can find the answers to your questions in the forums or you can type your question and get feedback.

Inconvénients

The first issue I should mention is the app itself. As for the mobile app, it is heavily text-based, it would be nice to see more graphics there. In addition, I would like to see one app which shows the community and the form together.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of commercial which can be annoying but on the other hand, it is understandable: the platform is free and it depends on ads to get some income.
I wish it could be easier to work with tickets and especially the deleting function.

Avantages

I started using Spiceworks in the cloud and then copied the database and importing it to our VM and lost nothing. It is an efficient and easy to use platform. Adding techs and break-fix categories to track what needs to be improved proved to be successful. This allows IT to focus on root cause and then to deploy solutions to prevent the same.

Inconvénients

The reports need to be streamlined to remove redundancy. Quantity is not always a good thing and by compressing and focusing on key areas the reporting could be a lot better and less fractured.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zoho Desk, ServiceNow et Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi passer à Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

First it was/is free. This proved great for our tight budget. We added Manage Engine and the integration proved invaluable. With the two combined, we now have analytics and desktop management and patching.

Avantages

The beauty of updating IT Assets all in one place from Mobile device to Laptops to Printers and the ability to save credentials for assessing those devices in a shot note for easy of continuity.

Inconvénients

I haven't find any fault using the app, so there is non for me to write

Avantages

Community forum. Personally, I consider forums a waste of time since you normally have to look for ages and still never get the answer you need. Communities are based that "someone has experienced this problem before" and is willing to share in all detail what the problem (can be awkward) and share the solution as well.
On the Spiceworks community (cheers!), we have always found answers that you usually only find on paid communities (details, scripts etc). The software (FREE!) gives you a great overview, even if you are spread over multiple locations and/or multiple networks. A complete inventory and a ticketing system that are customisable and ready to integration software and scripts. What more do you want for free?

Inconvénients

This is definitely not the worst but it takes a bit of getting used how Spiceworks operates. Like other platforms there is a learning curve. Some integration with other 3rd party software might not be straight forward but then there is the awesome community.

Avantages

Un sistema de inventario de equipos es una herramienta esencial para cualquier empresa o organización que necesite un control detallado de su infraestructura tecnológica. En este sentido, Spiceworks ofrece una solución completa y gratuita que permite administrar eficientemente el inventario de equipos, software y licencias.En los últimos 2 años, no nos ha fallado. Y se integra perfectamente en nuestras redes locales y remotasCon Spiceworks, es posible obtener información detallada sobre los equipos de la organización, incluyendo su hardware, software, licencias, garantías, ubicación y estado. Además, se pueden programar alertas para notificar sobre cambios en la configuración de los equipos, fechas de vencimiento de licencias y garantías, entre otros aspectos.

Inconvénients

Algunas de sus características avanzadas, como la automatización de la gestión de tickets, solo están disponibles en la versión de pago. Además, para algunas empresas, la interfaz y la funcionalidad pueden no ser lo suficientemente avanzadas o personalizables para satisfacer sus necesidades específicas.

Avantages

Spiceworks is great for managing help desk tickets. Using HTML we've been able to customize our end-user portal. Create multiple ticket templates to capture the details we truly need from end-users. We have found that the mobile application for iOS and Android to be the best on the market. It has a great GUI, very user friendly, informative, and easy to set up.

Inconvénients

The inventory system is lacking when it comes to producing accurate information. At one point this year we were upgrading our end users to dual monitors. We attempted to use Spiceworks to produce the make and model of the current monitor the end users were using. It came back telling us a generic description. I ended up writing a batch file that would obtain them remotely and that was accurate. We've also had issues where it would scan a computer that had 2 monitors but would only show one. We also went through a license key audit and thought we could rely on Spiceworks to produce accurate results. It ended up showing us that several computers had 3 iterations of office installed. I understand that these keys are in the registry but other similar scanners would only produce keys for whats actually installed on the workstation by cross-referencing installed applications and registry keys.

We recently have been experiencing issues where Spiceworks would attempt to scan 180 assets and it would fail to complete the scan without errors. We found this out by using WSUS to determine how many computers we had and Spiceworks was off by 30 assets of the 180. At least twice a week it also locks up and our end users can't access the help desk portal to submit tickets.

We've chosen to use LanSweeper to track assets. LanSweeper produced accurate results in a fraction of the time Spiceworks produced incomplete results. Spiceworks took 8+ hours, LanSweeper <30 minutes.

Avantages

The fact that it is a free product helps it to stand out. Beside that, when we did have an issue, the support was fantastic in helping us to track down and remedy the source of the problem. We really like the amount of detail you can see at a glance when using the help desk because it can aggregate the data from inventory which can include hardware devices and users. There are also many very handy plugins for Spiceworks that can help in countless ways.

Inconvénients

Since our users had a habit of submitting tickets with numerous large attachments, the ticket database became kind of unwieldy and there wasn't a clear way to actually delete tickets or their attachments from the database. This is good and bad, in that there's no accidental deletion of ticket history, but it can be frustration if space on the hosting server is very limited.

Avantages

La facilidad de despliegue, poca necesidad de configuración facilita la gestión de los activos y la transparencia para el reporte de incidencias por parte de los usuarios lo hace muy ágil

Inconvénients

La necesidad que la plataforma cloud siga añadiendo viejas funciones de la versión onpremise

Alternatives envisagées 

Jira, GLPi et PRTG

Avantages

I used a free version of Spiceworks for several years. Installation of the application only takes few minutes. In just a few clicks you have a full robust system for ticketing and inventory. Another great perk is Spiceworks community, merely priceless resource where all the IT folks share their knowledge and can help you with random IT dramas. Great way to keep an eye on the hardware inventory. Getting it configured and working properly can be a challenge, but the results are well worth it. Not to mention great helpdesk ticketing functionality, that allows to put an order on how your service requests are processed on a daily basis.

Inconvénients

I've only used a free version of the application. As I mentioned, one of the key reasons why I got it was for inventory purposes. Getting it work was a challenge. A lot of tweaking had to be done on the network to be able to query all of my PC and Mac workstations and servers. Nevertheless, the result was well worth it. Additionally, while the inventory is running, the system would be somewhat slow, but still managable. Great product! I highly recommend it to all IT admins out there.

Avantages

It was a low cost option that provided most of the features and functionality we were looking for in a Help Desk system.

Inconvénients

The reporting features were minimal and the ability to create usable ticket flows was limited.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi passer à Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Cost and ease of implementation (or so we thought).

Avantages

It's free and very useful for small companies, they don't have to spend any money to have a ticketing tool.

Inconvénients

It doesn't have a knowledge base.
The asset management was fine at the begginig but with more than 200 assets it became useless. Always was down because of the database management.

Avantages

Does a great job of managing our help desk ticketing system. Nobody likes making tickets, but with 4 techs watching the que, problems get resolved faster. We have been using the system for years. Very stable. The inventorying is reasonably robust - will let you quickly spot machines that are not up to spec for a planned upgrade.

Inconvénients

The polling and reporting on down devices is weak. You find out a device is down long after it actually went down, and then for DAYS it continues to aleret you the device is down (even though you have brought it back up). If you try and close the ticket, spiceworks gleefully creates another one, even though the problem is long gone.
That said, we did not install this to be a network monitor, so any monitoring functionality is just icing on the cake.

Avantages

Its a feature rich and functional product for an amazing price. They keep adding more too.

Inconvénients

Setup can be a bit of a bear depending on how much you want to customize it.

Alternatives envisagées 

Freshdesk

Pourquoi passer à Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Having experience with Freshdesk which is a good product, the price sold it on us for the

Avantages

It is not that complicated to track your time and the money you could earn, I can add categories and users with a click, alerts and more

Inconvénients

The mobile app needs some improvements, also no iPad size yet, currently I am using a Samsung tab S8 ultra, the ads are taking mostly of the screen.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zoho Desk et Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi choisir Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk 

The system was really old and we need something that I can check everywhere.

Pourquoi passer à Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Cost and Maintenance

Avantages

-Offers basic helpdesk features - email to ticket, email notifications, simple reports/metrics - and a simple interface for L1+ technicians. No training is required
-Knowledge Base is a great place for documentation, and to refer users for duplicate tickets
-No frills, easy to setup, requires virtually no maintenance when hosted on a Windows server (we do not use the cloud version)

Inconvénients

-Inventory and Network Monitor just seem to add bloat for the minimal usefulness that they are - we can do a better job with other free tools like The Dude
-Paying to remove ads still won't reclaim any screen space that they take up, just a replacement with your own graphic - I don't believe this is worth it

Avantages

Spiceworks is a totally free piece of software if you choose to self-host. Getting things up and running is pretty easy, and it doesn't involve a huge amount of upkeep to keep the inventory data up to date. It also comes with access to the Spiceworks online community. This is a gathering place for a large array of computer savvy folks who help each other out with questions, answers, and access to pieces of software that make life easier. I have reached out to the community many times, and gotten some great feedback on issues I have had, and suggestions on hardware and software purchases. I also like the ability to build my own help desk portal where end users can submit tickets for easier tracking and resolution.

Inconvénients

I have had some issues with the self-hosted software crashing from time to time. I have not been able to figure out why it needs a random reboot to keep it happy, but it only happens every couple of months, so it really isn't a huge issue to me.

Avantages

As I said above, it's FREE. For lower volume IT houses it's pretty great. We have a basic setup where emails sent to a support address automatically open a ticket. I operate almost exclusively from my phone and we've never had an issue creating, working on or closing tickets in the field or in the office.

Inconvénients

Nothing more serious than the occasional hiccup when an update is released for the mobile app and features are either shuffled around or changed so much they aren't easily uncovered again. Also, if it did more to auto-populate the fields for the name of the person who submitted it, what it pertains to, which software or hardware they're looking for help with, that would be great.

Avantages

With spiceworks CM version I was able to register all the devices on my network, monitor their performance and record all my assets. My users can open tickets oriented to our services.

Inconvénients

It can be a bit lengthy to configure all the tools since it has a high number of variables. Ads hide good design. The translation is not entirely good.

Avantages

It's extensible and easy monitoring for use

Inconvénients

It's will be eventually replaced by new cloud developers, because it development phase is slowly shelving momentum.

Avantages

Spiceworks is a free yet versatile help desk portal for users to submit tickets, technicians to track tickets and for administrators to generate reports. With the vast community support behind Spiceworks, its very easy to figure out to to customize the look and feel to meet the needs of your organization.

Inconvénients

While Spiceworks is great, [I assume] because of the free nature of the software and the companies business model, updates aren't very frequent. Security issues within the software can take a long time to get patched, and new features and few and far in-between.

Avantages

Great tool for ticketing system. Being a small company we used excel to track calls and troubleshooting with customers and we needed a better solution to keep track of all the calls and tickets created. It’s been great that we can access this in office and on our mobile device to refer to past notes in a ticket when we are on call. One benefit that we love is adding and modifying fields in the ticketing system to keep track of certain information of the customer

Inconvénients

Having gone from tracking our own calls manually this has been a huge benefit and we haven’t noticed any downsides to using this.

Avantages

The inventory and ticketing are very useful in smaller businesses however when i have to research an issue i normally end the search term in google with "Spiceworks" as i know i will be returned with a wealth of expert knowledge

Inconvénients

I find the bandwidth usage quite high, other than that it is value for money which was zero for just the helpdesk. There are other applications i have not used

Avantages

Can't beat the price. You have the flexibility to operate your helpdesk "in-house" or use their hosted platform. Either way you will have a full featured, customizable helpdesk with a user portal. At its minimal setup, you can be up and running in under an hour. If you have more work to do, you can easily build it to suit your needs. If you need additional functionality, you can always install one of many plugins.

Inconvénients

Though the community is awesome, many of the useful plugins over the years have been abandoned by their creators. Since these are built and maintained by the users of the community, these are often made to address a specific issue, and not many are kept up with "fixes". It would be great if Spiceworks worked a bit more on incorporating the most used ones into their software natively.

Avantages

It is a Swiss Army knife for network administrators allowing inventory, equipment monitoring and failure tracking and activities within the same package. It is great to be able to have everything you need within reach of an IP address, in addition to being able to receive as many notifications as you want and of what you want within the operation of the network.

Inconvénients

The hardware requirements are many, leaving out all those equipment with few features. Although software as such does not merit investment, it concentrates on the necessary hardware.

Avantages

The ease for an end user to submit a ticket and for me to communicate updates for that ticket are outstanding. I use this for a very basic IT help desk ticket system and am amazed at what you get for free. They can create tickets and communicate via a web page or via email conversations. Even with email it keeps a record of the communications with the ticket.

Inconvénients

None. I mostly use only the ticketing system which I have detailed above along with some of the support community message boards. I have no complaints about any of it.

Avantages

Spiceworks is the software that my company uses for ticketing and a secondary asset tracking system. Since I've been using it I've found that it's infinitely more helpful than at first it seemed. The ticketing system is very simple to set up and tracks and assigns tickets very well. Besides the ticketing and asset tracking I love all the plug-ins that are available as well as the Spiceworks community. There are very few resources where you will find a more helpful bunch of users who have real world experience and can answer anything you might need to ask. I always find someone who has broken down extremely technical knowledge that makes it easier for me to learn and expand.

Inconvénients

The software can sometimes be a bit slow to respond. There will at times be an odd lag in the software even though there is nothing taxing happening on the server and resources look fine. This is a minor occurrence and can be fixed by restarting the service on the server.

Avantages

The fact that it is 100% free is amazing. Secondly, it is very easy to setup, maintain and to use. It solves all of our needs for documenting our work via a ticketing system. Its reliable and also the Spicework Community is a great resource for answering technical questions. We actually use two installations of this: one for the IT team to document their work and also one for our Maintenance department to document maintenance requests and tickets and it works great.

Inconvénients

The software is not perfect and sometimes locks up or stops working and must be restarted. Other than that, I have no complaints.

Avantages

Inventory management is the one of the best feature in this software. Can able to scan the devices in the network and keep track of all the information of each and every devices.

Inconvénients

Less customization option available for this software, so in some places have to follow the common standards instead of customized functions depends on the user needs

Alternatives envisagées 

ManageEngine Endpoint Central

Pourquoi passer à Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Free of cost software if installed locally and have to pay only when choosing the cloud storage

Avantages

I love SpiceWorks. There are so many features when using SpiceWorks. There is a Forum that you can use to get help or chat with other users. There are giveaways and discounts for products. The ticket system is fantastic. When submitting tickets you can run reports and schedule them to pull a specific type of ticket and run a report at a specific time. It is super user friendly. There is too much content to name here.

Inconvénients

The inventory Scan feature is not always accurate. The periodic upgrades are annoying, and some upgrades makes a drastic change. The mobile app is quirky. Does not support MAC OS