Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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!

Cons

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.

Pros

It gave a good base level ticketing and inventory control

Cons

It was difficult to manage the e amount of endpoints we had

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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 Considered

Zoho Desk, ServiceNow and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to 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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

For internal clients, we rely only on Spiceworks as our ticket-based support system. If a user experiences a problem that can be resolved by IT, they need only visit the site and, in a matter of seconds, create a ticket that includes screenshots and other information that will aid us in fixing the problem as soon as possible.

Cons

My only gripe is that it is not simple to view all tickets in one place, regardless of their status, using the "my tickets" feature.

Pros

It is free. It works better than some of the others that I have tried. It is completely configurable for whatever category you need. Always works. Perfect for a simple ticketing system.

Cons

Since it is free, there are ads that show on website. Not really an issue. Not as granular as some of the others.

Alternatives Considered

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Zoho Desk and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

It was free. I tried it and felt that it checked all of the boxes for us.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Of course the cost since it is Free. Easy to deploy and users to understand

Cons

Does not have all the features and reports that others have, but that is offset by the price

Pros

Oh, where to start! I love that anyone in our company can email a specific address that we have set up to forward from Spiceworks and it will automatically forward it to everyone on the IT team so we don't have to continue checking the actual software every 5 minutes. Also, when someone responds, it goes directly to the ticket assignee's email and we can respond from either the platform or our emails. It's also nice that it sends reminders of open tickets or things that have been untouched for a while. I like the dashboard to see the frequency of opened/closed tickets, as well as see which issues are the most prominent. The actual tickets have areas to specify the category of the issue as well as a 3rd party ticket# so it's easy to find. There is also a knowledge base that we can refer to people who have had similar problems as others in the past. And everything is in the cloud so we don't have to host anything to ensure that it's saved :) They just added a remote session option too which could come in super handy when troubleshooting an issue. Oh, and I like that it has internal as well as public notes and it saves a history of everything so can go back and revisit a closed ticket that was taken care of months ago.

Cons

The attachments are a little finicky. As in, it doesn't allow "inline" attachments (for when I want to show a screenshot in the middle of my explanation). And if I want to download a screenshot from a ticket, I have to right-click it and save (not a big deal) rather than just click on the print icon that's usually present in other attachment previews on different sites (like Gmail, per say). But honestly, I haven't really dealt with many other IT ticket help desk platforms so I don't really have anything to compare it to. The only other things I don't like are things that are user-error based. Like how if we don't update the category or the ticket type in the actual ticket, the proper stats won't show in the dashboard.

Pros

The ticketing system works great you can set categories and customize the SLA's at your convenience and with the reporting tool you can build your own Ticket time tracking charts and accomplishment report of tickets assigned and complete that works great for newly IT departments that want to leverage their support standards. It includes a user portal so people can keep track of their tickets but also allows tickets creation/update via email which makes things so simple for the end user you can customize this portal with the company logo and preset the auto response message using HTML code.
We have been using the inventory feature which is really robust gives plenty details about the IT assets and their warranties. You can set networks scans and Spiceworks will give you very detailed information about everything on your network.

Cons

Spiceworks software network management needs a lot of the time it is discovering items that you have no interest in managing remotely and yet it keeps finding stuff and bringing it to your attention. The ability to manually add inventory items gets overlapped for the constant network scanning.
Spiceworks could open up their code a bit more. Since some specific needs that wouldn't be difficult to integrate/allow but that aren't done with the OpenSource collaboration to add more features and solve the lack of some specific UX desirable features.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

This is a free product, which in itself is impressive when you consider what you are being offered. In addition to a customizable ticketing system, you are given an inventory system, and a newly added network monitoring function which so far has been nothing short of impressive (Until now I have been using PRTG Monitor, which in itself is a wonderful tool, but not free.) The initial setup is very easy, and and Spiceworks as a service has very low hardware requirements, meaning you can run it on an older laptop fairly well.

The reporting function is a massive lifesaver, as it can help you generate a flexible list of everything from tickets (very flexible in what you want displayed, and how you want it sorted,) to your IT inventory (sorted by office location, purchase date, etc.) The ability to send these reports to our company's upper management to show hours spent on particular projects per month, or what assets need to be replaced due to original purchase date, is a very big plus.

The community portal itself is full of helpful people who are always willing to share their knowledge. On multiple occasions where I had to find a solution to a technical problem, I found people who were quickly able to pull more details from each instance, and provide a brief list of solutions in a fairly short amount of time. When you are backed against a wall, this can be a massive lifesaver.

Cons

Plugin compatibility. Some older plugins may no longer work well with newer version of the software, as well as some of the newest plugins requiring the latest update, but these are just minor nitpicks.

Pros

It is a very complete help desk allows you to have a great visibility of what is happening with the statistics of category breakdown, work by engineer, attention time, etc.. In addition you can create an internal knowledge base, allows you to have your inventory of equipment, reports, purchase records associated with a ticket, etc.. It is very easy to use for the end user because he only has to send a mail to a specific email address and his ticket is registered in the system. It is very stable and reliable.

Cons

It takes time to adjust it to your needs, but it has a great forum where everyone helps you.

Pros

-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)

Cons

-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

Pros

Very easy to use and the initial setup and normal operation is user friendly enough to where even a novice user could get it working for their needs. When it comes to Help Desk software, you can't beat the low price of FREE!

There is a large pool of add-ons and user created plugins that will fill in the blanks to add additional functionality.

If you get stuck on an issue while using Spiceworks Help Desk, the official email support and user forums are very helpful.

Helps you keep track of inventory.

Overall if you are looking for a cost effective HelpDesk ticketing solution for a small/medium business, you can't go wrong here.

Cons

Users have reported that on very large networks the initial network scan can take days to complete.

Official support is limited to email or user forums.

You can't hire an expert through Spiceworks to help set up or configure Spiceworks Help Desk to meet your needs. It is up to you to figure it out.

Pros

Myself and my team have been using Spiceworks for the last 2 years now as our Help Desk Ticketing software solution. We have now also recently changed over to their cloud version of this software which incredibly is also free and still have zero issues with the software. To date, it has never let us down. Spiceworks software delivers all the functionality we need out of a Help Desk Solution and is still running strong for us. We manage over a 500 tickets daily through this software and have never found to have had any technical issues with it.

Cons

I do however have only one small issue and that is I wish it had better sorting of submitted tickets and improved search capabilities. Otherwise this software is amazing and only look forward to any future updates they may have for us.

Pros

We have been using Spiceworks for 3-4 years and I absolutely love it. It allows our team to stay on task, easily communicate through notes on tickets, and most importantly get work completed efficiently. We obviously chose this software because it was free, but kept using it because it was easy to use, easy to configure, and had a large community of support behind it.

Cons

Some features of Spiceworks simply don't work well. Such as the inventory component of the software. It attempts to gather all the computers in your domain and place them in an inventory so you can track and monitor them, but at least half of our PCs just don't report in no matter how much troubleshooting we try.

Pros

The ability to respond to tickets via email with particular commands (such as assigning to a particular person, closing a ticket, etc) is very nice, and the web portal for end users to request support is nicely customizable.

Cons

Two features of Spiceworks stand out as the least polished and most frustrating. First is the way the software deals with custom attributes for tickets. This information is tucked away in a secondary menu, cannot be easily included in email notifications of a new ticket, and is very difficult to export in any format that makes it remotely usable. Second is the confusing way that IT staff received notifications about activities on particularly tickets, and the inability of the software to consistently CC administrators based on the content or attributes of the tickets. I have spend many hours trying to fine-tune the settings to make sure that my fellow admins and IT techs are not bombarded with emails while also getting notifications about tickets that are relevant to their work, but have given up at this point.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

It was free and easy to use. Lots of support from other users that also help out with other software.

Cons

Asset tracking wasn't the best, inaccurate and the reporting isn't the greatest.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

It was free and easy to use

Pros

It enables my user base to submit requests easily and allows me to communicate effectively with those users as far as the progress of the request and helps me to track requests. No more losing my "To Do" list. In addition, I can add a ticket for something I want to get taken care of, assign it a priority and follow updates all from one place. I also have the ios app so I can see it anywhere. In addition to all that, it is free!

Cons

It's hard to say what I don't like because I am not terribly familiar with other Help Desk Software for comparison. The initial setup was a little confusing for me. There was support but it was email and so there was a bit of time delay. Getting users to understand that they don't need to send a new email everytime because it creates a new ticket has been a challenge.

Pros

The ease of putting in tickets and meeting resolution target without much communication loss is imperative to all IT operations.

Cons

So i used the free version of the software being in a start up environment, that being said the software has a ton of adds.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Problem Management

Reasons for Choosing Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Operational requirements.

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Spiceworks is far more advanced

Pros

Pretty much everything. It is so comprehensive and makes everything I do easier. From manging my inventory to generating reports, to monitoring every system I have down to the postage machine, it's an incredible product, and oh, it's free! Mission critical software I couldn't possibly live without.

Cons

Splitting hairs, but if I had to say something negative, it would be that getting it to report properly on your inventory take a bit too figure out. But one your do, it's seamless and intuitive.