Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

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

Since transitioning from Zendesk last year, we've been using the Spiceworks Help Desk, and it's been a great asset in helping us accomplish tasks more efficiently. The simple dashboard layout makes it much easier for our IT department to manage tickets. Plus, assigning or creating tickets is as easy as clicking on one, streamlining the entire process.

Cons

With Zendesk, we had the ability to customize our ticket number sequence, starting at 60000 instead of the typical #1 or #2. This made it easier for both our employees and IT department to track and manage tickets efficiently. Unfortunately, we found that Spiceworks doesn't offer the same flexibility.

Pros

It's cloud based, so accessible from any location. On prem version was difficult with so many remote workers

Cons

Could not create multiple templates for forms. with the on-prem version we had different ticket forms for different topics. Cloud based was limited to just 1 main form

Pros

Spiceworks Cloud has a live chat that makes customers raise their issues.

Cons

Spiceworks Cloud is detailed and has a friendly feature.

Pros

Among the ticketing system for helpdesk purpouses, I think spiceworks is one of the best. The interface is quite simple and you will learn fast how to use and manage the tickets. Obviously there are many other features (for example managing users, creating reports), but I always use it as ticketing systems. Customers may send an email or log to interface with their accounts and open or update a ticket. You will reply to them via web interface and of course you can (and they can) attach files and images, in a fast and easy way.
You can assign to others / deassing the tickets in case of need.

Cons

I preferred the on premise version but it is not available anymore

Pros

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is crucial, speaking about ticket management.
Customers can open and update their tickets via email or via web interface in a fast and easy way.
The dashboard allows to view and manage - of course - the tickets, assign them, update and attach files, add comments (that won't be visible to customers), you can also view statistics and make reports. And if you are an administrator you can add new user and set their permissions.
The interface is clean and you immediately know how it works (so, even a newbie can be operational really soon). Highly recommended.

Cons

There is not an on premise version (they stop supporting it some years ago)

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

Great tool and easy to use ticketing system, easy ticket creation, assignments and monitoring. It allows you to create custom reports which can be used for analysis and tracking as well.

Cons

No complains so far about the tool, I would like to get more time to explore and implement more features in our company.

Pros

Spiceworks Cloud Helpdesk is a solid free offering for tickets, contracts, and managing assets. It is easy to use and has a solid UI for navigation.

Cons

Spiceworks cloud helpdesk doesn't have any single sign on option with modern identity providers. Active Directory is supported but only by of an additional web server in an on-premise environment.

Pros

It did the very basics and it was free and relatively easy to use.

Cons

It was very clunky, glitched frequently. The UI was extremely ugly.

Pros

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!!!

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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 Considered

Pros

One of the things I liked most about Spiceworks was its vibrant and supportive community. The Spiceworks community provided a wealth of knowledge and resources, allowing me to connect with IT professionals and exchange valuable insights. It was a great platform for seeking advice, troubleshooting issues, and staying updated with the latest industry trends. The community's active participation and willingness to help made problem-solving and learning a collaborative and enjoyable experience.

Cons

While Spiceworks had many positive aspects, one thing I liked least was occasional performance issues. At times, the platform experienced slowdowns or glitches, which could be frustrating, especially during critical tasks. Additionally, the user interface, although functional, could have been more intuitive and streamlined. Navigating through certain sections or finding specific features required some exploration, which could have been improved for a smoother user experience.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

It's extensible and easy monitoring for use

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

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

It is a great tool as service desk and hep desk solution
It makes management of IT assets easy and also doubles up as an IT management solution

Cons

Spiceworks has always been very helpful. No pitfalls.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

It was low in cost and easy to customize.

Cons

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

Pros

It's free and easy to setup, and a very good product if you need a basic Help Desk offering with basic features.

Cons

Advanced features are limited, as is reporting capability.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

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

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.

Cons

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

Pros

Spiceworks offers a free version of its software thus it is easy for small business to obtain and use it.It is easy to intergrate it with other applications .

Cons

Its free version contains alot of ads which I find annoying sometimes when I'm working.Spicework support is not available most of the time,this is an area they should really work on.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

The support wasn't too responsive on my end.

Pros

Decent tool, good for small and mid sized company. No they have the cloud version instead of having the local install on the server.

Cons

Would prefer a simple dashboard. Personally it has a lot of information to digest.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

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

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.

Cons

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

Pros

This application is extremely easy to set up and configure. It can be configured as an on-premise application or in the cloud. Administration is managed through a dashboard which permits administrators to manage roles for support personnel to whom tickets will be assigned. Tickets can be automatically assigned to individuals or teams based on configurable categories and ticket rules. There are standard data entry fields included and the administrator can add additional fields as needed. For example, during the Coronavirus pandemic, with everyone working from home, we added a mandatory phone number data entry field to our ticket layout. Data entry fields can be made mandatory if desired.

When a ticket is created by a user, the ticket is entered into the system with all of the information provided by the user and the user receives a confirmation email. The ticket will be assigned to the proper support agent or team based on the rules configured within the application. Any replies to that email are automatically added to the ticket with date and time added. Tickets can be easily closed upon completion. Duplicate tickets can be merged into one ticket which helps with management of the ticket queue.

The user portal is easily customizable with company name and other options. Users can even attach a screenshot or other file to the ticket to provide useful information beyond the text description of the user problem.

Best of all, it can be used for free.

Cons

Since this is a free IT Help Desk application, it is not nearly as full featured as some other IT Help Desk applications. Reporting is not as robust as some other applications. However, you can easily download information in .csv format and create your own reports if needed.

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

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

Reasons for Switching to Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

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

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

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?

Cons

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.

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.