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

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'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

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

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.

Cons

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 Considered

Reasons for Switching to Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

First off, nobody has ever complained about free.

Spiceworks itself does what it is meant to do -- it provides a simple helpdesk for you and your users, with basic features you'd expect from a support system. It's full of little things, like a built-in knowledge base, built-in remote support, integrations with other tools, etc.

The real value in Spiceworks though is it's community; it's like Experts Exchange on steroids. Everyone is friendly and helpful, and vendors have direct representation in the forums to help you with both sales and support questions. It rarely feels like anyone is trying to sell you anything in Spiceworks' community, but at the end of the day you end up buying from some vendors *because* of how they treat you there. It's incredible.

Cons

Inventory... inventory is not good. If you don't get it set up perfectly the first time, you might as well turn it off and forget about it. There's still no really good way to handle historical data and devices you no longer control.

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

I mainly use this for service tickets but it's still useful for keeping track of inventory. I really like how it tracks toner levels in printers.

Cons

The gui is a bit outdated and can run a bit sluggish. The lack of future support and updates is disappointing.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Spiceworks IT Help Desk is great to help manage ticket times and IT tasks. I like that it is made specifically for IT tickets or level 2 software support scenarios, it's definitely more for IT than for software development or software feature tracking. The modules are a little easier to look at than Fogbugz. The admin portal is also easy to use and manage teammates and team workloads - managing inbound tickets and creating brand new tickets (as a manager) to send out tasks is easy.

Cons

For me it took a while to ramp up and get trained on Spiceworks IT - it was a little bit less intuitive than Fogbugz and JIRA, but, once you learn how it works, it's much better. If anything goes wrong customer support is pretty good. For software development projects where repositories are being merged/ features are being tracked ect it isn't the best fit.

Pros

Extremely easy to use as a user and an administrator. Users simply send an email to a pre-defined email address ([email protected]) and a e-ticket is automatically generated. My IT staff receives notifications via email as well as the mobile app. IT Staff is able to assign tickets, respond to users, set categories, etc. very easily. Best of all, it's FREE.

Cons

Set up was very difficult. It took us a few attempts to get it working. But once it was up and running, it keeps on going.

Pros

I used this ticket system when I was apart of a IT team that setup a new casino network, software, servers and etc. I started with this software and a IT Tech user and handling my tickets. This software helped me do my job more effectively. I handled my tickets and assets in one location. It allows you to keep track of which user gets which device and I used the assets by mac address. Which in the end saved me a lot of time and frustration. Other techs didn't use the asset the same way so tracking down your devices after deployment is a nightmare. Even from the end user traning was a lot easier to handle because how easy this software is to use.

Cons

I'm not sure if this is a software issue or a setup issue. But when a user sends a email it would not auto fill in the info for the level of urgency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cons

The support wasn't too responsive on my end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.