SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.
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Spiceworks Help Desk
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Spiceworks offers a set of free tools for IT network management and help desk support ticketing. The inventory management system essentially provides comprehensive device information for asset management. The Spiceworks Network Monitor provides information on observed IT for problem tracking and server performance monitoring. And finally, the Spiceworks Help Desk Software lets IT personnel stay on top of issues across the network with a ticketing system. Help desk roles with role-based…
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Pricing
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Spiceworks Help Desk
Editions & Modules
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All Tiers
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds Service Desk
Spiceworks Help Desk
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Spiceworks Help Desk
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds Service Desk
Verified User
Manager
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
We used Spiceworks for approximately 9 years before moving to Samanage. While reviewing many systems available, we decided on Solarwinds Service Desk for the following primary reasons:
Solarwinds has a much better UI than Remedy. It's more modern and flows better than the older "Windows 95" view of Remedy. Spiceworks does offer a modern UI but is lacking on a lot of features that are considered basic for ITSM related tools. Spiceworks does work very well for …
Prior to Solarwinds we had been using Spiceworks that resided on a local server. They both had the basic items that I needed to have but Spiceworks was local so I would only be able to connect when I was in one of the offices or connected through my VPN. Spiceworks was not as …
SSD has more features and simplicity in implementation, and working with it is very important to us. It is also very reputable in terms of company security and safety. Helpdesk software should be designed user-friendly in mind. The SolarWinds desktop is created in the cloud …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
We had Spiceworks and we were limited by functionality, customer service, and program updates. We selected SolarWinds Service Desk because the software had all the functions that we needed in 1 program. We had several meet and greets and demos with their sales team. The way …
We have used Zendesk, ServiceNow, Spiceworks, and TeamDynamix. Zendesk lacked features like vendor and contract management but offered a competitive price. ServiceNow and TeamDynamix are more full-featured ITSM tools with more features but not cost-effective for our …
It was here before me. I plan to try to replace it with Spiceworks, which is free. With the decrease in budget, we have to find ways to cut costs. I used Spiceworks before and I think it does everything we need. I’ll save $7,000 a year.
It is the best among them all. No other ticketing system is so simple yet powerful. I have used Spiceworks and Salesforce, but those are a bit bloated and not as clean as Solarwinds. Also, with Solarwinds, it comes with great data and information to dive deep into getting …
Solarwinds Service Desk was a significant improvement over the Spiceworks freeware primarily due to the ability to auto assign tasks based on Category and Subcategory. The ability to lay out simple workflows and business rules is what really differentiated the system for our …
Though Spiceworks does a great job for being a free product, it lacks the cohesiveness that Solarwinds Service Desk brings. You can't assign tasks to other non-it staff, theirs no procurement, no problem or change management. It also lacks contract management that Solarwinds …
Solarwinds Service Desk is a larger solution than just a ticketing system. I think it stacks up quite well and surpasses some of the other solutions by providing asset inventory capability, change management, vendor management, contract management options. Many other …
In my opinion, we have a much richer experience with Solarwinds. It basically ramps up all the features of Spiceworks to the next level and enforces a proper ITIL framework into the process. Integration with Dameware is a much better experience than Spiceworks' connection to …
Formstack was used prior to my start and it was not effective. Spiceworks has been the only product I have used in the last 3 years. It is cost effective, easy to set up and is loaded with features for the price (free). The inventory feature allows you to build device and …
If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.
It's a great helpdesk solution - we currently have five years of data within it, roughly 25,000 tickets. The older edition is a great inventory and software license tracking tool. It is easy for users to use the interface and submit tickets and requests on the web, and its email integration is solid. The new version is a below-average system monitoring tool, only giving up/down status and a few other metrics.
Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.
There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.
My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.
Spiceworks is a free tool, so there would be no hesitation if we are required to upgrade it. We have installed Spiceworks on a dedicated server with more than enough resources to get the most from this tool, so we will have this running in our department for years to come.
Solarwinds Service Desk has a very "user friendly" interface. Everything looks nice and neat. And, learning how to use the system is very easy. It provides multiple services that are easy for most people to grasp, and allows for great organization of incidents and assets. Support for Solarwinds Service Desk has a good response and resolution time and are easy to work with.
Spiceworks is user friendly and easy to set up. It can be customized to suit your needs. If there are any problems, you can go to the community forums for support and be in contact with many IT Pros, as well as the Spiceworks support staff and development teams who are always happy to help users out
Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient
When the system is working, the pages load very quickly. We run reports all the time in the system. The reporting can be extremely complex or very simple. Either way, we have not had any issues with the reports. We do not currently integrate Solarwinds Service Desk with any other software.
SolarWinds support department will respond to you quickly from the time of purchase to after-purchase instructions & supporting, and the company is great in customers support. In buying a software, our organization always has a priority for the seller and support and accountability is very important to us, and the manufacturer or seller must be responsible and supportive.
Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.
When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.
The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.
If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth
We chose SolarWinds Service Desk for its user friendly platform compared to what we had. Its was easier for requestors to submit tickets, provide feedback, merge tickets, build a suitable approval process. Our organization had a hard time going back and forth with the end user on providing a status on their request or issue, where most users just didn't follow through or lost interest in their issue. We would have to send multiple emails to get any type of feedback and that's something we did not want to keep on doing.
EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.
We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.
We are more easily able to quantify user satisfaction with support.
We are able to develop SLAs that quantify and define the obligation of our support teams.
The actual cost of Solarwinds Service Desk per agent user is high in our estimation. The more you implement this platform across your organization, the more tightly tethered you are to this solution.