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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Terraform

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

    $0

    Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/ASpiceworks 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.

    $0

    (free for 1-5 Seats)

    Pricing
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Editions & Modules
    Open Source
    $0
    Team & Governance
    $20/user
    per user/per month
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Core Plan
    $0
    Premium
    $6
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    35 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    35 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    34 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    27 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    18 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    31 Answers
    Features
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of IBM Terraform and Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Feature
    IBM Terraform
    -
    Ratings
    Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    8.1
    56 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.855 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings5.548 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings4.943 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings9.346 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings10.055 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings10.054 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of IBM Terraform and Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Feature
    IBM Terraform
    -
    Ratings
    Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    9.5
    53 Ratings
    17% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings9.549 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings9.549 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of IBM Terraform and Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Feature
    IBM Terraform
    -
    Ratings
    Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    8.7
    53 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings9.847 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings4.512 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings10.047 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings10.029 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Small Businesses
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS CloudFormation
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (33 ratings)
    10.0
    (84 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (29 ratings)
    Usability
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    9.8
    (10 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    9.4
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    8.7
    (26 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.2
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM TerraformSpiceworks Cloud Help Desk
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
    • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
    • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    • It helps to multitask, even on the go with the mobile App.
    • We can customize to meet your needs with automated responses, notifications, and templates.
    • Detailed reports allow managers to keep track [of] and analyze data.
    • Allows for a database to store notes helpful for future tickets.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
    • The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
    • Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    • I have always wanted a way to redirect a support request into another IS bin, such as a development task.
    • It's possible to extract the data from the Spiceworks database, but it would be helpful if the process to do so were easier.
    • Improved ability to customize the system generated emails to improve the formatting and company branding.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    Still the best provisioning tool out there and good support from the community as well in terms of shared knowledge
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    IBM
    The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    We use it both locally on our own server so up time is decided by us and we also use the hosted help desk. We have never had an outage of that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    IBM
    I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    Implementation is straight forward. Never had issues as the team is already very familiar with Terraform installation from previous projects and roles
    Incentivized
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    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
    • having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
    • if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
    • writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
    Read full review
    Spiceworks Ziff Davis
    • Positive - Allow organizations to implement structured Help Desk procedures.
    • Positive - IT can begin to quantify their tickets and uncover needs within the organization.
    • Positive - IT can develop a solid roadmap with [the] management of future needs, equipment refresh schedules, etc.
    • Positive - IT can pinpoint employees who may need extra training or updated equipment based on historical ticketing data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Terraform Screenshots

    Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation