Overview
What is Spiceworks Help Desk?
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…
TrustRadius Insights
Best free product available
Great Tool for Small and Midsize Enterprise IT Departments
Lots of features, and you can't beat the price!
Spiceworks, the T-Rex of Help Desks.
Spiceworks Help Desk Review
Great ticketing system
Spiceworks Help Desk Makes My Job Simple
Spiceworks Help Desk gets the job done!
Great Free Help Desk
Spiceworks is highly recommended. Did I mention it was free?
Spiceworks Help Desk- A Great Deal Even if They Charged for It!
Spiceworks Help Desk is a great ad-supported option for coordinating end user support
Spiceworks Help Desk is powerful software at a community price.
Spiceworks' Help Desk will SAVE your IT department! And your budget.
Awards
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Popular Features
- Ticket creation and submission (53)9.393%
- Ticket response (52)8.989%
- External knowledge base (47)8.888%
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (53)7.575%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
All Tiers
Free
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Spiceworks Help Desk Demo
Features
Incident and problem management
Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes
- 7.5Organize and prioritize service tickets(53) Ratings
Prioritize tickets to ensure most urgent are tackled first
- 5.7Expert directory(46) Ratings
Directory of IT and businesses services available to customers to help route tickets to appropriate subject matter experts
- 7.3Subscription-based notifications(41) Ratings
Users subscribe to notifications for ticket updates
- 6.5ITSM collaboration and documentation(44) Ratings
Issue resolution through collaboration mechanisms like discussion threads, social tools; agents can attach notes, files, etc. to tickets in order to maintain a record of all interactions related to the case.
- 9.3Ticket creation and submission(53) Ratings
Users and agents can easily enter new support requests.
- 8.9Ticket response(52) Ratings
Agents can easily follow up with customers.
Self Help Community
Features that allow customers to self-service for support issues.
- 8.8External knowledge base(47) Ratings
Customers can self-service by searching through help articles.
- 5.9Internal knowledge base(47) Ratings
Internal knowledge base helps agents answer customers' support questions.
Multi-Channel Help
Features related to providing customer service and support via different communication channels. Communications are organized by ticket/customer/channel for the convenience of agents.
- 6.1Customer portal(45) Ratings
Customer portal allows customers to submit tickets themselves and/or access self help resources.
- 4IVR(10) Ratings
Includes an interactive voice response system for routing callers to the correct agent or information.
- 3.1Social integration(26) Ratings
Agents can communicate with customers via social networks like Facebook and Twitter; may also include brand activity monitoring/reporting capabilities.
- 8Email support(45) Ratings
Integrates with email so that agents can send and receive information related to support tickets via email; email communications are attached to support tickets.
- 5Help Desk CRM integration(27) Ratings
Integrates with CRM so that tickets and support communications are coordinated with customers' records.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Spiceworks Help Desk?
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 permissions and notifications allow tasks to be allocated across team members. If the user wishes to host Spiceworks apps and tools locally, then they are free. For cloud-based service, Spiceworks bills $12 per IT user per month, or $10 monthly per user if paid annually.
Spiceworks was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, also with a European headquarters in London (since 2012), and was backed by multiple investors, notably Goldman Sachs. In 2019 Spiceworks was acquired by Ziff Davis, a division of J2 Global. It is now a J2 Global company, operating under the name Spiceworks Ziff Davis.
Spiceworks Help Desk Video
Spiceworks Help Desk Competitors
Spiceworks Help Desk Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(244)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Spiceworks Help Desk has proven to be a versatile and valuable tool for various organizations. Users have utilized this software to efficiently manage their IT support requests, providing a solid interface and quick communication with both users and the IT team. The built-in help desk facilitates smooth communication with vendors and resellers for quotes on hardware, software, and services, making it a convenient one-stop solution. Additionally, Spiceworks Help Desk serves as an asset management discovery tool for networking and computing equipment, offering a primary inventory for desktops, mobile PCs, tablets, and software licenses. With its scanning capabilities, it can even identify security vulnerabilities in the network infrastructure.
The community forums within Spiceworks Help Desk provide a valuable resource for IT professionals to share advice, support, reviews of software and hardware, and user-generated scripts and plugins. Users have reported solving computer problems from start to finish by utilizing features such as inventory comparison, advice from the community forums, and vendor quotes within the platform. The software also allows for analytics on types of requests, time to resolution, and request volume, enabling users to track trends and optimize their support processes.
Spiceworks Inventory is another essential component of the Spiceworks suite that enables users to discover and inventory network-connected devices like iLO, Windows, Linux, Macs, printers, routers, switches, etc. It provides detailed device information such as make, model, warranty info, RAM, CPU, disk space, hardware components, and applications. This feature allows for effective system management within the organization.
Overall, Spiceworks Help Desk has been praised for its ease of use during setup and its clean interface. It offers incredible monitoring features along with a variety of customization options that cater to individual needs. With its wide range of functionalities encompassing help desk management, inventory tracking, security monitoring, and knowledge base centricity - all backed by excellent customer support - it has become a go-to solution for IT professionals across industries.
Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of Spiceworks Help Desk. Many reviewers have stated that the clean and efficient design of the ticketing system makes it easy to navigate and manage support requests. This user-friendly interface contributes to a smooth and seamless task completion, enhancing the overall user experience.
Convenient User Portal: The user portal in Spiceworks Help Desk provides a convenient landing page for end users to create and update tickets. Numerous users have expressed appreciation for the accessibility factor, as the user portal can be accessed via a browser without requiring specialized software. This accessibility adds to the usability and convenience of Spiceworks Help Desk, allowing anyone to submit help requests easily.
Customization Options: The ability to customize workflows, inventory management, and response management in Spiceworks Help Desk has been highly valued by users. Many reviewers have mentioned how they appreciate the flexibility provided by this software, as it allows them to tailor it according to their specific business needs. The customizable aspects contribute to its adaptability and usefulness for different organizations.
Loss of desktop functionality: Several users have reported that the replacement of the desktop version of Spiceworks with the online version has resulted in a loss of core functionality.
Limitations in cloud email integration: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the cloud version of Spiceworks, specifically regarding its limitations when receiving emails from specially made applications. This limitation negatively impacts the overall user experience.
Resource-intensive and occasional hanging: Users have experienced issues with Spiceworks using a significant amount of system resources, particularly on Windows systems. Additionally, some users have mentioned that they encounter occasional hangs or freezes while using the software, although a system reboot usually resolves this problem.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Spiceworks Help Desk Review
- Workflow
- Customization
- Inventory
- Response Management
- Escalation
- The desktop version has been supplanted by the online version (and a local version of that online version), losing a lot of core functionality
- Ticket collision
- Ticketing
- Reporting
- Inventory
- System Alerts
- The Community
- Spiceworks Live Events
- Organize and prioritize service tickets
- 90%9.0
- Expert directory
- 70%7.0
- Subscription-based notifications
- 90%9.0
- ITSM collaboration and documentation
- 100%10.0
- Ticket creation and submission
- 100%10.0
- Ticket response
- 100%10.0
- Internal knowledge base
- 90%9.0
- Customer portal
- 70%7.0
- Social integration
- 50%5.0
- Email support
- 100%10.0
- Help Desk CRM integration
- 70%7.0
- At the low price of free, it has had instant ROI over previous helpdesk tracking, even when including the value of labor spent on ticket management
- The live events are always educational and worth the time.
- The community is top notch
- The product reviews are unbiased and fair, as well as coming from real-world users
The community is top-tier, and their use of gamification principles goes beyond other communities to being an honestly fun system. The live events are worth every second spent watching them, and their annual conference is, in my opinion, the best conference of the year.
- IT Support
- IT Projects
- IT Purchases
- We track project timelines in it
- Other service departments - HR, Finance, etc. that are service oriented.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Implemented in-house
Second phase was taking that data, reviewing it, and setting items like categories and SLAs
Third phase was implementing those items into Spiceworks
Fourth phase was setting up email integration to our helpdesk email
Fifth phase was opening up the web interface
Sixth was launch
- No major issues were encountered.
- Task and follow-up entry
- Reporting
- Inventory
- Add-ons and plugins (like every system)
Hey Security Practitioners! Here is the perfect free tool to install for performing a risk analysis on your network!
- Identify workstations with running various operating systems on your network.
- Identify workstations running various anti-virus programs on your network.
- Identify workstations and servers running low on storage capacity.
- Provide dashboards to easily view the current state of your network.
- Spiceworks uses a lot of system resources and does need room for improvement in this area on Windows systems. Sometimes it can hang and a system reboot will clear up the issue.
- Spiceworks should be able to be installed on non-Windows systems such as Linux, Apple MAC OS, or other flavors of unix. So it should have a Linux install available for servers running this OS.
- Running Spiceworks on a workstation along with other programs is not recommended. I would advise installing it on a dedicated server.
- Organize and prioritize service tickets
- 80%8.0
- Expert directory
- 100%10.0
- ITSM collaboration and documentation
- 80%8.0
- Ticket creation and submission
- 80%8.0
- Ticket response
- 80%8.0
- External knowledge base
- 100%10.0
- Internal knowledge base
- 90%9.0
- Customer portal
- 70%7.0
- IVR
- N/AN/A
- Social integration
- 80%8.0
- Email support
- 80%8.0
- Help Desk CRM integration
- 80%8.0
- Considering that we have a limited budget and resources for security tools, Spiceworks has had a positive ROI in our department because we can use it to perform risk analysis on our network without the overhead cost of purchasing a similar tool to perform this function.
- The reporting feature of Spiceworks is great. You can create your own reports based on the criteria you want on your network, such as searching for workstations that run a particular operating system or systems running an outdated antivirus program.
- The real-time monitoring is an important feature. I do not have to initiate a scan of the network after I have setup Spiceworks to scan a subnet. It will automatically scan the network and identify new systems being attached to your network.
1. Limited in the number of devices it could scan on your network. This would not work for us.
2. Provide a trial period for their scanners. This would not work because we needed something permanent with all the features working.
3. Were difficult to install. You needed a high level of linux/unix experience to get their solution to work.
4. Required a small agent installation on every device you wanted to scan. This was out of the question since we couldn't touch every desktop to install their agent.
- Risk Analysis tool
- Cost efficient
- Easy to use
- Easy reporting features
- Easy to install and get up and running.
- I never heard about Spiceworks being used as a security risk analysis tool, but I quickly recognized it and am glad that I did.
- I like the fact that I can create custom reports that I can show my supervisor.
- The fact that the tool is free is a great plus. I know that it has saved our department $$$ because we don't have to pay for a similar product along with subscription fees.
- Spiceworks can identify workstations and servers that are running low on disk drive capacity. We could eventually use it as a means of identifying systems that need to be upgraded.
- We could also use Spiceworks to identify outdated applications which could require an upgrade.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Implemented in-house
- I had to backup my existing Spiceworks installation from my workstation and install it on the dedicated server we setup for it.
- No other issues came up once we ported the installation to the dedicated server.
- Installation is very easy to get the system up and operational within an hour!
- Scanning your network is a breeze with this tool.
- Dashboards are great so you can visually view your network.
- You really should install this on a system dedicated to Spiceworks only, preferably on its own server.
- I would recommend a system running 16GB of RAM or more.
- You may have to tweek the report functions to create the output you want to see.
2. Its easy to install.
3. You can have it up and running in under 1-hour.
4. You get dashboards that are easy to read so you know the state of your network.
5. You can create your own reports and not just the ones already installed.
6. Excellent tool for network administrators and security practitioners.
7. Did I mention that its free?
Spiceworks Review
- Network device inventorying.
- Locating new devices and rogue devices.
- Inventorying installed software to maintain compliance with guidelines.
- Keeping up with hardware specs for life-cycle management.
- Identifying unusual network traffic.
- Keeping up with server up-time and alerting if a server or cloud service is down.
- Asset location tracking.
- Verifying Warranty information on brand name PCs.
- Their help desk feature, while robust, tends to be a little quirky for end users.
Needs some work: Knowledge base needs to be more easily customizeable for internal systems only.
- Organize and prioritize service tickets
- 90%9.0
- Expert directory
- 70%7.0
- Subscription-based notifications
- 70%7.0
- ITSM collaboration and documentation
- 70%7.0
- Ticket creation and submission
- 70%7.0
- Ticket response
- 80%8.0
- External knowledge base
- 100%10.0
- Internal knowledge base
- 70%7.0
- Customer portal
- 80%8.0
- IVR
- 70%7.0
- Social integration
- 80%8.0
- Email support
- 90%9.0
- Help Desk CRM integration
- 80%8.0
- Most parts of Spiceworks are Free, so how can one complain about that!
- Device Inventory management
- Rogue Device detection
- Network Mapping
- Identification of Applications on Workstations.
- Workstation hardware specifications analysis.
- Lifecycle management of Workstations
- Looking into the helpdesk features which appear quite robust.
- Internal FAQ and Knowledgebase.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
- Implemented in-house
- The fact that it cannot use Microsoft SQL for its db, but instead it self-install it own little SQL lite.
- This makes it difficult for us to use with our primary reporting server/service.
- Overall the product is simple to set up and get up and running in a minimal amount of time.
- I wish Spiceworks would support installation on Microsoft SQL as opposed to forcing the use of its built in SQL-lite which makes reporting outside of the UI difficult at best.
Spiceworks, Where IT goes to work
- But it's created and supported as if it was a very expensive program.
- Web-based. Got a browser? You can get your tickets.
- MUCH. INFORMATION. If you know a little SQL, you can get it to tell you just about anything about your network.
- Community. Adjacent to the program is a flourishing community of, I think at this point, over 5 million users. Reviews, how-tos, vendors, anything you could need in a forum, plus a plate of bacon.
- Access to devs. Not only is their support great, but through the community, you can get some access to the developers. I'm currently bugging them over some feature requests. :)
- Plug-ins. There are a few features, like nesting sub categories when creating a ticket that you would expect to be standard, but are only supported by plugins. It's not fun when you depend on a feature you get from a plugin, and the creator stops working on it.
- SQLite isn't my favorite thing in the world, but it's what I have to fight to write custom reports.
- It takes a lot less time to open tickets
- Track-it and Service Center
- Implemented in-house
- Learning how to get a third-party plugin to play right.
- Creating/working with tickets
- Inventory
- Reporting
- Everything
- writing custom reports in SQLite
With Spiceworks, I can solve computer problems from start to finish. For example, a user submits a ticket to Spiceworks Help Desk, then I use Spiceworks Inventory to compare his computer to similar machines and to see what software is installed that could be causing problems, I can go to the Spiceworks Community forums to get advice on how to solve the problem or to read product reviews, and then I can even get quotes from vendors for the replacement parts or new software, all without having to leave Spiceworks.
- Help desk software is easy to set up and manage and has a user portal with room for a FAQ or self-support as well as a robust ticketing system.
- Network inventory discovery in Spiceworks is better than many expensive solutions that I've used, and it's completely free.
- I get quick answers to complicated questions in the community forums. Many IT Superheroes are more than happy to help you out with technical problems or offer up advice.
- With Spiceworks, I can solve computer problems from start to finish. For example, a user submits a ticket to Spiceworks Help Desk, then I use Spiceworks Inventory to compare his computer to similar machines and to see what software is installed that could be causing problems, I can go to the Spiceworks Community forums to get advice on how to solve the problem or to read product reviews, and then I can even get quotes from vendors for the replacement parts or new software, all without having to leave Spiceworks.
- There has been talk of adding a Wiki feature to SpiceWorks, which I think would be a great addition.
- Only runs on Windows. It will automatically discover and inventory any OS, but the software itself must be hosted on Windows.
We run Spiceworks on our antivirus management server (VM), it doesn't need anything too powerful but it can be a little slow at times if you're running on a slower host.
Many people seem to only use the help desk feature, or only participate in the community, etc. so even if you don't use the entire package, there is something that everyone in IT will find useful in Spiceworks.
- FREE, so the only investment was the time it takes to install and configure, which can be done in an afternoon.
- Spiceworks Help Desk has greatly reduced the time it takes to address and solve users' problems, and to keep a record of all help desk activities.
- Network/PC/Hardware/Software Inventory used to be very time consuming and was often inaccurate. Spiceworks does inventory for you, so it's always accurate and up-to-date.
- Spiceworks will notify me when one of my network resources stops responding to pings, which allows me to quickly address problems before they can have a negative impact on our business.
- Sysaid,Mediawiki,Liferay,nmap
- Help Desk
- Inventory Management
- Knowledge Base
- Community support forums
- Offline device notifcation
- In addition to hardware and software inventory, I've used Spiceworks to keep track of contact information for vendors, service providers, utility contractors, etc.
- The community has grown at an unexpected rate, and keeps getting better every day.
- More reliance on the help desk for ticketing. Right now users initiate support through telephone, email, walk-in, etc. so many times a support ticket is never created. If our company keeps growing, we'll be relying much more heavily on the help desk than we are now.
- Help desk portal can be a great tool for self-support and FAQ before users submit a ticket, but we haven't done much to implement that yet.
- Implemented in-house
- After inventory scans, network devices sometimes show up incorrectly or not at all if they're not configured properly.
- Inventory is very easy, and there are great articles about configuring your devices to make sure Spiceworks can accurately scan them.
- The community is one of the most helpful and professional support forums that I've ever been a part of. Many major IT companies are involved in the community, so you can often speak directly to a representative of the company whose product or service you're having trouble with or researching.
- Help desk is much better than the previous (paid) help desk software that we had been using before Spiceworks.
- The only difficulties I've experienced with Spiceworks is related to automatic scans of network devices. Some devices don't show up properly in the inventory. This is usually something that can be fixed by changing settings on that device.
Installing an update is as easy as downloading the new executable installer and waiting for it to finish. Everything is pretty much automatic.
- Each upgrade has many bug fixes and improvements.
- More integration with out systems on our network.
- I'd like to see a Wiki implemented, I've heard that this feature may be on the way.