Spiceworks

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.

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.

Its a feature rich and functional product for an amazing price. They keep adding more too.

Setup can be a bit of a bear depending on how much you want to customize it.

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.

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.