Spiceworks

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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?

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

This is a free product, which in itself is impressive when you consider what you are being offered. In addition to a customizable ticketing system, you are given an inventory system, and a newly added network monitoring function which so far has been nothing short of impressive (Until now I have been using PRTG Monitor, which in itself is a wonderful tool, but not free.) The initial setup is very easy, and and Spiceworks as a service has very low hardware requirements, meaning you can run it on an older laptop fairly well.

The reporting function is a massive lifesaver, as it can help you generate a flexible list of everything from tickets (very flexible in what you want displayed, and how you want it sorted,) to your IT inventory (sorted by office location, purchase date, etc.) The ability to send these reports to our company's upper management to show hours spent on particular projects per month, or what assets need to be replaced due to original purchase date, is a very big plus.

The community portal itself is full of helpful people who are always willing to share their knowledge. On multiple occasions where I had to find a solution to a technical problem, I found people who were quickly able to pull more details from each instance, and provide a brief list of solutions in a fairly short amount of time. When you are backed against a wall, this can be a massive lifesaver.

Nachteile

Plugin compatibility. Some older plugins may no longer work well with newer version of the software, as well as some of the newest plugins requiring the latest update, but these are just minor nitpicks.