Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk Review

Every help desk product we tested this time around has various pricing plans, except for Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk. That's because it's free. To be sure, it doesn't give you nearly all the functionality found in many other products, certainly not our Editors' Choice honorees such as Freshdesk or Vivantio. But you do get basic ticketing and reporting that we found to be plenty powerful enough to support a small business' internal IT help desk. You also get an innovative and free (!) plug-in for sophisticated analytics and access to a Spiceworks archive of technical articles to help you solve many standard device and IT problems.

(Editors' Note: Spiceworks is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)

Spiceworks Pricing and Compromises

As we said, Spiceworks Cloud's price tag is zero. The company makes money by serving ads directed at IT pros using the software. That sounds annoying, but it didn't bother us much once we were using the tool. The giveaway is incredibly enticing, considering that Spiceworks doesn't charge for any of its other IT products, including asset management, infrastructure, and network monitoring, remote control, and SLA contract management. All these tools integrate with Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk, so you can build yourself a very capable IT toolbox without spending a dime as long as you're careful about evaluation.

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Besides seeing ads, the primary thing you give up with Spiceworks is flexibility. For one thing, Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk focuses on internal IT support only, which means it competes only with the likes of Vivantio and HaloITSM. You won't easily use it as a customer help desk such as you'd build with products like Freshdesk or HappyFox. Additionally, because it's free and doesn't adhere to ITIL, Spiceworks is best for smaller IT shops that don't need the glitzier features of more commercial packages.

For example, Spiceworks doesn't currently support adding tickets from social media, though it does have a self-service portal for use by employees. Other features you'll find in competitors that Spiceworks skips include live chat, chatbot support, and the ability to incorporate a support widget on a website. Nor is there much in the way of external app integration aside from its smart reporting plug (see below). So while the free price tag might be enticing, be sure to consider all these factors when evaluating your choices.

Interface and Unique Features

The Spiceworks Cloud user interface looks much like other alternatives, with a menu bar across the top of the page and icons on the left to take you to other features. It's worth repeating here that Spiceworks also offers asset management in the form of software inventory, device inventory, and contract management. This can be important for some IT shops that might manage larger device fleets since the service tech can immediately access the device's purchasing records, send it out for a fix, and assign a new device to the user.

These are all separate tools, but they're also free and integrated with the Spiceworks help desk. The inventory tool works in conjunction with an IP Scanner to discover devices on your network. That's convenient, but you still have to install an agent on the target devices to enable the collection of hardware and software information.

Spiceworks' dashboards are functional but can't be modified. You can only change a toggle view between the last seven or 30 days. You get some extra information when you hover over a graph, but nothing is clickable. You also can't export any information from the dashboards, although the same data is available for reporting.

Spiceworks Ticket Management

IT professionals create tickets in Spiceworks via email, a mobile app, or a web browser. For users, however, that's relegated to just the browser. As of this writing, Spiceworks does not support recurring or scheduled ticket creation or any API for programmatically creating tickets. The new ticket form is also static and can't be modified. Spiceworks does provide the ability to apply rules to new tickets to perform one of eight different actions automatically.

The self-service portal presents a simple web page with three contact email, summary, and description fields. Clicking Submit enters the ticket and sends an email acknowledging receipt to the email address entered in the form. Requests submitted via email are added to the list of unassigned tickets. Any agent can click the Accept link on the ticket summary page to take responsibility for handling that ticket.

Managing tickets happens from the main ticket table. This is simply a listing of tickets in a grid form showing primary fields like Summary, Assignee, Creator, Priority, Due Date, and Last Updated Date. A search icon above the ticket list opens a text box for entering your criteria. New views can be created by clicking on the Funnel icon. Clicking on the Activity menu item displays a ticket activity log by date. You can search for text on the page using your browser's Find (Control+F) command.

Reporting and Data Export

As we've hinted above, reporting is a standout area for Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk. On the surface, when you compare the product's internal reporting features against those of the others in this roundup, Spiceworks' reporting capabilities are plain vanilla, to say the least. But then there's the Microsoft Power BI connector, which changes everything.

This simple plug-in makes your Cloud Help Desk account data available in a Power BI template. Both the connector plug-in and the report template are free for download from the Spiceworks website.

You might think Power BI is a bit intimidating for casual users. But Spiceworks Cloud is aimed at IT professionals, which means its intended users should be comfortable with some basic logic and report building forms. And if they are, they'll be able to create visually compelling reports quickly.

The best part is that Microsoft also offers the essential Power BI Desktop application for free, along with a wide range of tutorials and videos. This connection makes Spiceworks' reporting as capable as any other products we tested while keeping the whole solution free—at least until Microsoft changes its mind.

Surprisingly Capable, Unbeatably Cheap

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is by any measure a no-frills ticketing solution, but it comes at no cost. It might be just the thing for small businesses looking for a tool to track their internal IT help desk requests. Larger organizations will be better off with a solution like our Editors' Choice award winner Zoho Desk.