Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a completely free and concise ticketing solution.

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk may be a simple ticketing solution, but it is completely free. For large companies, its feature set may be too limited, but for small companies, it may be a real boon.

Each service desk product we tested this time has a different pricing plan, except for the Spiceworks Cloud service desk. That's because it is free. To be sure, it does not provide you with almost all the features of many other products, and certainly not the winner of our Editors’ Choice awards, such as Freshdesk or Vivantio. But you do get basic tickets and reports, and we found them to be powerful enough to support the internal IT help desk of a small business. You can also get an innovative and free (!) plug-in for complex analysis and access to Spiceworks archives of technical articles to help you solve many standard equipment and IT problems.

(Editor's note: Spiceworks is owned by PCMag's parent company Ziff Davis.)

As we said, the price tag of Spiceworks Cloud is zero. The company makes money by advertising to IT professionals who use the software. This sounds annoying, but once we use the tool, it won't bother us. Considering that Spiceworks does not charge for any other IT products, including asset management, infrastructure and network monitoring, remote control and SLA contract management, the gifts are very attractive. All these tools are integrated with Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk, so you can build a very powerful IT toolbox for yourself without spending a penny, as long as you evaluate it carefully.

In addition to seeing advertisements, the main reason you give up Spiceworks is flexibility. On the one hand, Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk only focuses on internal IT support, which means it can only compete with companies such as Vivantio and HaloITSM. You will not easily use it as a customer service desk, such as building with products such as Freshdesk or HappyFox. In addition, because it is free and does not comply with ITIL, Spiceworks is best suited for small IT shops that do not require the dazzling features of more commercial software packages.

For example, Spiceworks does not currently support adding tickets from social media, but it does have a self-service portal for employees. Other features you will find among the competitors that Spiceworks skipped include live chat, chatbot support, and the ability to integrate support widgets on the website. In addition to its smart report plug-in (see below), there are not many ways to integrate with external applications. So while the free price tag may be tempting, be sure to consider all these factors when evaluating your options.

The Spiceworks Cloud user interface looks a lot like other alternatives, with a menu bar at the top of the page and icons on the left to take you to other functions. It is worth reiterating here that Spiceworks also provides asset management in the form of software inventory, equipment inventory and contract management. This may be important for some IT shops that may manage larger device groups, because service technicians can immediately access the purchase history of the device, send it out for repair, and assign the new device to the user.

These are standalone tools, but they are also free and integrated with the Spiceworks help desk. The inventory tool is used in conjunction with an IP scanner to discover devices on the network. This is convenient, but you still need to install an agent on the target device to collect hardware and software information.

The dashboard of Spiceworks functions normally, but it cannot be modified. You can only change the switch view between the last 7 days or 30 days. When you hover over the chart, you will get some additional information, but there is no clickable information. You also cannot export any information from the dashboard, although the same data can be used in reports.

IT professionals create tickets in Spiceworks via email, mobile apps, or web browsers. However, for users, this is just a browser problem. At the time of writing, Spiceworks does not support repeated or scheduled ticket creation or any API for creating tickets programmatically. The new ticket form is also static and cannot be modified. Spiceworks does provide the ability to apply rules to new tickets to automatically perform one of eight different actions.

The self-service portal provides a simple web page with three contact email, summary, and description fields. Click Submit to enter the ticket and send an email confirming the receipt to the email address entered in the form. Requests submitted via email will be added to the list of unassigned tickets. Any agent can click the accept link on the ticket summary page to be responsible for processing the ticket.

The management work order occurs in the master work order table. This is just a list of work orders in a grid, showing the main fields such as summary, assignee, creator, priority, due date, and last updated date. The search icon above the ticket list will open a text box for entering conditions. Click the funnel icon to create a new view. Click the "Activity" menu item to display the work order activity log by date. You can use the Find (Control F) command of the browser to search for text on the page.

As we hinted above, reporting is a prominent area of ​​Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk. On the surface, when you compare the internal reporting capabilities of a product with the other products in this review, the reporting capabilities of Spiceworks are ordinary to say the least. But there is also the Microsoft Power BI connector, which changes everything.

This simple plugin makes your Cloud Help Desk account data available in Power BI templates. Both the connector plug-in and the report template can be downloaded for free from the Spiceworks website.

You might think that Power BI is a bit scary for ordinary users. But Spiceworks Cloud is aimed at IT professionals, which means that its target users should be satisfied with some basic logic and report construction forms. If they are, they will be able to quickly create visually compelling reports.

The best part is that Microsoft also provides the basic Power BI Desktop application for free, as well as various tutorials and videos. This connection makes Spiceworks' reporting capabilities as powerful as any other product we tested, while keeping the entire solution free-at least until Microsoft changes its mind.

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a simple ticketing solution anyway, but it is free. For small businesses looking for tools to track their internal IT help desk requests, this may just be a matter. With solutions like our Editor's Choice Award winner Zoho Desk, large organizations will get better.

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Paul Ferrill is a freelance writer and critic for PCMag. Contact him via [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @paulferrill.

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