A no-frills ticketing solution that’s totally free
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a simple and affordable internal IT help desk solution for small businesses. We appreciate its advanced asset management tools, along with its smart ticket management system that supports automatic responses and custom rules. However, a few confusing interface choices and underwhelming reporting tools are downsides, and it doesn’t integrate with third-party apps, so it may not fit nicely into your existing business processes. Spiceworks is worth considering for smaller companies looking to minimize costs, but HaloITSM is our Editors’ Choice winner for the category, thanks to its advanced AI tools, broad integration support, and more user-friendly interface.How Does Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk Differ From Customer Service Help Desk Software?
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is an internal IT help desk service that enables employees to submit support tickets, ensures that they reach the correct IT professionals, and makes it easy for IT staff to manage them. It also provides knowledge base creation tools, allowing you to offer self-serve support, along with extensive inventory and asset management tools.
Although you can technically use Spiceworks for external customer support, it’s better to opt for a dedicated external-facing help desk solution that offers features such as omnichannel ticket creation, like Freshdesk or HappyFox.Pricing: Refreshingly Affordable
Spiceworks offers something you don’t typically find in most other internal IT solutions: a free tier. Ads support this Core plan either as banners at the top of most pages or as small videos (with autoplay but no sound) that don’t interfere much with the user experience. The Core level includes asset and ticket management functionality, incident tracking, and reporting with some customization options. You can also create a self-serve knowledge base for your end users.
The Premium plan costs just $5 per seat per month, billed annually. This tier removes the ads and grants you the ability to create checklist-based workflows for recurring tasks. Premium also allows you to perform bulk actions, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks.
Other internal help desk tools are significantly more expensive. Freshservice, for example, starts at $19 per user per month, billed annually, and includes a range of additional features, such as the ability to submit tickets through live chat or support widgets. Other more advanced solutions, such as HappyFox Service Desk and Zendesk for Employee Service, are even pricier, respectively, starting at $49 and $29 per agent per month, billed annually. HaloITSM puts all of its features into a single pricing plan (around $95 per month). You might need to spring for one of those options if your company has advanced IT needs, but Spiceworks targets smaller, more cost-conscious businesses better than other services we’ve tested.Interface and Ease of Use: Simple, But Not Intuitive
Although the service directs you to the help desk tool when you create your account, Spiceworks’ main website focuses on its IT community, with no clear way to reach the help desk upon return. I spent several minutes clicking around before returning to the product page for the IT help desk, clicking on Try Cloud Help Desk, and being redirected to the ticket area of my account. The other option to access Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk from the main site is to go to IT Tools > Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk and scroll to the bottom of the page, where you’ll find an Existing Customer button.
Mobile apps are available for both Android and iOS, enabling your team to manage tickets on the go. Spiceworks assured me that it monitors them for security issues and will make fixes as necessary; however, the apps don’t seem to have undergone significant changes since 2022.
Logging into your account on the web takes you directly to the ticket management area. Although this is ideal for return visits, I expected more guidance upon initially accessing it. The icons in the sidebar are easy to parse, with labels appearing when you hover over them. However, these icons don’t provide immediate options for tasks such as adding IT staff or employees to your database. The visual design is dull, with minimalist visual indicators for things like ticket priority level that are easy to overlook. HaloITSM’s interface is far more attractive.
I finally found employee controls by navigating to Settings > Employee Administration. Thankfully, the Add Employee button on this page is highly visible. The form for adding employees is also quite simple, requiring only (in order) a name, role assignment, email address, and hourly rate. However, this interface doesn’t allow you to add multiple employees at once, which may be frustrating if you have a large team.
