Interesting article: Spiceworks community not as large as advertised – and product really doesn’t “do a lot”

I've poked around the Spiceworks platform, and it's impressive for its simplicity and power for a free platform. It won't do a lot, but it will do rudimentary inventory and asset discovery, help desk ticketing, resource utilization tracking and network monitoring. I doubt anyone would mistake the power of a commercial-grade RMM/PSA combination for what Spiceworks offers, but it's "good enough" for its target market.

Likewise, I can attest that Spiceworks doesn't have the community that it claims. Many of the members listed in its IT Service Provider community are inactive (at least they're not participating in the forums), and there's only 30,000 of them there. As a test, I randomly contacted an active member of that forum expecting to get one of the many thousands of MSPs. The person who responded was the junior IT person at a Midwest manufacturer of truck jacks and lifts. He's hardly an MSP, but he did speak highly of the Spiceworks platform and how it provided features that his company couldn't afford in commercial software.

Channel Insider Blog - Managed Services - Spiceworks Is a Force to Be Acknowledged