Zendesk vs. Spiceworks

While businesses must constantly focus on developing long-term consumer relationships, they can’t forget about their employees. Creating a positive employee experience (EX) can help an organization streamline internal operations, improve team productivity, and reduce employee turnover. Yet, this can only be achieved if you’re empowered with the right tool in your technology stack.

In this guide, we compare two products—Zendesk vs. Spiceworks—and detail how these IT help desk software options stack up. While Spiceworks offers standard IT ticketing features, Zendesk stands apart due to our speed, reliability, scalability, and security capabilities. We’re also suitable for employee and customer support, so we can meet all your service needs. Read more about how we outshine Spiceworks below.

Speed and reliability

At Zendesk, we know how important it is for you to get up and running quickly—that’s why our software is ready to go in days, not months. Our software is also flexible, reliable, and easy to use, so you can adapt to changing business needs as you go, without hiring an army of developers or worrying about dependability. In contrast, it’s been noted that Spiceworks can be clunky and potentially unreliable when trying to execute routine tasks like updating a ticket.

Scalability

Zendesk is with you for the long haul, providing a solution for today and scaling alongside you as your company grows. We also have IT, HR, and CX capabilities, so you can use Zendesk for your customer- and employee-facing needs. On the other hand, Spiceworks lacks critical features and functionality to help you scale, such as robust integrations. Additionally, larger businesses looking for organization-wide standardization may want to consolidate their IT, HR, and CX solutions as they expand to create a seamless experience for both employees and customers, and Spiceworks offers only IT capabilities.

Security and compliance

At Zendesk, we prioritize the safety of your employee and customer data just as highly as you do. We combine enterprise-level security features, advanced encryption keys, and comprehensive audits of our systems to ensure all private information stays private. Conversely, Spiceworks has limited compliance certifications and lacks features like single sign-on (SSO) and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) login capabilities.

More in this guide:

• At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Spiceworks
• Spiceworks vs. Zendesk: Features comparison
• Maximize your ROI with Zendesk
• What customers are saying about Zendesk
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try Zendesk?

Below is a high-level overview of how Zendesk and Spiceworks compare. It includes the most important service desk software features—a few of which we’ll cover in more detail later—needed to deliver the best employee experience.

Let’s dive deeper into five key features and see how Spiceworks and Zendesk compare.

Reporting and analytics

Zendesk has a wealth of reporting and analytics features for support teams. Our reporting and analytics tools allow you to access real-time and historical data to spot any inefficiencies, take action on that information, and improve your IT operations. Also, our reports are pre-built and customizable, so you can monitor the data that matters most to your team.

Spiceworks has reporting and analytics capabilities, but it lacks features like customized and advanced reports. And it’s been noted that reports can be fractured and redundant.

AI and automation

Zendesk AI offers advanced features that have been pre-trained on IT ticket data and can be used out of the box. You can use our AI-powered employee experience solutions to deliver 24/7 service, solve employee issues faster, optimize your internal knowledge base and self-service capabilities, and more. For example, leverage our advanced chatbots to immediately understand and solve common employee issues. Or, use our AI-powered intelligent triage and routing to automatically send tickets to the right team and improve service efficiency.

Spiceworks, on the other hand, has limited AI and automation capabilities. As of now, the solution doesn’t offer a conversational chatbot, but it has basic capabilities for automating replies and ticket transfers.

Omnichannel support

Zendesk enables you to provide IT support over the channels your employees use most, such as email, live chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other business productivity channels. You can manage and unify these conversations through our unified Agent Workspace, which also has a context panel to provide reps with valuable insights to resolve inquiries faster.

Spiceworks provides limited options for support and primarily focuses on ticket creation through email, mobile apps, and web browsers. Most notably, it doesn’t have built-in functionality to connect tickets with Microsoft Teams or Slack. Users would need a third-party integration like Tray.io to connect those channels.

Apps and integrations

Zendesk offers over 1,500 apps and integrations via our Zendesk Marketplace to help you unify your tech stack and streamline your data across systems. We also provide several low-to-pro-code customization options like API and app frameworks, Zendesk SDKs, AWS Events Connector, and robust developer resources. If you can’t find the exact solution you’re looking for, your dev team can build it.

Spiceworks has a limited selection of integrations, most of which focus on IT management. This may be problematic for businesses that must build on or supplement Spiceworks’ capabilities.

Ticket management system

The Zendesk IT ticketing system provides robust case management tools—including ticket fields, forms, tags, automation, and business rules—so it’s simple to track, manage, and update tickets. AI and workflow automation tools also give employees context and insight into similar tickets and relevant macros so they can get their inquiries resolved faster.

Meanwhile, collaboration tools make it easy to leave comments on tickets and work with different stakeholders to resolve requests. Additionally, our employee portal software allows users to submit ticket forms with or without SSO and LDAP capabilities.

While Spiceworks has a ticket management system, users have reported problems adding a comment to or updating a ticket and needing to click an email link every time they submit a new ticket due to a lack of SSO or LDAP capabilities.

With Zendesk, businesses don’t have to worry about the cost of scale limitations.

Our transparent pricing structure gives you the features you need today while offering the flexibility to accommodate your future growth. Additionally, we prioritize an intuitive experience that infuses intelligence into every touchpoint to help teams unlock productivity. Built-in tools like workflow automation and generative AI enable IT teams to do more with less, which saves costs. We are also by our customers' side every step of the way to help them maximize the value of their investment.

From analytics to apps and integrations, Spiceworks has restricted capabilities compared to the comprehensive features available with Zendesk. These product limitations may come with the costs of poor support experiences, low efficiency, migrations, and re-implementations.

We’ve helped thousands of companies improve their support operations and have customer stories to prove it. Here are just a few examples of how Zendesk can help.

The Salvation Army

“With [Zendesk], everything we need is in one place… Zendesk allows us to collaborate, report on our resolution time, and even suggest articles to help people resolve issues faster.”

—Katina Durrent, assistant director of IT support at The Salvation Army

ACLU

“Zendesk is going to allow us to become a leaner and more efficient support organization because people can get from point A to the answer they need a lot faster."

—Justin Birdsong, associate director of enterprise database systems at ACLU

LATAM Airlines

“Zendesk is a user-friendly platform and very intuitive. It’s given us a chance to improve our people experiences because we can add new Zendesk functionalities, such as audiovisual content or chatbot.”

—Monica Obando, senior HR manager at LATAM Airlines