SpiceWorks vs OTRS

SpiceWorks - is an IT infrastructure management system for small businesses. It's currently being used by over 1,000,000 IT professionals. And one of the main reasons is that it's. The freemium model is absolutely fair as the advertising banner is displayed in the software web interface. But the most interesting thing about SpiceWorks - is an in-built community for IT professionals, which allows admins to solve many problems with the help of crowdsourcing. The community includes forum where you can ask for advice, groups for communication or collaboration, wiki with useful how-to articles and ratings of hardware and software with reviews. And, of course, this community is an excellent environment for running Marketplace, where IT vendors can promote their products (post special offers, news, articles) and communicate with their target audiences - IT professionals.

Many companies use OTRS as a helpdesk-system for two reasons: it is free and is perfect for integration with web site and email. Now, OTRS can be also adopted by sysadmins and IT departments (even in large companies) - the new version OTRS ITSM 2.0 has been officially certified by expert company PinkVERIFY of compatibility with six ITIL v3 processes. As you know, ITIL - is the library of recommendations and best practices for managing IT infrastructure. OTRS ITSM has been around for about 3 years. Until today, it featured incident management, problem management, configuration management, SLA management and knowledge management. Version 2.0 added change management to that list. Now OTRS ITSM allows you to control such processes as setting up new employee with a laptop, implementing new systems and equipment, upgrading licensed software.