Spiceworks took 8+ hours, LanSweeper <30 minutes. LanSweeper produced accurate results in a fraction of the time Spiceworks produced incomplete results. We've chosen to use LanSweeper to track assets. At least twice a week it also locks up and our end users can't access the help desk portal to submit tickets. Quickly add devices to the dashboard and see data lightning fast. Spiceworks Network Monitor is simple to install and easy to set up. We found this out by using WSUS to determine how many computers we had and Spiceworks was off by 30 assets of the 180. Thousands of businesses use Spiceworks to keep an eye on critical infrastructure including servers, switches, and IP devices. We recently have been experiencing issues where Spiceworks would attempt to scan 180 assets and it would fail to complete the scan without errors. I understand that these keys are in the registry but other similar scanners would only produce keys for whats actually installed on the workstation by cross-referencing installed applications and registry keys. It ended up showing us that several computers had 3 iterations of office installed.
We also went through a license key audit and thought we could rely on Spiceworks to produce accurate results. We've also had issues where it would scan a computer that had 2 monitors but would only show one. I ended up writing a batch file that would obtain them remotely and that was accurate. Although, as it is a free tool, it comes with some ads, its features, and its Web-based interface can’t be beaten comparing to other tools. It came back telling us a generic description. Spiceworks is a fast growing tool which becomes one of the industry standard free system/network monitoring tools. We attempted to use Spiceworks to produce the make and model of the current monitor the end users were using. At one point this year we were upgrading our end users to dual monitors. Cons: The inventory system is lacking when it comes to producing accurate information.