SolarWinds NPM vs Spiceworks comparison

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SolarWinds Logo
11,347 views|6,178 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Spiceworks Logo
1,317 views|684 comparisons
86% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM and Spiceworks based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds NPM vs. Spiceworks Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable.""I like SolarWinds support because it's 24/7. You describe your issues, your situation and maybe two or three hours later you can discuss a solution with a technical engineer.""The solution is very user-friendly.""Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades.""It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass.""SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install.""As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning.""We had some interfaces where the SFP Ports were having some problems after a while. We found which of the SFP Ports was having the error and changed it, so the bandwidth become okay."

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"The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.""It's easy to understand.""It was easy to integrate Spiceworks with our existing setup.""The solution can find all asset details automatically, whether it's a Mac address, computer name, IP address, models, etc. It's very helpful.""Helpdesk and inventory are both equally valuable, and they form the true core of the product.""It lets us know whether devices are getting out of date and tracked warranties. Spiceworks also gave me visibility in terms of what software was installed on each device and its status.""It shows the users that are currently logged in, which is not something that Active Directory by default will ever let you know up front.""The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space."

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Cons
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API.""Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution.""The price of the solution can be improved.""It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price.""The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support.""They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.""The scalability can be better.""The solution could be more secure."

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"They've also tried to integrate it with social logins, like Twitter and LinkedIn, and that type of login authentication has no place in a corporate application.""I would like the solution to allow for more direct interaction with computers. I can open tickets and I can see their status, but I can't interact directly with the computers themselves.""There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution.""The SNMP sniffer requires a lot of work to get right.""It would be nice to have remote access to the solution via a tablet. They also need remote control from a PC. Right now, to complete the technical support process, you have to have a tool to access the PC, and check the problems.""Once a device was recognized on the network, Spiceworks never got rid of it even after you took it off the network. You had to go in and manually remove it.""Having an integrated asset management tool, where I can plug in things that are offline, would be good.""Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
  • "Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
  • "I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
  • "The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
  • "The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
  • "I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
  • "You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
  • "The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The product is free! Get it now."
  • "It's free."
  • "It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."
  • "Seeing that it is a low-cost solution, I would advise you to go ahead with Spiceworks and experiment with it to see if you can get things working properly, especially if you currently don't have any existing service desk software in place."
  • "The tool is cheap."
  • More Spiceworks Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring or… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer:We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer are… more »
    Top Answer:The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.
    Top Answer:The GUI must be improved. The GUI looks old-fashioned. The vendor must do some web development for it.
    Ranking
    Views
    11,347
    Comparisons
    6,178
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    485
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    1,317
    Comparisons
    684
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    666
    Rating
    7.2
    Comparisons
    Zabbix logo
    Compared 24% of the time.
    Lansweeper logo
    Compared 22% of the time.
    ServiceNow logo
    Compared 19% of the time.
    Freshdesk logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    SysAid logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    From network inventory and network monitoring to help desk software, and mobile device management (MDM) to cloud services detection, Spiceworks helps you manage everything about your IT workday from one easy place.
    Sample Customers
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Construction Company10%
    Hospitality Company6%
    Retailer6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government7%
    University7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise56%
    Large Enterprise32%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business50%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise21%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise49%
    Buyer's Guide
    SolarWinds NPM vs. Spiceworks
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Spiceworks and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 147 reviews while Spiceworks is ranked 33rd in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 47 reviews. SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2, while Spiceworks is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Spiceworks writes "Good low-cost service desk system, but lacks in automation workflows and categorization ". SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and Entuity, whereas Spiceworks is most compared with Zabbix, Lansweeper, ServiceNow, Freshdesk and SysAid. See our SolarWinds NPM vs. Spiceworks report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.

    We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.