We compared PRTG Network Monitor and SolarWinds NPM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: PRTG Network Monitor customers like its user-centric approach, straightforward reporting, and customizability. SolarWinds NPM is commended for its adaptability and extensive network surveillance functionalities.
Room for Improvement: PRTG Network Monitor could improve its performance and resource efficiency. Other pain points include usability and cross-platform compatibility. SolarWinds NPM needs improvement in edge computing capabilities and data reporting. Users also said the performance could be better and that they would like to see expanded IPAM functionality.
Service and Support: PRTG Network Monitor received mixed reviews for its customer service. Some users commended the support team’s prompt service, while others reported slow response times and noted the lack of remote session support. While some customers described SolarWinds support as helpful and responsive, others reported delayed responses.
Ease of Deployment: PRTG Network Monitor’s setup isn’t considered to be overly complex. Deployment times may vary depending on the environment's complexity and device count. Some users said SolarWinds NPM was straightforward to set up, while others perceived it as complex.
Pricing: PRTG Network Monitor is deemed reasonably priced and cheaper than its competitors. The cost of SolarWinds NPM varies depending on the customer’s size and requirements. Some users find it costly.
ROI: Users said that PRTG Network Monitor has proven to save time and money through automation and proactive support. Some users reported immediate benefits from using SolarWinds NPM in terms of security and business outcomes, while others have not.
Comparison Results: PRTG Network Monitor is regarded as a simple, user-friendly, and cost-effective solution, but users would like to see improvements in performance, documentation, integration, and technical support. SolarWinds NPM is a customizable solution that’s easy to deploy and features comprehensive network monitoring capabilities. However, some users consider it costly and voiced concerns about technical support and user experience.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Ability to create a dashboard inside software monitoring."
"Accessibility, ease of use (Web GUI, MobileApps). In general, compared with other software"
"The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts."
"The alerting is the most valuable feature. I also like the iPhone app. I get alerts in an email on the iPhone app."
"PRTG Network Monitor's best features are its flexibility, ease of implementation, user-friendliness, and intuitive interfaces."
"The bandwidth monitoring is a very attractive feature, it can tell you the bandwidth utilization while it is attempting to connect to the host for feedback."
"What I've found most valuable is the custom sensor, which allows you to write scripts or code to monitor a specific metric in your environment."
"The scalability is good. You can improve a remote host or the clustering. This gives it the flexibility to monitor another infrastructure remotely."
"Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support."
"What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface."
"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
"All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great."
"Reporting tools are a great feature along with the ability to create customized reports for you"
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"In our organization, we encounter performance issues with our PRTG probe service. I saw documentation from the vendor or Paessler mentioning that there are limitations for WMI sensors. Other than that, we are okay with PRTG."
"We would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us."
"The icons on PRTG's network diagram are hard to find. For example, finding the icons for firewalls and servers is difficult, so we're struggling to create the network topology."
"Along with more room for automation, more room for advanced configuration can be integrated into the solution."
"I would like to see a more robust platform and a new dashboard. In addition, the code is good, but it needs improvement."
"I know we're going to move to Docker applications and I understand that PRTG does some monitoring regarding this. I do not know if it is complete. If it's not yet complete, it's something they should consider improving."
"PRTG Network Monitor is okay to use, but you'll need some time to analyze the data. If it can automatically locate or identify the problem area, it would be more helpful to users."
"The product could be improved by being cross-platform friendly."
"If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools."
"Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution."
"It would be good to have high security."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
"Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time."
PRTG Network Monitor is ranked 5th in Network Monitoring Software with 96 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews. PRTG Network Monitor is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of PRTG Network Monitor writes "It's an all-in-one solution, and net flow is included in the licensing ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". PRTG Network Monitor is most compared with Zabbix, Centreon, Nagios XI, ManageEngine OpManager and Fortinet FortiSIEM, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes, Entuity and LogicMonitor. See our PRTG Network Monitor vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all Network Monitoring Software 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.
PTRG would give you almost the same functionality as solarwinds at less cost. the key is to understand the protocols that run monitoring which would include SNMP, and netflows which actually show you human readable data in terms of monitoring your network bandwidth. in my opinion if you wnat cost savings go with PTRG if you can afford it then go with solarwinds.
My Pittsburgh experience shows that Zabbix is worth checking out:
www.zabbix.com
add Grafana for custom charting and dashboards:
play.grafana-zabbix.org
I would strongly recommend that you perform a Proof of Concept with at least two candidates. Look at how they will be able to scale both in number of input sources as well as handling for instance different data centers for storage... Also how is per node licensing or costs handled.
We're really happy with PRTG. It's a graphically-rich environment that really has helped us to diagnose difficult issues and solve them. And hey, Germans make good stuff...
I used both and found SolarWinds to be the more intuitive, more full-featured, preferred product.
I strongly recommend to use SevOne. The SevOne toolset is the fastest and most scalable on the market through our distributed architecture approach. Where similar tools can take hours to report once used at scale SevOne can monitor and report in seconds on all digital infrastructure including network, compute, storage, cloud, virtual, SDN etc.
I used both in large network environments; Solarwinds outlook interface is quite simple than PRTG but if you want to monitor real time traffic using SNMP, PRTG is the best choice but Solarwind counts on an average basis from interface. Even PRTG better to monitor hardware ram, harddisk, processors utilization , SQL traffic status , AD information is good than Solarwind. Two separate PRTG server at remote place support clustering in WAN environments with same costing but Solarwind has limitations. I used to generate customs SLA with respect to defined time frame ; PRTG is good choice for best report generation than Solarwind. PRTG license cost is flexible against interfaces but Solarwind counts per device , users, interface basis.
Now weak points of PRTG : 1) Log kills huge spaces as it counts per second basis. It doesn't have auto removal option based on duration. I made a scripts to remove logs earlier than 365 days. 2) Solarwind quickly detects interface up status than PRTG. Another fantastic NMS software is "whatsUpGold' which is better than Solarwind and cost is device based (not interface ) and cheaper than Solarwind. With respect to log/event management /SIEM /SOC Solarwind is good for SME type environments.
-moshiur
Would prefer Solarwinds for the following reasons -
Tight integration with major vendors - Cisco, Arista, Juniper and more
New NetPath feature enables faster troubleshooting
Scales well to support larger setups
Modular platform to include Servers, Applications, NetFlow, IPAM, DB's, Storage devices & more