SolarWinds NPM vs Spiceworks vs Stackify 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
Stackify Logo
477 views|359 comparisons
71% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring.
To learn more, read our detailed IT Infrastructure Monitoring Report (Updated: April 2024).
770,292 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
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems.""The solution is stable and reliable.""The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring.""The other valuable system is the DSS (decision support system). If there's a fault in the network, SolarWinds is basically capable of rectifying and resolving that problem on its own without any intervention from an IP assistant or administrator.""We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM.""I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates.""There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience.""There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."

More SolarWinds NPM Pros →

"It lets us know whether devices are getting out of date and tracked warranties.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.""The solution can find all asset details automatically, whether it's a Mac address, computer name, IP address, models, etc. It's very helpful.""The solution is very stable. It's reliable and efficient.""The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.""If you're in the market for a low-cost service desk system, Spiceworks is a good software solution to start out with, especially when it comes to startups and those organizations that don't currently have any existing service desk software in place.""It's easy to understand.""Spiceworks is generic and free.""The most valuable features are the inventory and personalization."

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"The filter feature on Stackify is one of the features I found valuable. It's awesome. When I want to get the application logs, the solution gives me many filters. For example, if I want to get logs from my test environment, the option is there for me to select the environment from Stackify, and you can also select the particular application, and you'll see the information you need there. The filter feature alone and the fact that Stackify offers a lot of different filters is what I like the most about the solution because I've used other tools with the filter feature, but the filtering was very difficult, versus Stackify that has good filtering. On Stackify, you can filter the information by the last one hour, or the last four hours, and you can also select the date range and specify the timestamp, then the solution will give you the information based on the date range you specified. Another feature I found valuable on Stackify is its rating feature because it tells you how your application is faring. For example, a rating of A means excellent, while a rating of F means very bad, or that your application is not doing well at all. The ratings are from A to F. I also like that Stackify helps you in terms of load management because the solution gives you information on overutilized resources. These are the most valuable features of the solution.""The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial.""The deployment is very fast.""The solution is stable and reliable."

More Stackify Pros →

Cons
"The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long.""There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better.""The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.""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.""We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future.""I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions.""There needs to be more integration of widgets, especially for reporting purposes."

More SolarWinds NPM Cons →

"Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need.""There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution.""Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable.""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.""The SNMP sniffer requires a lot of work to get right.""One of the biggest ways in which Spiceworks could improve is by developing better and more automated workflows. For example, in another solution called ServiceDesk by ManageEngine, you can have levels of approval in the event that there is a request for new software, or when someone requests a VPN or WiFi connection. This kind of multi-stage approval feature provided by ServiceDesk does not appear to exist in Spiceworks, and it is one of their main shortcomings for me.""I would like to see more information when drilling down into access permissions, assignments management, or tagging. When I click a note or a device, I should be able to see more details about the router and modem. For example, I want to see the version, downtime, availability, latency, etc. I should have easy access to everything about our assets at a glance.""The network mapping could be improved. Putting together an actual bonafide network map would be really nice."

More Spiceworks Cons →

"It should be easily scalable and configurable in different instances.""The search feature could be improved.""I would like to be able to see metrics about individual running containers on the host machines.""I've not used Stackify for a while, and I'm currently using a solution now that's not as good as Stackify. Among the solutions I've been using so far, Stackify has been one of the best for me, but there's always room for improvement. For example, I don't know if it's just me, but when I try to get the log from Stackify, sometimes it doesn't appear in real-time. It takes a few minutes before the logs appear. When I redeploy my solution and the application starts, I don't see the logs immediately, and it would take two to three minutes before I see the logs. I don't know if other customers have a similar experience. It's the wait time for the logs to appear that's a concern for me, could be improved, and is what the Stackify team should be looking into. In terms of any additional feature that I'd like added to the solution, I'm not sure if Stackify has a way to export logs out. I've been trying to do it. On the solution, you can click on a spiral-like icon and it shows you the entire error, and I'd prefer an export button that would let me download the error and save that into a text file, for example, so it'll be available on my local machine for me to reference it, especially because the log keeps going and as you're using the solution, the system keeps pushing messages on to Stackify, so if I'm looking at a particular error at 12:05 PM, for example, by the time I go back to my system and would like to revisit the error at 12:25 PM, on Stackify, the logs would have gone past that level and I won't see it again which makes it difficult. When you now go back to that timestamp, you don't tend to see it immediately, but if the solution had an export feature for me to save that particular error information on my local machine for reference at a later time, I won't have to go back to Stackify. I just go to that log, specifically to that particular export that I've received on my local machine. I can get it and review it, and it would be easier that way versus me going back to Stackify to find that particular error and request that particular information."

More Stackify Cons →

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 →

  • "The price is variable. It depends on how much data we have received in that particular month. Usually, it goes up to $2,000, or, at times, $3,000 USD per month."
  • More Stackify 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… 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… 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.
    Top Answer:The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial.
    Top Answer:The licensing cost is calculated on a per-user basis.
    Top Answer:When Stackify completes drill downs, sometimes there is a block of execution pipelines, and you cannot see the details… more »
    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
    Views
    477
    Comparisons
    359
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    1,453
    Rating
    7.3
    Comparisons
    Zabbix logo
    Compared 24% of the time.
    Lansweeper logo
    Compared 23% of the time.
    ServiceNow logo
    Compared 19% of the time.
    Freshdesk logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    SysAid logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    New Relic logo
    Compared 67% of the time.
    AppDynamics logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    Dynatrace logo
    Compared 16% 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.

    Stackify is an application performance management (APM) solution that combines application performance monitoring with logs, errors, and reporting. It is a SaaS solution that is developer-focused. Users can quickly scan, identify, and repair issues with applications. Stackify APM offers valuable tools, such as Prefix and Retrace, which help to make it a comprehensive and valuable APM solution. Stackify is now part of the Netreo family of IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM), which is considered one of the fastest-growing IT organizations in the marketplace today.

    Stackify Prefix

    Stackify Prefix helps developers write better code, faster. The tool examines, tests, and approves code as it is being written. Almost every new application is code-perfect, negating the need for exhausting troubleshooting and frustrating time-consuming code review.

    Prefix is able to discover poor-performing SQL queries, ORM queries, potential bottlenecks, and concealed exceptions prior to moving the application into production.

    Prefix offers Summary Dashboards, intuitive suggestions, integrated logs, and distributed tracing. Distributed tracing expands visibility to cloud-native applications, microservices, and containers and can also provide additional transparency to cache services, web services, third-party services, and more. Users are able to easily move from logs to traces and back.

    This valuable tool ensures developers are able to consistently release the best code possible in the least amount of time, while improving performance, productivity, and profitability.

    Prefix is a very robust and easy-to-use tool. It can be used seamlessly with Linux, macOS, and Windows. Prefix integrates well with numerous languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, .Net, and .Net Core.

    Stackify Retrace

    Stackify Retrace is a user-friendly, trusted APM solution used in more than fifty countries worldwide. Users know that Retrace is able to ensure they can complete quicker, more efficient application development and consistently enhance overall application performance by suggesting important intuitive suggestions users need. 

    This solution is beneficial to both developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) personnel to learn to improve code and immediately finetune issues by:

    • Establishing effortless collaboration between Dev and Ops personnel via an easy-to-use GUI dashboard.

    • Delivering complete transparency of all stages of the application development process, from pre-development to production.

    • Utilizing performance protocols, such as error tracking, application logs, and code profiling, in real time in order to thoroughly understand how long a code will take to complete various tasks.

    • Improving overall efficiency and productivity by immediately discovering and repairing application issues.

    Retrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) uses both front-end and back-end monitoring to give users a complete picture of what is going on with the applications. This intuitive dashboard displays performance with a complete breakdown of resource usage and integrates the server-side and client traces into one engaging, user-friendly, extensive view. 

    Retrace is an out-of-the-box solution that works seamlessly with Java stacks, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, .Net, and .Net Core. It is also compatible with many of today’s popular frameworks, such as AWS, Azure, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, and SQL Server. Additionally, Retrace will work effectively with many cloud providers, containers, and languages, and offers excellent and easy integration with today's favorite tools such as Jira, Slack, Jenkins, and more.

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino
    MyRacePass, ClearSale, Newitts, Carbonite, Boston Software, Children's International, Starkwood Media Group, Fewzion
    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%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Retailer7%
    Healthcare Company6%
    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 Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise29%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    IT Infrastructure Monitoring
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: April 2024.
    770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.