Compare NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM
NetBrain is ranked 28th in Network Monitoring Software with 2 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 5th in Network Monitoring Software with 13 reviews. NetBrain is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of NetBrain writes "A time-saving, portable network analysis and mapping tool that does the job you expect it to". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "It is very flexible, and the reporting is quite nice". NetBrain is most compared with SolarWinds NPM, LiveAction LiveNX and PRTG Network Monitor, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor and ManageEngine OpManager. See our NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
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 Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: January 2020. 397,717 professionals have used our research since 2012. | ||||||||
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | ||
It is a central solution in terms of how to actually use it. It has a very easy dashboard. Everything is concise. We are able to create custom sensors. For different parts of the business, we have many products across many environments, and it works for everything. The fact that I can use custom MIB files to customize my sensors for the things that are not there as a default is a good feature. The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors. We can see trends for a lot of different things, such as hard drive space and bandwidth usage. We can see and plan for the future by knowing, "We're sort of at 75% capacity now. In three months time, we know we're going to be up to 90%,so we need to plan ahead for it, getting upgrades booked in place." Since things like this take time and effort, it's handy to see trends into the future of where our company is going. The solution provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It gives us really good quality of service when it comes to monitoring of available space and available resources. It allows us to preempt issues before they become a problem for the business. It is easy to use and intuitive, which is really important. It does what it says on the box by giving you a visual of the state of what is going on at any one time. It is pretty simple to use, which is always a good thing. It's been very reliable in updating us if any issues crop up. We use the remote probes a lot for our branch offices. Instead of deploying the full instance of PRTG, we'll put a remote probe out there. This simplifies the whole deployment for us. | Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions. A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings. | The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts. 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. It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation. This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments. The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour. We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future. You can monitor performance counters effortlessly. One of the best features is the reports feature. |
Cons | ||
With custom sensors, there is a lot of work which needs to be done in the background, just for it to be tailor-made for the specific thing that we are actually monitoring. We take a lot of time with the custom sensors. I would like to see the customer sensor be more robust and a bit more varied. I have an issue with DFS, distributed file services... there isn't one by default. Taking into account the difference between DFS and DFSR as well would be great. The dashboarding definitely needs improvement. The only sort of limitation is the actual probes. So, if you don't have enough probes on there, you can over flip them and cause the WMI sensors and SNMP sensors to sort of overload. Sometimes, they might timeout for a minute, but they do come back. The desktop app is the one area where it do with some improvement. From a user's perspective, I would like to be able to get more out of the desktop app as opposed to where we are now with it. While the desktop app is good, they could slightly improve it. We would like it to be a single pane of glass. At the moment, you can only see certain portions of information. You have to scroll through to make it more granular. We want them to develop the desktop app to be more user-friendly. Once you start going above 5000 sensors, things do start to get a bit shaky. There are some best practice out there that you will need to adopt and be aware of. 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. | It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities. Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging. | It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution. We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak. This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API. Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution. The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable. It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. The performance is slow. It would be nice if SolarWinds could have a polling engine on the site that would collect the reporting and then manage everything itself. Consolidation of platforms would provide a smoother experience. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | ||
We used a product called SolarWinds in the past, and its cost was high. Whereas, PRTG came in at a third of SolarWind's cost. Cost was a factor when selecting this solution, but it just did everything we wanted it to do. Our licensing costs are 10,000 euros over three years. At the moment I'm only using 500 sensors. I pay yearly, so it's a cost that's easily swallowed. We have an unlimited perpetual license, so we just pay support costs and it can scale throughout the organization. We looked at PRTG and SolarWinds. From a cost side perspective, compared to PRTG, and from what you get back from it, PRTG was sort of a hands down the winner. While I am not the person who deals with pricing, I would say that we pay around 1000 pounds a year. It is about £4,500 for the first year, then about another 15 to 20 percent annually after that. So, we are looking at about £1000 running costs a year. When you think about how much an outage costs per minute, it's negligible. | The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price. | It is expensive. Some solutions are open source and free. We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap. The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it. 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. 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. |
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Top Comparisons | ||
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Also Known As | ||
| PRTG | Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor | |
Learn | ||
| Paessler AG | NetBrain | SolarWinds |
Overview  | ||
| PRTG Network Monitor runs on a Windows machine within your network, collecting various statistics from the machines, software, and devices which you designate. PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports. This will let you plan for network expansion, see what applications are using most of your connection, and make sure that no one is hogging the entire network just to torrent videos. | Managing today’s networks with yesterday’s manual processes is no longer a viable solution. NetBrain’s network automation platform provides actionable insights into your network to help you make better and faster decisions - particularly when you’re troubleshooting, securing, and making changes to the network. | Check the health and performance of your entire network for easier troubleshooting and faster results using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor. NPM lets you quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance problems and outages. Now with built-in deep packet inspection and analysis you can immediately determine the impact of network or application latency on user experience. |
Offer | ||
Get ahead of IT infrastructure issues With PRTG Network Monitor you can identify and solve potential issues before it affects anyone. Download a free 30-day trial today and experience the benefits of 24-hour IT Infrastructure Monitoring. | Learn more about NetBrain | Learn more about SolarWinds NPM |
Sample Customers | ||
| Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank | CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc. | Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard |
Top Industries | ||
Comms Service Provider13% Financial Services Firm13% Construction Company9% Marketing Services Firm4% Software R&D Company35% Comms Service Provider15% Media Company6% Government5% | Software R&D Company24% Comms Service Provider15% Healthcare Company10% Government8% | Healthcare Company16% Comms Service Provider11% Financial Services Firm9% K 12 Educational Company Or School7% Software R&D Company26% Comms Service Provider17% Financial Services Firm6% Manufacturing Company6% |
Company Size | ||
Small Business30% Midsize Enterprise30% Large Enterprise39% Small Business25% Midsize Enterprise11% Large Enterprise63% | No Data Available | Small Business25% Midsize Enterprise22% Large Enterprise53% Small Business29% Midsize Enterprise8% Large Enterprise64% |
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: January 2020.
397,717 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See also NetBrain Reviews, SolarWinds NPM Reviews, and our list of Best Network Monitoring Software Companies.
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