AlertSite vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

AlertSite vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Download the complete report

Helped 902,988 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AlertSite

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

38th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Monitoring Software (3rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AlertSite is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.1%
AlertSite	0.6%
Other	98.3%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

RituRaj

SDE 2 at Virtusa

Proactive monitoring has improved uptime and now detects performance issues before users suffer

The user interface and configuration experience could be more modern and streamlined in some areas, especially when managing a large number of monitors or creating complex monitoring workflows. Better navigation, integration, and more intuitive customizations for the dashboard and alerts would improve the overall operational experience. Dashboard customizations and reporting flexibility represent another improvement area. More advanced visualization options and an easier way to create tailored operational dashboards would help the team analyze trends and share insights more effectively. The integration ecosystem could also be expanded further, especially for modern DevOps and cloud-native workflows. Stronger native integrations with collaboration tools, observability platforms, and CI/CD pipelines would make it easier to fit into the evolving engineering environment. It would also help to have more automation-friendly capabilities such as easier API-based configurations, management, and infrastructure as code support for monitor provisioning. That would make large-scale monitoring management more efficient for the DevOps team. From a support perspective, the experience has been generally stable, but faster turnaround times for more complex technical issues and more detailed troubleshooting guidance would be beneficial. Improved documentation and more advanced implementation best practices for enterprise-scale deployment would also help the team onboard and optimize the platform more effectively. AlertSite would benefit from continued modernizations in a few areas. The biggest improvement would be a more intuitive and modern user experience for configuring monitoring, managing alerts, and navigating dashboards, especially in larger environments with many monitored services. Stronger integrations with modern cloud-native DevOps ecosystems including better automation support, richer APIs, and easy integration with CI/CD pipelines and observability platforms would also be helpful. Another improvement area is intelligent alert management. Features such as smart alert correlations, anomaly detections, and noise reduction would help operations teams focus on the most critical incidents more effectively.

Read full review

NikhilKalwint

Technical Specialist at ServiceIO

Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility

From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The alerting capabilities of AlertSite were really helpful."

"My company went with AlertSite because as a tool, it's fast, easy to maintain, and provides great support."

"This solution has numerous advantages; it's extremely simple to configure, and either digital monitors or single-URL monitors are simple to configure and build."

"There are custom reports available along with the inbuilt reports."

"AlertSite has helped improve issue detection, reduce downtime risk, and support faster troubleshooting in the production environment."

"The return on investment of this solution is well witnessed in our organization because of the integration and various capabilities that it offers to interact with the upstream or downstream systems."

"If there are any issues, it triggers an alert within 30 seconds. When it triggers the alert, we go ahead and check it immediately. The alert is triggered on a real-time basis."

"I highly recommend AlertSite to other users."

More AlertSite pros

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."

"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."

"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."

"It is scalable."

"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."

"Having used various other vendors for monitoring over my career, the SolarWinds products give outstanding value for the price."

"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"It is not compatible with all of the product platforms that we use."

"In terms of support, it is all based on the cost of the subscription that our company purchased, but it wasn't great, and it could've been much better."

"AlertSite sometimes triggers false alerts or fake alerts, which needs to be rectified. When we see an alert and go ahead and run certain tests on it, the test always passes. However, on the main screen, it shows up as critical. Therefore, the false alert needs to be fixed."

"What needs improvement in AlertSite is the documentation, particularly the lack of documentation."

"The user interface and configuration experience could be more modern and streamlined in some areas, especially when managing a large number of monitors or creating complex monitoring workflows."

"One area that needs improvement in AlertSite is the slow UI. I'm using the classic UI because it's quite user-friendly, or in human-readable format, but it's a little slow. It takes time to load all the monitors, so if that could be sped up, that would be helpful. The AlertSite support team also needs improvement in terms of availability. Most of the agents in the team aren't available 24 x 7, so if there's something you need to discuss, you need to tell the support team ahead of time to schedule it. Multiple times, when a case comes up during weekends or whenever my team is doing an update, support needs improvement, availability-wise. I use AlertSite for synthetic monitoring, so whatever is available right now is okay, but if I want to request a new feature on a website, currently, the UI refreshes automatically. I would like to have the option on AlertSite to configure that manually. The UI auto-updates every few minutes, so if I can control that manually, that would be helpful."

"I would like the ability to get more data points with regard to some of the unique requirements that we have."

"AlertSite requires improvements related to security, even at the enterprise level."

More AlertSite cons

"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."

"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."

"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."

"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."

"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."

"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."

"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is high."

"We purchased the license once and had the option of selecting the number of user licenses."

"My company pays to use AlertSite, but I'm unsure of the exact costs because it depends on how many monitors you have."

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

24%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Marketing Services Firm

Educational Organization

13%

University

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlertSite?

The experience with the pricing and licensing of AlertSite was generally reasonable for an enterprise monitoring solution, especially considering the value it provides for proactive monitoring and ...

What needs improvement with AlertSite?

What is your primary use case for AlertSite?

AlertSite is primarily used for applications and website monitoring to ensure uptime and performance availability for customer-facing services and APIs. The main use cases include monitoring web ap...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...

Postman Enterprise vs AlertSite

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs AlertSite

Compared 10% of the time

Datadog vs AlertSite

Compared 10% of the time

Compared 8% of the time

Catchpoint vs AlertSite

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs AlertSite

Compared 5% of the time

More AlertSite Competitors

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Opsview vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

AlertSite

Download AlertSite product report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

AlertSite offers efficient transaction monitoring with easy script creation through DejaClick Recorder. It supports multi-factor authentication, ensuring security. Analytical capabilities and rapid alerts enhance response times, making it ideal for enterprise-level monitoring.

AlertSite prioritizes transaction-based monitoring with DejaClick Recorder, allowing users to create scripts without coding. Its user-friendly dashboard and fast error notifications support time-sensitive issue resolution. Location features and data monitoring history are beneficial for tracking and analysis. While AlertSite excels in ease of use and speed, improvements are needed in support, generative AI, and documentation. Security weaknesses and slow UI issues are noted, requiring attention.

What are the key features of AlertSite?

Script Creation: DejaClick Recorder enables simple script creation without coding.
Security: Supports multi-factor authentication and OTP delivery.
Analytics: User-friendly dashboard for data analysis.
Alerts: Immediate notifications trigger under a minute.
Location Tracking: Comprehensive monitoring history and geographical data.

What benefits or ROI can users expect from using AlertSite?

Quick Response: Fast alerts improve time-sensitive resolution.
Cost Efficiency: Rapid issue resolution reduces downtime costs.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies data analysis and monitoring.
Scalability: Ideal for enterprise-level operations and cloud application monitoring.

Organizations implement AlertSite primarily for monitoring complex transactions, application performance, and server reliability. Its deployment on on-premises servers gives enhanced control, while features like DejaClick assist in monitoring cloud applications, user logins, and system uptime across sectors such as retail kiosks and IT infrastructure.

SmartBear

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive server, application, and infrastructure monitoring, focusing on integration, application dependency, and network insights through user-friendly interfaces and detailed dashboards.

With AppStack and AppInsight support, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers service management, detailed resource dashboards, and integration capabilities. It monitors hardware metrics and performance parameters, facilitating database and network insights for cloud and virtual environments. Robust alerting, predictive analytics, and capacity planning ensure efficient management of server health and application performance.

What are the key features?

Integration: Seamlessly connects with existing tools.
AppStack: Provides a holistic view of applications.
AppInsight: Supports widely-used applications.
SNMP Polling: Efficient network data collection.
Diagnostics: Real-time troubleshooting.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailored monitoring views.

What benefits should users expect?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Extends from servers to databases.
Transparent Control: Enhances visibility into performance metrics.
User-Friendly: Simplifies proactive monitoring with alerts.
Predictive Features: Supports capacity and trend planning.

Industries implement SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to enhance server utilization reporting, network configuration, and AV equipment performance tracking. They benefit from monitoring critical services across diverse deployment models, improving management efficiency and decision-making.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

JetBlue, Payless ShoeSource, Hilton Inc., StubHub, Symantec, Newegg, Sapient, AstraZeneca, Dell, Quest Diagnostics

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

AlertSite vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor