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Azure Cost Management vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Azure Cost Management significantly reduces cloud expenses and operational effort while enhancing cost detection, resource management, and security patch updates.
Sentiment score
7.2
SolarWinds NPM enhances infrastructure visibility, delivering cost reductions, faster issue resolution, and significant ROI through optimized resource management.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Azure Cost Management offers satisfactory service with helpful support; however, response times and communication need improvement for complex issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM support gets mixed reviews, praised for expertise yet noted for delays and aggressive sales tactics.
I would rate the technical support of Microsoft in general as nine out of ten.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
Azure Cost Management is scalable for diverse businesses, integrating with Azure services despite some limitations in automation capabilities.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable, adapts well to infrastructures, but may face performance and cost issues on virtual platforms.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Azure Cost Management is stable, reliable, with high uptime; some users desire more automation for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.5
SolarWinds NPM is stable with issues from server limits and bugs, resolved through updates and proper configuration.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Cost Management needs better automation, integration, customization, and support for efficient, scalable, and user-friendly cost control.
SolarWinds NPM users report issues with network discovery, UI features, costs, automation, support, and security improvements are needed.
Customization features could be added for Azure Cost Management.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
 

Setup Cost

Azure Cost Management offers cost-effective, fair pricing with a pay-as-you-go model, rating 5-8 out of 10 for satisfaction.
SolarWinds NPM pricing varies by setup size, with initial costs, tiered licensing, and maintenance fees influencing total expenses.
The pricing part could be improved.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Azure Cost Management provides insights and tools for forecasting, budgeting, and optimization with user-friendly, customizable features and visualization capabilities.
SolarWinds NPM offers ease of deployment, real-time monitoring, customizable alerts, and user-friendly design for efficient network management.
Azure Cost Management helps me in forecasting and knowing the expected budget.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Cost Management
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (3rd)
SolarWinds NPM
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Infrastructure and Tools solutions, they serve different purposes. Azure Cost Management is designed for Cloud Cost Management and holds a mindshare of 6.8%, down 12.6% compared to last year.
SolarWinds NPM, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 4.4% mindshare, down 5.5% since last year.
Cloud Cost Management
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Joy Maitra - PeerSpot reviewer
Continuous monitoring and predictive analytics help provide insights into utilization
Continuous monitoring helps me detect anomalies in the pipeline, preplan resource scalability, and assist with cost management by offering good visibility into resource utilization. It also offers predictive analytics and some existing features, including dashboards. The AI prediction feature helps forecast based on current utilization trends and suggests improvements like the GenAI feature for interactive inquiries.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure Cost Management?
Gives visibility into the cost of cloud-based solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Cost Management?
The pricing part could be improved. I would rate it as six out of ten. It depends on the solution. We mostly pay for our licenses.
What needs improvement with Azure Cost Management?
Customization features could be added for Azure Cost Management ( /products/azure-cost-management-reviews ), but the dashboards are handy, and overall, everything is good.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
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...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
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 ar...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure Cost Management, Cloudyn
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Quixey, Infomedia, Panaya, Wix.com, Mirabeau, Mi9, GetTaxi, Outsmart Studios, Bownty, BlazeMeter: The Load Testing Cloud, Irdeto, Effective Measure, Totango, Nextdoor, BranchOut, The BioTeam, Evolven, Netotiate, ClickSoftware
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Nutanix, Microsoft and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: July 2025.
862,289 professionals have used our research since 2012.