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CA Unified Communications Monitor vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

CA Unified Communications M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
89th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
63rd
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Unified Communications Monitoring (3rd)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of CA Unified Communications Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.7%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
CA Unified Communications Monitor0.5%
Other95.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr.Solutions Engineer | Project Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Meets the needs of the customer but all of the features need improvement
I do not choose the solution. The client does. I am an implementer. We are systems integrators. It is worth mentioning that the solution should be easy to install and offer the user exhibition capabilities. Also, a data sheet should be used to gather information about the product, to facilitate easy and simple implementation. I rate CA Unified Communications Monitor as a five out of ten.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Good end-to-end monitoring"
"We use the solution to meet the needs of the customer."
"For us, it's very key to know the voice quality of the total solution, which is based on many components across many domains."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"Technical support has always been great."
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"Performance history is the most valuable feature, especially when tracking down a problem."
"SolarWinds helps us have visibility to the most relevant issues in our network and makes our problem solving process much faster and easier."
"I like the tracking feature to track devices and see where they are connected, which is very practical."
 

Cons

"All the features and functions of the solution can be improved, specifically the user experience."
"The solution should have automatic baseline detection."
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network."
"Network discovery missed many devices."
"One of the problems that SolarWinds has is when the data becomes too big, it will start getting slower."
"The integration with video apps could be better."
"I would say the NPM toolset has room for improvement."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"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 (which have no connection to the public internet)."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"Some solutions are open source and free."
"Price could be improved on"
"Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"Quite highly priced"
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Construction Company
24%
Comms Service Provider
18%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business60
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
 

Questions from the Community

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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

CA UC Monitor
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BBVA Compass
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Unified Communications Monitor vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.