Catchpoint vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Catchpoint and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Catchpoint is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.6. Catchpoint holds a 0.8% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Catchpoint users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Catchpoint

Read 18 Catchpoint reviews

2,373 Views
1,353 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

4,708 Views
2,919 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Catchpoint

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Catchpoint and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor compete in the server and application monitoring category. SolarWinds appears to have the upper hand due to its superior features, despite some users preferring Catchpoint's support and pricing.

Features: Catchpoint users highlight real-time monitoring, extensive alerting capabilities, and a broad range of third-party integrations as its most valuable features. SolarWinds users appreciate its comprehensive monitoring, detailed performance metrics, and ease of troubleshooting. SolarWinds appears to have the upper hand in feature richness and depth.

Room for Improvement: Catchpoint users seek improvements in historical data storage and the accuracy of synthetic monitoring. SolarWinds users desire enhanced reporting features and faster updates. While both products have areas for improvement, SolarWinds shows a broader range of user-requested enhancements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Catchpoint is praised for its support during setup and intuitive deployment process. SolarWinds users find the setup to be straightforward but occasionally require significant manual configuration. Both products have strong customer service, but Catchpoint users rate their support higher.

Pricing and ROI: Catchpoint offers competitive pricing and is perceived to deliver good ROI. SolarWinds has higher upfront costs but users report that its extensive features justify the investment. Catchpoint is seen as more cost-effective, but SolarWinds offers better ROI due to its feature richness.

To learn more, read our detailed Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 885,376 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

Catchpoint

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

40th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (57th), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (11th)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% 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	1.3%
Catchpoint	0.8%
Other	97.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Henry Mike

Senior Network Engineer at AT&T

Monitoring has delivered proactive issue detection and improves user experience across our apps

The best features Catchpoint offers are Catchpoint Synthetics, Catchpoint API test, Catchpoint Dashboard, and Catchpoint UI. I would like to add that Catchpoint UI is very user-friendly and with a basic introduction, anyone can just get started. When we talk about Catchpoint Dashboard, this is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that display various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to our business. When it comes to Catchpoint Synthetics, it enables us to create our synthetic monitoring using Catchpoint. Creating the Synthetics monitors is easy and requires basic knowledge of Selenium and JavaScript. It also allows us to run the test from external, which is the backbone, and internal enterprise nodes. Additionally, Catchpoint provides detailed insights of each request that is involved in the application flow, which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level. With the help of Catchpoint, we are able to address issues before our customers. Our triage time has reduced. We are able to reduce outages and unwanted user incidents. We are able to get to the root cause of the issue efficiently post-implementing Catchpoint monitoring.

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

"One of the features, the scatter plot, is very useful. It shows red dots wherever there are issues."

"The solution offers three different ways of slicing data to look for abnormalities."

"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."

"This is the most complete monitoring solution that any business can use to better their internet performance, which is quite simple to configure individual monitors for every team member."

"Catchpoint has positively impacted my organization because it has been a great tool due to reduced downtime and faster incident resolution, improved user experience and retention, and cost saving through performance optimization."

"Catchpoint has a very professional service team, they can help you with the scripting and other functionalities, and they have a dedicated network team, so if you face any issues with the geolocations on the nodes or anything related to the network, there is dedicated support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."

"Catchpoint has impacted my organization positively by providing a positive return on investment on proactive monitoring capabilities, adaptability, and being seen as a long-term solution regardless of changes made to the monitored environment."

More Catchpoint pros

"If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help."

"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."

"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."

"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."

"Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business."

"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."

"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."

"From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Despite Catchpoint being very proactive and user-friendly, I find difficulty with the JavaScript editor."

"There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring."

"if we need to do performance analysis, we have to click too many times. For example, if there is an issue that is caught by Catchpoint, we need to understand what the error is and at which step it failed, or which transaction that is impacted. To drill down, we have to click too many things to get the answer."

"We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts."

"Documentation and online indexing are awful but have been improved recently."

"Sometimes it is difficult to investigate a single failed test run."

"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."

"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."

More Catchpoint cons

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."

"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."

"The technical support is nothing special."

"I believe that SolarWinds should spend more effort in reporting."

"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"

"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."

"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."

"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."

"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."

"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."

"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"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."

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

"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."

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

"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

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

885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Construction Company

10%

Retailer

10%

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	12

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

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?

Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the cost was very cost-effective and affordable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Catchpoint?

Catchpoint can be improved as it has a complex setup and configuration, and dashboard customization and UX should be improved.

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Catchpoint

Compared 10% of the time

ThousandEyes vs Catchpoint

Compared 9% of the time

Datadog vs Catchpoint

Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Catchpoint

Compared 4% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Catchpoint

Compared 3% of the time

More Catchpoint Competitors

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Icinga 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

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint

March 2026

Download Catchpoint product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs, and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.

Learn more at: https://www.catchpoint.com/

Catchpoint

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2026

Free Report: Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Find out what your peers are saying about Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.

See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.