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Catchpoint vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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

Catchpoint
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
38th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (62nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (12th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.2%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.2%
Catchpoint0.7%
Other98.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

AnmolRai - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant Project Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Valuable monitoring features enhance ecommerce experience while improvement needed in region-specific insights
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive similar data for the China market as we do for North America and Asia Pacific, this would be helpful.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."
"The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues."
"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."
"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."
"Catchpoint's customer service and support are valuable."
"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."
"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
 

Cons

"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."
"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."
"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."
"It would be great if Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow."
"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."
"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."
"There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring."
"Trending needs improvement. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"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."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"The product is expensive."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Retailer
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive simila...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.