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Centreon vs PRTG Network Monitor 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
8.1
Centreon enhances ROI through efficient monitoring, quick issue resolution, cost savings, and minimal impact during outages.
Sentiment score
6.9
PRTG Network Monitor boosts ROI by enhancing time efficiency, reducing staff needs, preventing failures, and offering cost-effective management.
Sentiment score
7.2
SolarWinds NPM enhances infrastructure visibility, delivering cost reductions, faster issue resolution, and significant ROI through optimized resource management.
Centreon provides timesaving and costsaving benefits as it lets us manage multiple devices on a single platform.
It significantly saves time by automating monitoring tasks and reduces costs as it requires fewer resources.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Centreon's customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, though availability limitations and support level improvements are needed.
Sentiment score
6.8
Users appreciate PRTG's intuitive design, often resolving issues via resources, despite email-only support and mixed service feedback.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM support gets mixed reviews, praised for expertise yet noted for delays and aggressive sales tactics.
We do not have direct access to Centreon's technical support.
If issues arise, like services appearing as down in Centreon, technical support helps check the polar-server communication.
Technical support from Centreon responds within 24 hours and resolves issues quickly.
The setup process is well-documented, making it easy to deploy.
Tutorials are available so I can manage any issue with PRTG Network Monitor easily.
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
Centreon is valued for flexibility and scalability, though improvements in data management and alert scaling are recommended.
Sentiment score
7.3
PRTG Network Monitor is highly scalable, allowing seamless expansion with added sensors or licenses, despite potential hardware limitations.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable, adapts well to infrastructures, but may face performance and cost issues on virtual platforms.
Occasionally, for several hours, we do not receive any alerts, causing a business impact.
We use other tools for adding and deploying configured devices, but direct access from Centreon would be beneficial.
On a scale of one to ten, scalability is rated as 9.5.
PRTG Network Monitor has the ability to scale and add new devices.
For less than one hundred devices, it is stable.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Centreon is stable and reliable, though stability may vary; support resolves issues swiftly, especially with the latest versions.
Sentiment score
7.9
PRTG Network Monitor is praised for its stability and reliability, with issues often due to user errors or limits.
Sentiment score
7.5
SolarWinds NPM is stable with issues from server limits and bugs, resolved through updates and proper configuration.
Sometimes we do not receive alerts, causing business impact, and users ask why no alerts were received.
Centreon is a much more straightforward and stable tool compared to Icinga.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
 

Room For Improvement

Centreon users seek improved customization, monitoring, UI, documentation, integration, mobile features, auto-remediation, multilingual support, and notifications.
PRTG users seek enhancements in dashboards, cloud integration, application speed, support, reporting, pricing, and sensor expansion.
SolarWinds NPM users report issues with network discovery, UI features, costs, automation, support, and security improvements are needed.
Enhancements are needed in identifying configuration issues, providing real-time alerts in case of issues, and improving the HTTP configuration tasks.
Reliability is sometimes an issue. Centreon has a developer mode and production mode, but sometimes alerts don't come through in production mode.
While Centreon excels at server-level monitoring, it lacks the ability to track web app availability and latency, unlike Dynatrace, which is efficient in this area.
They need to improve application performance monitoring, error tracing mechanisms, and log management.
PRTG Network Monitor should provide syslog monitoring since it is not available at this time.
PRTG Network Monitor can sometimes be too detailed and cluttered at the beginning, making it heavy to use.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
 

Setup Cost

Centreon provides an open-source solution for SMEs but has a complex pricing model for enterprises needing premium features.
PRTG Network Monitor provides flexible, cost-effective licensing for enterprises, appealing for intuitive setup and competitive pricing against other solutions.
SolarWinds NPM pricing varies by setup size, with initial costs, tiered licensing, and maintenance fees influencing total expenses.
Centreon's pricing is not very expensive.
Pricing is by the number of devices, not by sensor.
The prices are very high for PRTG Network Monitor.
It's not too high, nor too low, but it's reasonable.
The solution is considered expensive.
Pricing-wise, SolarWinds NPM is more expensive than PRTG.
 

Valuable Features

Centreon offers unlimited monitoring, enhanced visualization, and customizable features for efficient oversight with extensive device compatibility and anomaly detection.
PRTG Network Monitor is praised for its scalability, user-friendly interface, real-time monitoring, and seamless integration across various technologies.
SolarWinds NPM offers ease of deployment, real-time monitoring, customizable alerts, and user-friendly design for efficient network management.
Monitoring is a fundamental pillar of technical support, and Centreon streamlines this process, reducing the need for extensive manual checks.
Centreon's real-time monitoring, despite having some manual aspects, supports us in managing our operations effectively.
Centreon allows us to monitor all of our devices on one platform.
PRTG Network Monitor already provided me with 100 free sensors, which is enough for my network monitoring.
PRTG Network Monitor is easy to set up. Within a few minutes, it is operational.
It is advantageous because it can be deployed on-premises.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Centreon is 2.4%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PRTG Network Monitor is 4.2%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Simon KONAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Plug-ins are free but it has limitations in sending out information to users
The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram. The solution can be used if you want to get email notifications, which is not good for our company because if someone is not in front of their desktop, you can't receive information about an equipment or LAN that is down.
Noman-Saleem - PeerSpot reviewer
Detects suden changes but significant pricing concerns affect the effectiveness of network traffic troubleshooting
We use PRTG Network Monitor for monitoring traffic on interfaces and the behavior of network traffic. If there are sudden changes in traffic or any configuration issues, we can sort them out using PRTG. It's very helpful for troubleshooting and monitoring traffic utilization on our interfaces…
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
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Centreon?
Centreon's pricing is not very expensive. Initially, I rated it seven, but corrected to five out of ten.
What needs improvement with Centreon?
I have certain concerns with Centreon, such as being unable to set downtime for multiple devices at once due to the l...
What is your primary use case for Centreon?
We are using Centreon for monitoring devices, both LAN and WAN devices. There are subsidiaries for my company, so if ...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it a...
What do you like most about PRTG Network Monitor?
The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PRTG Network Monitor?
The pricing is in the middle. It's not too high, nor too low, but it's reasonable.
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 ar...
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 scalabil...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.
Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: July 2025.
862,514 professionals have used our research since 2012.