Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Checkmk vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

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

Checkmk
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
11th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (5th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Checkmk is 3.8%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.6%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Paolo Sala - PeerSpot reviewer
A reasonably priced tool for system and application monitoring
The main room for improvement is in the solution's presentation and the integration area. In our company, we use the integration capabilities from ServiceNow. We also have another big monitoring solution in place in our company, which is Dynatrace. At the moment, there doesn't exist an out-of-the-box integration for Dynatrace. I think that the integration and the exporting of the data collected are areas where Checkmk lacks but should try to improve the most. The only implementation of Checkmk that allows high availability is the virtual appliance that has the option for the availability of a different box. Otherwise, you have to find a way to implement it manually with some custom solution, which could be an improvement.
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Checkmk helps me compare data and foresee issues."
"I really like the auto-discovery feature."
"It's versatile, scalable, and easier to use compared to other solutions like Nagios and OMD."
"The alerting system in Checkmk really works properly."
"The initial setup of Checkmk was easy...It is a very stable solution."
"Checkmk was built on a platform that was user-friendly, and I could build my charts easily."
"We can monitor multiple sites using the product."
"Overall, from one to ten, I rate Checkmk a nine."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
"We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less."
 

Cons

"The main challenge for us is that we're moving from Nagios to Checkmk, and we're still getting used to the new way of working."
"Checkmk does not allow running scripts at varying intervals."
"I think that the integration and the exporting of the data collected are areas where Checkmk lacks but should try to improve the most."
"If an alert is generated for a specific pattern in the log, and if Checkmk catches that log, it will stay there even after the alert is resolved."
"Sometimes we receive alerts, and it can become annoying when you acknowledge an alert. It is very clunky when you acknowledge the alert. The process is not very intuitive, and there are instances where it feels a bit cumbersome to acknowledge an alert."
"It is easy for tech-savvy people, but newcomers might find it intimidating."
"In Checkmk, the documentation can probably be improved a bit more."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features."
"Currently lacks integration with SMS services."
"The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is affordable."
"Checkmk is a fairly reasonably priced solution."
"The price of Checkmk is cheaper compared to other enterprise products."
"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."
"Price could be improved on"
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
14%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
55%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Checkmk?
The most valuable feature of the solution is that it has a lot of different pieces, and they all work together...It is a very scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What needs improvement with Checkmk?
I will get more information about Checkmk when the proof of concept is done. It's going to be before the summer. There will be a report about the tool and a recommendation to use it. So far, it loo...
What is your primary use case for Checkmk?
Checkmk ( /products/checkmk-reviews ) is a monitoring tool, so that's what I will use it for. Right now, it's not in production, but it's in a proof of concept phase. It looks good, so probably, du...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Checkmk vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.