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CrowdStrike Falcon vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

CrowdStrike Falcon
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
132
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (6th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Threat Intelligence Platforms (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (1st), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (1st), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (1st), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. CrowdStrike Falcon is designed for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and holds a mindshare of 14.1%, down 19.4% compared to last year.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 2.5% mindshare, down 3.2% since last year.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Waleed Omar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides effective real-time threat detection with potential for cost optimization
Some features such as device control, firewall management, and file analysis are standalone products that we need to purchase separately. If these features came out of the box within the product, it would be much more beneficial for us. Other providers such as SentinelOne include these features in their base product. We attended a CrowdStrike Falcon event where they discussed some shallow AI features, but we cannot see these in our panel yet. We work with different solutions such as Darktrace and SocRadar, where AI features are automatically displayed in our dashboards after release. However, for CrowdStrike Falcon, we cannot see these features.
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The EDR is amazing and ease of integration with Splunk is a big plus. Integration with BigQuery is also a plus for me and workflow creation is easy. Overall, CrowdStrike Falcon is a great product."
"I like the overall reports of this solution. They are crisp, and to the point."
"I haven't had any issues with bugs or glitches. I haven't had a problem with stability so far."
"The machine learning behavior for anomaly detection is a valuable feature. It helps identify any suspicious or unusual activities within the system."
"I find nothing to miss in terms of stability; there are no glitches, and the solution is stable."
"The malware protection is the most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon."
"CrowdStrike Falcon's most valuable feature is the fact that it's not getting in the way of our workforce and their workflow."
"The solution can scale easily."
"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."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"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 application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
 

Cons

"The management reporting functionality needs to be improved."
"CrowdStrike Falcon could improve by having an easier way to search and use the interface for extracting queries from the data. The interface could improve."
"An improvement would be to extend support to legacy and unsupported servers."
"The management of the solution could improve."
"The pricing structure should allow for some flexibility."
"Improvement is always possible. It's challenging to gauge how much future mitigation is provided, especially since we've only been using the product for about one and a half years. Every product faces this challenge because nothing is ever completely foolproof. So, besides relying on technology, we also focus on increasing our staff's awareness of security issues. Feedback from my colleagues suggests that the reporting and dashboarding of incidents could be improved."
"This solution could be improved with greater scope for admins to make changes to the solution."
"Deployment in cloud environments is challenging. Another concern is CrowdStrike's GUI. It changes annually, making it hard to work and find options."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace is just a click away. Since we were using the on-premise version of the product, we continued on the cloud by purchasing it through the AWS Marketplace."
"Our licensing fees were between $50,000 and $60,000 per year, which was pretty expensive for a small business."
"It is an expensive product, but I think it is well worth the investment."
"This solution offers annual subscriptions. The pricing for this solution could be reduced."
"Crowdstrike Falcon is relatively cheap."
"I am not aware of the price, but I believe that it is among the most expensive XDRs out there. Of course, this is dependent on the features you choose. Depending on the features, the price might increase."
"The cost of CrowdStrike Falcon could be reduced. It is quite expensive if you compare it to other solutions, such as Blue Coat, Symantec, McAfee, or Kaspersky."
"In my opinion, the pricing of CrowdStrike Falcon seems aggressive."
"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."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions that are very scalable, secure, and user-friendly. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto offers ...
How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?
Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing user interface that makes setup easy and seamless. CrowdStrike Falcon offers a cl...
How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?
The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

CrowdStrike Falcon, CrowdStrike Falcon XDR, CrowdStrike Falcon Threat Intelligence, CrowdStrike Identity Protection, CrowdStrike Falcon Surface
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike Falcon vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
865,140 professionals have used our research since 2012.