Grafana Enterprise Stack vs SolarWinds AppOptics comparison

Grafana Labs and SolarWinds are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Grafana Labs is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.5, while SolarWinds is ranked #58. Grafana Labs holds a 1.2% mindshare in IM, compared to SolarWinds’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Grafana Labs users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Read 13 Grafana Enterprise Stack reviews

1,190 Views
1,166 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

SolarWinds AppOptics

Read 9 SolarWinds AppOptics reviews

1,069 Views
492 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Grafana Enterprise Stack

SolarWinds AppOptics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

SolarWinds AppOptics and Grafana Enterprise Stack are competing products in application monitoring and data visualization. Grafana Enterprise Stack appears to have the upper hand due to its robust features and enhanced visual insights.

Features: SolarWinds AppOptics provides seamless infrastructure and application monitoring. It ensures granular visibility into system performance and offers custom metric options. Grafana Enterprise Stack excels in data visualization capabilities, integrates with various data sources, and allows extensive flexibility in metric analysis.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds AppOptics could enhance its data visualization features, expand integration with more data sources, and improve the customization of monitoring dashboards. Grafana Enterprise Stack might work on simplifying its initial setup process, reducing the learning curve, and providing more straightforward documentation for better user accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds AppOptics offers an easy setup with cloud-based deployment and prompt customer service. Grafana Enterprise Stack, despite presenting a learning curve due to its extensive customization options, results in a tailored solution for complex environments.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds AppOptics offers a cost-effective solution with a straightforward pricing model providing clear ROI. Grafana Enterprise Stack, requiring higher initial investment, offers significant ROI for organizations needing advanced data visualization and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds AppOptics Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

September 2025

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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

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

13th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SolarWinds AppOptics

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

58th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (57th), Cloud Monitoring Software (44th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Grafana Enterprise Stack	1.2%
SolarWinds AppOptics	0.5%
Other	98.3%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Gregory Diana

Managing Director at Exponential Energy (Pty) Ltd

Offers very good charting capabilities and capable of automatically generating dashboards, even for a large number of data points

In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party. It's like Node-RED. Node-RED is free, and you can choose an application, but that application depends on the person who's supporting it. If they decide not to support it, then you're stuck. However, I believe that it can't be improved or changed because people have to make money and make a living from it. Nothing will ever be changed. It depends on the software. Same as Windward. Windward just decided it could not support a large number of customers, so it focused on high-income, low-volume clients. Whereas Node-RED has millions of followers and fantastic support, the same as Grafana. Grafana is partly free, but it's your problem. That's how all these companies work. If you're big and you pay a lot of money, they'll pay attention to you.

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John Yuko

Assistant Manager ICT - Projects at I&M Bank Ltd

Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions

I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.

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

"Our productivity has improved with its use."

"The dashboards are pretty good."

"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."

"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."

"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."

"The most valuable features of Grafana for data visualization are its ability to create intuitive dashboards and its wide range of visualization options like graphs, charts, and tables."

"The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance, from 10 AM to 2 PM, we may experience high memory utilization. It helps us to solve these issues."

"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack pros

"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."

"The product has a great dashboard."

"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."

"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."

"The reporting of the solution is very good."

"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."

Cons

"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."

"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."

"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."

"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."

"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."

"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack cons

"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."

"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."

"The solution should be more user-friendly."

"The integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward."

"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."

"The implementation needs improvement. It needs to get modernized with the newer cloud scenario in both public and private deployment models."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."

"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."

"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."

"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Energy/Utilities Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Enterprise Stack?

The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance,...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?

The layout is good, but I think it needs some enhancement based on my experience. I might not have gotten deeper to understand more details, but I believe it needs more improvement. Scalability and...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?

I have been working for several months with Icinga, but after that, I moved forward to Zabbix, and now I might switch to Grafana Enterprise Stack. I am trying many alternatives to provide monitorin...

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Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack

September 2025

Download Grafana Enterprise Stack product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

September 2025

Download SolarWinds AppOptics product report

Also Known As

No data available

AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato

Overview

Grafana Enterprise Stack is a powerful tool for real-time data monitoring and visualization. With its flexible and scalable features, it is widely used for creating dashboards, analyzing metrics, and gaining insights into infrastructure, databases, and applications.

Its valuable features include powerful visualization capabilities, extensive data source integrations, customizable dashboards, a user-friendly interface, and a robust alerting system. Users appreciate its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate with different data sources, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Grafana Labs

AppOptics is a SaaS-based simple, powerful and affordable Infrastructure & Application monitoring for custom on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems.

Your business runs on applications, and when they go down or run slowly, it can impact the business in lost productivity, customers, or revenue. To add to the complexity, your IT environment is changing, and workloads can be spread across data centers, and cloud resources. You need to monitor the availability and performance of applications and infrastructure, regardless of where they are, so you can identify potential issues early and address them before they impact users

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell

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Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

September 2025

Free Report: Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds AppOptics and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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