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Kentik vs NETSCOUT vSTREAM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 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

Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th)
NETSCOUT vSTREAM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
87th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT vSTREAM is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Kentik1.5%
NETSCOUT vSTREAM0.5%
Other98.0%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Gcecilio - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a media company with 51-200 employees
Traffic insights have reduced transit costs and support secure, direct connections with providers
The best features that Kentik offers are the ability to identify traffic end-to-end and to know which transit is used, if it goes through any other transit, to see the entire flow, from the subscriber to the content provider and vice versa, from the content provider to the subscriber.I can also determine whether it is symmetric or asymmetric traffic, and if it goes through any provider that has some kind of bottleneck. That is very important. Regarding the security part, which is also possible to handle through Kentik, you can configure it in a way that makes the network more secure and reduces the amount of dirty traffic or attacks received. Kentik has had a high positive impact on my organization. Besides the cost reduction, it has been possible to perform troubleshooting more effectively, and also regarding DDoS-related attacks. In addition to cost reduction, we had a more reliable connection. Since the moment we identified that it was possible to have a direct connection with content providers like CDN77, Cloudflare, and Akamai, we established a direct connection there through a PNI with these content providers, making the network less dependent on an IP transit provider.
KL
Network Engineer at Inniti Network Solution
A user-friendly solution that is easy to install and improves visibility
I would like to see improvements made to the user guide. From my personal experience, it is helpful to see a list of steps describing what to do next in different situations. An example is what to do and what to back up in the case of certain types of failure. There are also cases where a customer can't understand specific features. Enhancements to the user guide would be helpful for this. More features for network fragmentation would be helpful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Kentik has positively impacted my organization significantly, as it serves as our main monitoring system."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"The biggest thing Kentik has given us is the amount of visibility we have into our own network now and knowing what's going on at a given time."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"The most important feature is cybersecurity."
"The generation of KPI-like information that feeds to the nGeniusONE (management) server is the most valuable feature."
"One of the valuable features is the packet decoding."
"Sometimes it took a month to troubleshoot something that we can now do within days."
"vSTREAM gives us better visibility and reporting about our network infrastructure, allowing for cost-optimization."
 

Cons

"My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing shows that the prices are quite high."
"Perhaps a better explanation would be to see how tagging is captured and a method of comparing my tagged interfaces on Kentik’s side."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"Kentik can be improved in terms of languages, and visually it could be improved a bit more as well."
"Currently, the way I'm configuring it uses reactive alerts, which means alerts are triggered when an issue occurs. I would prefer more proactive alerts in the future."
"There is a large difference between BGP and normal nodes. I don't think this plays out to the best for the customer or Kentik."
"The stability is okay, but sometimes we see that the memory on the server is not 100 percent correct and we need to stop and start the software to have it reallocated again."
"Room for improvement exists in filtering in the packet decode."
"I would like to see improvements made to the user guide."
"I would like for it to have a smaller footprint of the virtual appliance and better performance."
"I would say that this is not a scalable solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
"The tool is cheaply priced."
"Licensing is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Media Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been limited because I was not responsible for that in my company, but I have spoken with my boss, and he reported that the licensing mode...
What needs improvement with Kentik?
Kentik can be improved by enhancing the alerting system, especially the way templates work and the hierarchy of these alerts.
What is your primary use case for Kentik?
My main use case for Kentik is as a network monitoring system and flow analysis tool. A specific example of how I use Kentik for network monitoring is monitoring devices or services that go down an...
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Also Known As

No data available
vSTREAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Metropolitan Police Agency, Banpara, PropertyRoom.com
Find out what your peers are saying about Kentik vs. NETSCOUT vSTREAM and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,383 professionals have used our research since 2012.