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Kentik vs NETSCOUT vSTREAM comparison

 

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
33rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (17th)
NETSCOUT vSTREAM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
81st
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT vSTREAM is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON - PeerSpot reviewer
Client experience and cybersecurity have improved with an easy setup
The solution is valuable for client experience, especially in the financial sector. The most important feature is cybersecurity. The pricing is good, but the functionality is the most important aspect for clients. The solution is easy to deploy and requires only one person to set up, making it easy and quick. Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.
KL
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

"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"Overall, I would give Kentik nine out of ten stars."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."
"vSTREAM gives us better visibility and reporting about our network infrastructure, allowing for cost-optimization."
"One of the valuable features is the packet decoding."
 

Cons

"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"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."
"We had faced some issues during an outage and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools. It took time to resolve these issues, which is why I give them eight points."
"I would like to see improvements made to the user guide."
"Room for improvement exists in filtering in the packet decode."
"I would like for it to have a smaller footprint of the virtual appliance and better performance."
 

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
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?
I would say Kentik's pricing is not cheap. From my perspective as part of the technical team, I would not categorize it as expensive, but I know it is not cheap.
What needs improvement with Kentik?
There's always room for improvements and better relations when using any kind of product. We faced some issues with Kentik UI and alerting, which we asked them to fix, and they succeeded. They have...
What is your primary use case for Kentik?
We are using Kentik mostly for synthetic tests, and from one last year, network monitoring as well. We are using it for inter DC BGP tests and server monitoring as well.
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Comparisons

 

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: June 2025.
859,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.