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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
12th
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
86th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT vSTREAM is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Kentik1.7%
NETSCOUT vSTREAM0.5%
Other97.8%
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

"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."
"Kentik is worth the money to have as a tool."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"Kentik has had a positive impact on my organization in terms of our network visibility because we leave our dashboard on a display screen, where the entire engineering team can see it."
"Kentik has positively impacted the organization by providing greater control over certain subjects and enabling monitoring of current traffic."
"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."
"I can say that I am so happy with this platform because it is very useful for us."
"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."
"vSTREAM gives us better visibility and reporting about our network infrastructure, allowing for cost-optimization."
"Sometimes it took a month to troubleshoot something that we can now do within days."
"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."
 

Cons

"Kentik can be improved by enhancing the alerting system, especially the way templates work and the hierarchy of these alerts."
"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."
"Kentik can be improved in terms of languages, and visually it could be improved a bit more as well."
"It also detects anomalies proactively, but the same is not so true when it comes to real network problems, since they tend to just happen."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"I would like to see more granular user and security rights."
"Perhaps a better explanation would be to see how tagging is captured and a method of comparing my tagged interfaces on Kentik’s side."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use."
"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."
"I would say that this is not a scalable solution."
"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."
"Room for improvement exists in filtering in the packet decode."
 

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
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Media Company
9%
Construction Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

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?
I do not currently use Kentik's anomaly detection. I had communication with Kentik's technical support through a WhatsApp group. When I faced any issues or there were problems with my Kentik collec...
What is your primary use case for Kentik?
I'm using Kentik for my own internal use. My primary use case is to monitor our equipment and to get a more detailed view of where our inbound and outbound traffic is going.
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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: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.