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Kentik vs NIKSUN NetVCR 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
34th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (16th)
NIKSUN NetVCR
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
99th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 NIKSUN NetVCR is 0.2%, up from 0.1% 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.
Himanshu Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
High performance, quick packet monitoring, and helpful support
The solution could improve by having automatic mitigation. For example, as soon as a problem occurs the solution alarms and mitigates the situation immediately. In a feature release of the solution they should add features related to automation and remediation. Automation would help increase level of security the solution provides.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, I would give Kentik nine out of ten stars."
"The most important feature is cybersecurity."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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."
"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, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."
"The most valuable features of NIKSUN NetVCR are its performance and forensic capabilities. Additionally, the information that the solution provides is highly detailed and useful. When dealing with network traffic packets can be sent at a high speed causing some security issues, but this solution is able to rapidly monitor the packets providing security."
"The unique selling point of NIKSUN is its ability to scale and its reporting capabilities. NIKSUN captures the packets at a very high speed, from one GB to 160 Gbps also. It offers report granularity in nanoseconds."
 

Cons

"The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect."
"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."
"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."
"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 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 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."
"NIKSUN is a passive solution. It provides you with you data, alerts, reports and the root cause of issues. However, it requires a person to make use of this functionality. If an event is happening and nobody attends to it, the effects of the event could be severe."
"The solution could improve by having automatic mitigation. For example, as soon as a problem occurs the solution alarms and mitigates the situation immediately."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheaply priced."
"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 price of the solution is high. There is an annual license costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
 

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
NetVCR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Visa, FedEx, CitiGroup, IDC
Find out what your peers are saying about Kentik vs. NIKSUN NetVCR and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.