Kentik vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

Kentik and Plixer are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Kentik is ranked #29 with an average rating of 9.0, while Plixer is ranked #74. Kentik holds a 1.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to Plixer’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kentik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Plixer users who would recommend it.

Kentik

Read 16 Kentik reviews

3,784 Views
3,368 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

1,916 Views
1,437 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Kentik

Plixer Scrutinizer

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Kentik and Plixer Scrutinizer compete in the network analysis and monitoring category. While Kentik stands out for its SaaS capabilities and ease of use, Scrutinizer shines with its integration flexibility and reporting prowess.

Features: Kentik's strengths include real-time data exploration, effective visualization tools, and powerful DDoS alerting. It offers detailed traffic insights with robust customization options. Meanwhile, Plixer Scrutinizer is recognized for its extensive integration capabilities and comprehensive reporting features, providing valuable network traffic context.

Room for Improvement: Kentik could enhance its API usability, providing more actionable intelligence and improving security rights management. Users also suggest improving the user interface and alerting options. For Plixer Scrutinizer, users wish for SaaS availability, improved data management and storage, and better documentation alongside streamlined updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kentik's SaaS model simplifies deployment, earning positive feedback for ease of use. Its customer service is noted for being responsive and supportive. Plixer Scrutinizer, primarily deployed on-premises, is praised for a reliable technical support team, although initial deployment can be complex.

Pricing and ROI: Kentik is perceived as cost-effective, particularly for larger deployments, with flexible licensing to accommodate diverse needs. Plixer Scrutinizer offers competitive pricing based on device count and flow capacity, with a flexible licensing model valued by users for its adaptability.

To learn more, read our detailed Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2026

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Helped 884,933 peers since 2012

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

29th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (16th)

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

74th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Kentik	1.8%
Plixer Scrutinizer	0.5%
Other	97.7%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Network monitoring is improved through multi-vendor integration and effective observability

In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area. Specifically, more work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues. Although Kentik has a market presence, it lags behind Selector AI, which is a leader in integrating AI to support network operations.

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Ira Mulyanti

Sales Director at ARGA SOLUSI

An affordable product with great integration capabilities

Plixer Core Platform is a valuable feature and a good software. Plixer Scrutinizer uses NetFlow analysis to monitor whatever is there in a network. Price-wise, Plixer Scrutinizer is not an expensive product. Basically, Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that can integrate with any other brand or product in the market, so it is not an area of concern.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important feature is cybersecurity."

"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."

"Collecting that data and having those metrics first-hand, in real-time, allows us to make an educated decision, versus an uneducated guess."

"In terms of overall vendor partnership, I'd give Kentik a nine out of 10; they're right up there as one of my best partners to work with, amongst all the contracts that I own, and they're very customer-centric, always available, with nothing too small or too big that I can't ask them to help with, and they seem to be willing and able to jump in no matter what."

"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."

"We have been extremely happy with the features; they were exactly what we were after."

"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."

"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."

More Kentik pros

"I really feel, after reviewing three at one time and knowing some other ones, the bang and performance for the dollars, and the capacity and the flexibility; it's really second to none in those situations."

"There are other tools out there that will do what Scrutinizer does. But what I have found with Scrutinizer is that it does it very quickly. I've taken 25 million individual data fragments from the different sensors, and it has graphed that and mapped it and presented a picture within 30 seconds. It has a very efficient database algorithm that I am really impressed with."

"The internal reputation of our IT to resolve historical bandwidth problems has 100 percent improved."

"Compared to other solutions, the functionality Scrutinizer delivers is better."

"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."

"If you have a large network then this product is totally invaluable."

"Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features."

"It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pros

Cons

"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Perhaps a better explanation would be to see how tagging is captured and a method of comparing my tagged interfaces on Kentik’s side."

"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."

"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."

"Sometimes it's difficult to order the dimensions correctly when trying to make Sankey flow diagrams."

More Kentik cons

"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."

"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."

"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."

"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information."

"They're working on the security areas, so it can provide more insight. What they have is still pretty much IP-concentric. If they were to make it IP and URL, they'd be a little bit ahead on that."

"There is room for improvement around the data that they have on the website about solutions... they should have more templated solutions on their website. Going out and identifying how to do RTP performance with a Cisco router, or how to do application response times in an Arrista data center deployment was where most of the work was... They should spend some more time documenting solutions and putting together white papers."

"For updating the Scrutinizer platform, when we have the actual data, it never happens in one day."

"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

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."

"Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."

"We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."

"There is a recurring maintenance fee after the initial purchase or if we want the license upgrade."

"There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."

"We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."

"The license is per device. We have 50 devices."

"We recently bought a license upgrade, so we will integrate more exporters. We upgraded from a 25 exporter license to a 50 exporter license. Therefore, there will be more flows, and this will be an extension. I don't know when we will purchase a faster server, because the server that we have is quite new."

"I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kentik

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2026

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Overview

Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.

With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

Kentik

The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

Plixer

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent.

Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2026

Free Report: Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

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