Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Kentik vs SolarWinds Network Device Monitor 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 (15th)
SolarWinds Network Device M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
30th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.6% 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.
Vijay Samant - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitor network utilization and manage bandwidth efficiently with live monitoring and reliable fault management capabilities
I use SolarWinds Network Device Monitor for monitoring network utilization, bandwidth utilization, uptime, and downtime. It also assists in incident management SolarWinds Network Device Monitor provides live monitoring capabilities, which are very useful. Its fault management capabilities are…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"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."
"The most important feature is cybersecurity."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."
"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."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"The product is useful for switches and IP phones."
"In terms of general network monitoring features, I find SolarWinds Network Device Monitor very flexible and comfortable to use. The software itself is extremely useful when it comes to monitoring how our data moves between different networks and environments."
"Link monitoring is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is monitoring."
"The solution and its interface are elaborate and fully integrate all monitored items for easy analysis and troubleshooting."
"This product proactively tells us about issues before the users notice."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The alerts we are getting when we start losing connection access have been helpful."
 

Cons

"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."
"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"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."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor lacks the granularity of other monitoring tools like LiveNX."
"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."
"The solution is not user-friendly."
"SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects."
"In terms of price, it could be less expensive."
"The solution should have AI-powered issue-resolving capabilities"
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could improve the features. We don't have the complete model for the database, and the monitoring for the database is up and down. We expect that we could monitor the blocking items on the database but we don't have that feature."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could improve by being more user-friendly. The network has so many features which make it difficult to find how to configure how to use it. It is not simple to customize."
 

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 enterprise license is good for the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor. However, it is expensive, they should reduce their price."
"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."
"The product is expensive."
"I rate the product's price as three to three and a half or on a scale of one to ten, where one means low price, and ten means high price."
"Thankfully, it doesn't take a lot of manpower to install and deploy."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."
"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."
"The price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
859,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
What do you like most about SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
I rate the product's initial setup process a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult phase and ten is an easy process.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor should include automatic diagrams in its network solutions. Additionally, there is a challenge with having to add an additional polling engine after 10,000 element...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Network Device Monitor
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Air Rarotonga
Find out what your peers are saying about Kentik vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.