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LiveAction LiveNX vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

LiveAction LiveNX
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
28th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
29th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of LiveAction LiveNX is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.5%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM4.5%
LiveAction LiveNX0.7%
Other94.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ashwani Bansal - PeerSpot reviewer
Network management and diagnostics improved through effective monitoring and reporting capabilities
The solution is handy. I have not used that particular feature. Maintenance is required for the system. If you want to use something on the endpoints or end-user devices, then using LiveAction LiveNX in place of other tools would be quite beneficial. The solution impacts operational costs and resources. On a scale of 1-10, I rate LiveAction LiveNX a nine.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All in all, LiveAction LiveNX has become an indispensable tool for maintaining and improving our network's reliability and performance, ultimately supporting our organization's goal of providing timely and dependable delivery services."
"The alerting feature is very good because it allows you to set MOS alerts at various network junctures or data points."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to create CLI scripts on the fly to fix any issues. We were using it for QoS modeling to ensure that we were properly modeling QoS, and it basically said here is what you need to fix to get this QoS done, whether it is ACL or something else. It would either push or recommend. If you have the right credentials, you could also push. It is very good if you are a Cisco shop. It gives you reporting, latency, and bandwidth utilization for your applications, so you can do good capacity management planning. There are a lot of pieces that LiveNX can give you. It is a total NPM solution for SD-WAN."
"We don't have any complaints about the software. According to my team, it's a very good tool that's very intuitive."
"Its analytical capability is really good."
"The intention and the idea of the filter is great."
"The product has a very good graphical interface."
"On a scale of 1-10, I rate LiveAction LiveNX a nine."
"The solution is easy to install and it takes a couple of hours."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed the solution from new and completed the upgrades."
"The most valuable feature is the vital states of the devices as it provides overall CPU and device health information."
 

Cons

"This is a horrible solution and I think everything needs to be improved."
"It is not as robust as other NPM solutions. For instance, there is a problem while labeling specific applications. It works well with well-known applications, but when you have to put in new applications that are not very known and set them up with names, ports, URLs, or some protocols, it is not as intuitive."
"The only downside to this software is the price."
"Sometimes the solution does not register devices properly and that is a bug."
"Improved documentation and more responsive customer support can help in addressing issues faster."
"The tool crashes sometimes when we try to pull reports simultaneously."
"Maintenance is required for the system."
"The product is weak in multi-tenancy. We have to install multiple instances of LiveAction, whereas we would like to build it once for our customers."
"An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients."
"The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
"It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately."
"The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex, and I find it challenging."
"Currently lacks integration with SMS services."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's very expensive."
"We use the free version."
"The solution is fairly expensive compared to other products."
"I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise84
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about LiveAction LiveNX?
The product has a very good graphical interface.
What needs improvement with LiveAction LiveNX?
The solution could be enhanced by implementing custom patterns for each customer.
What is your primary use case for LiveAction LiveNX?
The customers use LiveAction LiveNX for network monitoring and management purposes.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Also Known As

LiveNX
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tampa Electric, Digital First Media, Allscripts, Boxwood Technology
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about LiveAction LiveNX vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
866,744 professionals have used our research since 2012.