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ManageEngine OpManager vs SolarWinds NPM vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of ManageEngine OpManager is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.6%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 2.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.6%
ManageEngine OpManager1.9%
WhatsUp Gold2.3%
Other92.2%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Charles A - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Director at Access Healthcare Services Pvt Ltd
Reporting features improve operational efficiency while weekend support needs enhancement
Support is moderate and needs improvement, especially during weekends when technicians perform upgrades. During weekends, they need to provide more support to ensure a smooth transition. There is a call for ManageEngine OpManager to scale better in automation and AI functionality. Although the product stability is good, support enhancement is necessary to enable better planning for upgrades and maintenance activities.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.
EC
Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet
Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains
The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution gives pretty good network visibility. I am also impressed with it's monitoring."
"The application monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."
"Once it was set up and running, there were no issues with it, and it seems to run fairly well."
"The tool is useful for SNMP monitoring."
"The traffic monitoring and the traffic analysis are great."
"We run weekly and monthly reports to provide exceptions, and it's helped our organization remediate problems proactively."
"I like being able to push configurations to multiple devices. If you have the same configurations for all the branches, it's easier to use ManageEngine OpManager and push configurations at once rather than individually pushing them to each device."
"Rich GUI tool to monitor infrastructure."
"I love the GUI. Almost everything is accessible through the web interface. It is very user-friendly. It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them."
"We were able to unify our entire company under one monitoring solution that works for everybody, saving a ton of time and significantly speeding up problem-resolution time."
"If you are almost in the dark, SolarWinds can give you a quick view of what you have and you can start basic monitoring."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"The stability is fantastic."
"Our ability to locate the source of a network issue has dramatically reduced our mean-time-to-resolve."
"With SolarWinds, everything just works."
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless."
"We no longer have to manually search for problems because we are alerted when something in the network goes down."
"The most valuable feature of WhatsUp Gold is NetFlow and the virtualized maps."
"Overall, we have been satisfied with the functionality of the product."
"The new version has a lot of improved features."
"It is very good at monitoring the network and keeps us up to date on the status of internal devices."
"This is a good, stable network monitoring solution for devices."
"The visual map and email alerts are very useful to have in real time so we always know the state of our network."
 

Cons

"Some of our customers have been asking that OpManager have a feature to monitor the operating system, however, I tell them that Endpoint Central is doing that. You can buy endpoints and then OpManager, and they integrate between them, and everything is okay."
"It is sometimes difficult to manage the user interface. It can get very complicated."
"The integration with various OEM products could be simplified."
"There needs to be improvements to make the solution capable of supporting more devices, and it would be good to see an option for automatic deployment."
"OpManager is slow but that just might be the server we have it on."
"We have been facing an issue since last year when a lot of our users started to work from home through their mobiles or computers. We are having trouble reaching these devices. We are now planning to publish our instance to the cloud so that we can reach these devices. Its performance should be improved in terms of the discovery of the devices. I would like to feel confident with the discovery that this solution does. For example, on my dashboard, I would like to be able to view a list of all devices seen on a specific server. At present, it is difficult to find such information. This would be an excellent feature to have."
"The solution is a bit difficult to configure."
"We would like the solution's customize and build functionality to be more user-friendly."
"SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution, aside from the fact that they had a major hack a couple of years ago and effectively allowed the Russian government to completely hack their code, making everyone vulnerable."
"Failover functionality does not exist without the purchase of the "Fail Over Engine (FoE)" license."
"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."
"It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there."
"Customer Service: 0/10 as there were no knowledge base articles when I used it, and every new patch required customer login to apply."
"The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution."
"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user."
"I might like to see a better interface in the future. It's not necessarily easy to integrate the product with other vendors."
"Integrations with other devices. I want to have a product that has full integration with my active directory so I can track user activity. I want to track my complete user activity, so I'm looking for a product to implement in the near future, which will have full integration with my network and active directory users. It became very difficult to track user activity."
"This product should add other options for monitoring. It does not currently meet the broader needs of the banking industry in the version we have deployed."
"The licensing model could be improved. Right now, the levels are too far apart. This causes the solution to be more expensive than it needs to be."
"Sometimes it's a little bit slow."
"WhatsUp Gold should work on real-time monitoring and configuration management."
"The price could be improved. When we first started using this product, the company was new. The prices were very low then, in comparison with HP OpenView or IBM, but now the policy is too high, relative to the number of devices we have."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The initial cost is low and the add-ons are reasonable."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"It is reasonably priced."
"We have a standard license for ManageEngine OpManager. We purchased the license for one year and now we are upgrading it soon."
"The price of ManageEngine OpManager is reasonable. We have an annual license and the cost comes from how many devices are being monitored. There is not anything extra cost for maintenance and support."
"Pricing for ManageEngine OpManager depends on the number of nodes you onboard and whatever pricing is reflected on the ManageEngine portal which offers discounts from ten percent to fifteen percent. It purely depends on the sales volume and the negotiation. In my organization, there are about one thousand two hundred nodes which cost around $29,000 per year. There's no additional support fee or maintenance fee from ManageEngine OpManager. Pricing for the solution is highly competitive and I would rate it five out of five. ManageEngine OpManager is one of the most competitive options out there."
"ManageEngine OpManager has a three-tier licensing model."
"The price for ManageEngine OpManager is average."
"It is not an expensive product."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"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."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."
"This is a well priced solution."
"Pricing is reasonable compared to other products."
"The choice of version depends on the number of points, or devices, that you want to monitor, and this makes the product expensive."
"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."
"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."
"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."
"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise27
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine OpManager?
Based on my experience and use case, the setup cost and price of ManageEngine OpManager is good. However, if it were ...
What needs improvement with ManageEngine OpManager?
ManageEngine OpManager could improve by adding network device control capabilities. The control feature would be more...
What is your primary use case for ManageEngine OpManager?
I am using ManageEngine OpManager for network and server reliability. We have multiple locations, so integrating all ...
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 ar...
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 scalabil...
What do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?
The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network is...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?
Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information fir...
What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?
It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complic...
 

Also Known As

OpManager
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bonita, Thorp Reed & Armstrong, Galaxy, Fiserv Credit Union Division, Universitas 21 Global, ERP Suites LLC
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.