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NetBrain vs SolarWinds NPM 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (15th), Network Automation (4th)
SolarWinds NPM
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 2.8%, up 1.7% compared to last year.
SolarWinds NPM, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 4.5% mindshare, down 5.3% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetBrain2.8%
LinkRunner13.6%
Wireshark12.6%
Other71.0%
Network Troubleshooting
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM4.5%
Zabbix11.7%
LibreNMS4.6%
Other79.2%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
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

"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"It is scalable."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface and the ease of deployment."
"You can monitor performance counters effortlessly."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"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."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
 

Cons

"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable."
"The response time of the support team needs to improve"
"The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The licensing is based on the number of nodes, interfaces, and volumes."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
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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
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise84
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.