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NetCrunch 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

NetCrunch
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
83rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
66th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (28th), Log Management (73rd)
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 (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of NetCrunch is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

RP
A network monitoring platform with a useful reporting feature, but permission-based options could be better
The initial setup is fairly easy. Most of it's wizard-based. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to set it up. But if you don't know certain things related to protocols and everything else, it might be difficult. If you know how SNMP works, it'll be fairly simple to set up.
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

"Reporting on NetCrunch is pretty good. It's very similar to SolarWinds. It's just a different interface. The majority of everything there was beneficial."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
"I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is."
"Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring."
"The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server."
"The biggest thing for me is that it provided enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information you need."
 

Cons

"I didn't care for the role-based, permission-based options, which were not the best."
"The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"The solution could be more secure."
"Having more technical and support resources available in Saudi Arabia would be helpful."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"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."
"If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"Price could be improved on"
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
"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 price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"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
Comms Service Provider
12%
Agriculture
12%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
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
 

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...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AER Kooperation, AON Corpration, Advance Financial services, Airbus SAS, Bauer Net consult, Banco Soal, Bertelsmann, Burke County public, COF training services
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about NetCrunch vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.