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NIKSUN NetVCR vs SolarWinds NPM 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

NIKSUN NetVCR
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
98th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of NIKSUN NetVCR is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Himanshu Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
High performance, quick packet monitoring, and helpful support
The solution could improve by having automatic mitigation. For example, as soon as a problem occurs the solution alarms and mitigates the situation immediately. In a feature release of the solution they should add features related to automation and remediation. Automation would help increase level of security the solution provides.
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

"The unique selling point of NIKSUN is its ability to scale and its reporting capabilities. NIKSUN captures the packets at a very high speed, from one GB to 160 Gbps also. It offers report granularity in nanoseconds."
"The most valuable features of NIKSUN NetVCR are its performance and forensic capabilities. Additionally, the information that the solution provides is highly detailed and useful. When dealing with network traffic packets can be sent at a high speed causing some security issues, but this solution is able to rapidly monitor the packets providing security."
"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 have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"The benefit of this solution is the reporting. We're able to report on and see our network in a graphical form. We are able to detect when a device is added to a network."
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
 

Cons

"The solution could improve by having automatic mitigation. For example, as soon as a problem occurs the solution alarms and mitigates the situation immediately."
"NIKSUN is a passive solution. It provides you with you data, alerts, reports and the root cause of issues. However, it requires a person to make use of this functionality. If an event is happening and nobody attends to it, the effects of the event could be severe."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"A need for improvement is in the technical support provided by SolarWinds."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
"The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is high. There is an annual license costs."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"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."
"SolarWinds NPM is very expensive, and we pay ten thousand yearly."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"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."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"It is too expensive."
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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
No data available
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

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

NetVCR
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Visa, FedEx, CitiGroup, IDC
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about NIKSUN NetVCR vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.