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Packetbeat vs ThousandEyes 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

Packetbeat
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
61st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
2.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ThousandEyes
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (10th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Packetbeat is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThousandEyes is 2.0%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ThousandEyes2.0%
Packetbeat0.2%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Network analytics have delivered lightweight, integrated visibility for search, observability, and security
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP, but not as deeply as other solutions. It covers NetFlows and these types of flows, but not at the level of a deep packet capture that you can find in the market where it taps every single packet in the network. Packetbeat is more about bringing statistics about the packets, but it doesn't capture these packets. The development intention of Packetbeat appears to be to provide a window for application monitoring and performance analytics, and for that purpose, it is doing sufficiently well. However, if the vendor has another goal to build a similar network monitoring solution that exists in the market, which is outside of Elastic's business nature, Packetbeat is a sensor that needs to be improved to the level of deep packet capture where it loses no packets in the network. That improvement would take Elastic to another level.
Shreyans Parekh - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Finance and Operations at Fruitist
Proactive monitoring has transformed digital experience and now optimizes application delivery
With ThousandEyes, there are some configuration and metric screens that are not entirely intuitive with ThousandEyes, so they can certainly improve in terms of the usability of certain metric screens. ThousandEyes can also offer deeper traffic insights relative to specific applications, so detailed analytics on application-level traffic would help in better understanding and managing our network resources effectively. I would say that ThousandEyes can also, in terms of providing more extensibility with other observability tools, offer more out-of-the-box integrations with other observability tools so that ThousandEyes can serve as that single source of truth, so that we don't necessarily need to go to other tools to be able to be that one-source dashboard. I think there's a lot that ThousandEyes can continue to improve on there. The issues that I've talked about, including extensibility with other platforms and the improvement of accessing specific metric screens in order to be able to provide for fuller access and more detailed access to network-level metrics would make the platform feel less complicated to navigate. It wouldn't require as many manual integration inputs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The beauty of Packetbeat is that it is easy, free, and lightweight, while other solutions are expensive and will accumulate a huge amount of data."
"Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature."
"Overall, I would rate ThousandEyes nine out of ten."
"The authentication overall - including to the VPN and LAN - is excellent."
"With ThousandEyes, it's one click or one place where I can see all of my public prefixes, how long it takes, when the last update was, where a route was missing from the internet, or is it actually causing a black hole."
"ThousandEyes gives companies better visibility."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution was the ability to see how the connection quality is between the sites and get an alert if it was turning bad."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its scalability. It is a good tool for network admins."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward...In terms of ROI, the solution is worth the money."
"The solution is very easy to use."
 

Cons

"Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows."
"The scalability of the agent itself could be improved."
"Once I fully use the tool 100%, I'm sure I would have something to critique, however, for now, I'm happy with it."
"Regarding the user interface, I appreciate dropdowns, but I prefer a guided experience where the interface explains itself instead of requiring extensive searching to reach a point."
"I would like the product to offer more agility."
"ThousandEyes can be improved by making the installation procedure less time-consuming and enhancing the interface to be more user-friendly."
"ThousandEyes definitely has differentiators versus the peers in the space, as there are other tools that are a bit more user-friendly to configure, especially around enterprise agents; for example, when upgrades are required, it sometimes needs a complete de-installation and re-installation of a newer version, which leads to a bit of administrative overhead from time to time, but overall, it has been an excellent product."
"ThousandEyes could improve the dashboards by adding more features."
"The guest portal is hard to use."
"They only offer synthetic requests."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"In our company, we incur a yearly expense in our company for the licensing part. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten since it is expensive."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
"The solution is cheap."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Packetbeat?
Elastic is pretty cheap for large enterprises but unaffordable for small ones.
What needs improvement with Packetbeat?
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP...
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I have dealt with all of them: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent, and Fleet, because I need to use all of them to achieve a solution for customers. These solutions are typically...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
With ThousandEyes, there are some configuration and metric screens that are not entirely intuitive with ThousandEyes, so they can certainly improve in terms of the usability of certain metric scree...
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
My main use cases for ThousandEyes at my current company are leveraging ThousandEyes for digital experience, internet, and internet performance. I'm using ThousandEyes for full network path visuali...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Packetbeat vs. ThousandEyes and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.