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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
66th
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
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (13th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Packetbeat is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThousandEyes is 2.4%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ThousandEyes2.4%
Packetbeat0.3%
Other97.3%
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.
Abdalraheem Asha - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior cloud engineering lead and IT project owner at KDD
Has improved collaboration with providers and pinpointed issues across regional networks
ThousandEyes has been the most user-friendly tool I have seen in the past couple of years, making life easier in troubleshooting and helping us find what's happening while offering vivid options on how to use the agents or the server-side tools with multiple options to trace out the issues. The best features ThousandEyes offers include the ability to place two different points or nodes, such as a server or a node in the cloud in my account, then installing agents and tracing the connectivity which helps me build a perfect user experience to check what's happening while users access my resources. I love the dashboards in ThousandEyes and the way I see the results after placing or doing the tests; this is perfect, and I would say this is the best thing. ThousandEyes has positively impacted my organization by raising the customer experience and positive feedback by over 70% due to the complex situation with local service providers, allowing me to resolve user feedback and issues which enhanced the user experience significantly. I measure the 70% improvement in customer experience through customer tickets and feedback after resolving issues, where previously, users faced problems and limited time on the platform, and after using ThousandEyes, the user time reached up to five to six hours a day, even for teams possibly totaling 30 hours a day.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature."
"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."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the path analyzer, which identifies the node causing the errors."
"ThousandEyes gives companies better visibility."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward...In terms of ROI, the solution is worth the money."
"The installation process is not hard at all."
"One feature I liked is end-user monitoring."
"Overall, I would rate ThousandEyes nine out of ten."
"The authentication overall - including to the VPN and LAN - is excellent."
"ThousandEyes has positively impacted our organization by enabling us to know if a third-party hosted application isn't functioning properly, allowing us to determine what's actually going on and whether the issue lies on our side or with the application provider."
 

Cons

"The scalability of the agent itself could be improved."
"Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows."
"It would be nice if the solution covered other areas like server monitoring."
"The tool does not provide features for application-level monitoring."
"Once I fully use the tool 100%, I'm sure I would have something to critique, however, for now, I'm happy with it."
"I feel it needs more holistic integration. It needs more improvement."
"There is room for improvement in terms of customization and user-friendliness."
"More detailed documentation explaining the metrics and the testing mechanisms would be helpful."
"ThousandEyes could improve the dashboards by adding more features."
"They only offer synthetic requests."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"The solution is cheap."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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?
I think that the scalability of the agent itself could be improved. It is also a bit limited in terms of capabilities. When a customer needs to customize the collection, I think it's tougher there.
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I've been using Packetbeat ( /products/packetbeat-reviews ) for call centers, for logs, for observability, network monitoring, and some search engine optimization.
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?
ThousandEyes could focus more on end-users than enterprises, as the solution is powerful, and collaboration with multiple cloud providers should be developed for better test traceability, with the ...
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
My main use case for ThousandEyes is troubleshooting, with a specific example being testing connectivity through IXP to ensure the fastest route in collaboration with service providers over the reg...
 

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 Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: January 2026.
881,176 professionals have used our research since 2012.