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Pandora FMS vs SCOM 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

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
76th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (61st), Cloud Monitoring Software (44th)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.6%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.6%
Pandora FMS0.6%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis."
"It is very good at monitoring Microsoft Server."
"SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers."
"Setting up SCOM is straightforward and takes about an hour as long as you have all your firewalls and DNS settings in place."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of Windows and Linux servers."
"Alerts notify the server or service owner of problems, allowing quick decisions or actions to keep the service running based on configured thresholds."
"SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS."
"Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it."
 

Cons

"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"Application monitoring must be improved."
"The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."
"Direct integration with third-party tools, like ticketing systems, is lacking but would be beneficial."
"SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved."
"It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring."
"Regarding certain issues in the solution, it can be difficult to generate reports if we have a program that is not user-friendly for reporting. While this is not necessarily negative, we may need to use another solution."
"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"SCOM is likely to be phased out in favor of more compatible tools like Icinga for application monitoring or when moving to cloud solutions like CloudWatch and Azure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
883,824 professionals have used our research since 2012.