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Pandora FMS vs SCOM comparison

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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
66th
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 (59th), Cloud Monitoring Software (38th)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.4%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other97.9%
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

"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"You can configure several types of architecture for high availability or load balancing."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"We are consultants and thanks to Pandora can detect a lot of disasters that other companies can't, and we can offer high availability of the system to the client."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"Network monitoring is fun again with Pandora FMS."
"SCOM has improved our organization by simplifying the monitoring process. The system tells you what the bi-weekly or monthly usage was and that enables us to report this information to the manager. It shows if there was a connectivity issue that needs to be fixed and it's easier to concentrate on what needs to get fixed. System errors, therefore, get fixed faster."
"SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence."
"Setting up SCOM is straightforward and takes about an hour as long as you have all your firewalls and DNS settings in place."
"This product is really easy to use and has best monitoring capabilities when used to monitor Microsoft products."
"This product allows me to measure the level of availability of services and detect errors in them."
"Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications."
"We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money."
"SCOM provides alerting capabilities and threshold settings, which are helpful for monitoring."
 

Cons

"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."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved."
"Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM."
"Dashboarding and application performance management."
"It would be a much better product if Microsoft provided management packs with the product."
"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"On-prem network monitoring is something that could be improved drastically."
"It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"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."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"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."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
20%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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

Ask a question
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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...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

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: September 2026.
916,212 professionals have used our research since 2012.