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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
69th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (27th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (60th), Cloud Monitoring Software (41st)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.5%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.5%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

MM
Independent Consultant at Maack Consulting
The open architecture is easy to extend and enhance
Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas. They could improve their management console's ability to monitor large environments could be improved. For example, SNMP management is only partially integrated into the management console.
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

"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"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."
"In comparison with most monitoring software, this software is incredibly easy to use."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"Thanks to Pandora FMS, we've been able to adapt to every new monitoring challenge over the past seven years."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped."
"SCOM is a very powerful tool if deployed and eventually maintained correctly."
"Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awards Excellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilities Fast and consistent UX for system admins Extensive dashboarding capabilities REST API available Excellent technical support, rich user community Designed for on-premise installations"
"It's easy to use."
"We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay."
"It works better than other products I’ve used – namely SolarWinds, which is cumbersome and error prone for web app monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it."
"We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money."
 

Cons

"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times."
"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"I would like more customized reports. People should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately."
"I would like to see them improve their network monitoring."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface."
"It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively noisy out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action."
"It would be nice to see the old MP Designer come back as you could quickly design and build a MP without a deep understanding of the XML code behind it."
"Unfortunately, when you need to monitor member servers which are not joined to the same domain as the SCOM servers, you need to go through the certificate route (so that you can have the required trust through the certificate). This is very time consuming and very prone to error."
"They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"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."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"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."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"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."
"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
17%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
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
Earn 20 points
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: April 2026.
896,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.