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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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
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

"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS."
"It works better than other products I’ve used – namely SolarWinds, which is cumbersome and error prone for web app monitoring. SCOM is not."
"The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped."
"It's easy to use."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​"
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it."
"The product’s auto-remediation feature helps with automation."
 

Cons

"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"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."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"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."
"SCOM's feature that notifies us when a server is down is not present in recent updates, which has weakened the product."
"Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement."
"The price could be improved."
"Of course, price is always an issue with Microsoft and could be improved."
"The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult."
"It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."
"I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems."
"All of the areas of reporting are very bad and need to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"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."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
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

Ask a question
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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.
883,044 professionals have used our research since 2012.