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Pandora FMS vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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
41st
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
40th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
28th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (16th), Log Management (40th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.6%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"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 network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"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."
"SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers."
"It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"The solution ranks as one of the top five monitoring tools."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
 

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."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"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."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"A need for improvement is in the technical support provided by SolarWinds. Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team, especially during application-level issues."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long."
"The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation."
 

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."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"Price could be improved on"
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"It is too expensive."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
9%
Media Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
54%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,451 professionals have used our research since 2012.