Plixer Scrutinizer vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Plixer and VMware are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Plixer is ranked #55 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.3. Plixer holds a 0.4% mindshare in NMS, compared to VMware’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Plixer users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

1,343 Views
927 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

Read 47 vRealize Network Insight reviews

1,734 Views
1,248 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

vRealize Network Insight

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

vRealize Network Insight and Plixer Scrutinizer compete in the network management and monitoring category. vRealize Network Insight holds the advantage with its strong network visualization and microsegmentation capabilities, whereas Scrutinizer excels in traffic analysis and security focus.

Features: vRealize Network Insight provides extensive network visualization, enabling effective flow monitoring, capacity management, and troubleshooting. It supports microsegmentation and assists in application migrations and firewall rule distribution. Plixer Scrutinizer is strong in detailed traffic analysis with advanced network flow monitoring and reporting. It integrates with Active Directory and Cisco Identity Services, providing enriched data context.

Room for Improvement: vRealize Network Insight could improve integration with third-party solutions, simplify its interface for non-technical users, and enhance user-friendliness. Plixer Scrutinizer needs enhancements in data visualization, easier integration with third-party applications, and improvements in configuration management. Users also suggest better scalability, reporting enhancements, and a more streamlined update process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both vRealize Network Insight and Plixer Scrutinizer are primarily deployed on-premises. vRealize Network Insight users rely on VMware's knowledgeable technical support. Plixer Scrutinizer is recognized for its ease of deployment and available demo options, though technical support experiences vary, with some unresolved cases.

Pricing and ROI: vRealize Network Insight is considered expensive but offers significant ROI with its robust features, providing labor savings and network management efficiency. Plixer Scrutinizer offers competitive pricing linked to the number of devices and sensors, seen as reasonably priced for its value, making it accessible for larger networks. Both solutions help reduce operational costs and improve efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Plixer Scrutinizer vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer vs. vRealize Network Insight

July 2025

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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

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

55th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (11th)

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

40th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (42nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.6%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Ira Mulyanti

Sales Director at ARGA SOLUSI

An affordable product with great integration capabilities

Plixer Core Platform is a valuable feature and a good software. Plixer Scrutinizer uses NetFlow analysis to monitor whatever is there in a network. Price-wise, Plixer Scrutinizer is not an expensive product. Basically, Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that can integrate with any other brand or product in the market, so it is not an area of concern.

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Shaijith KB

Senior System Specialist at General Directorate of Residence and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA)

Comprehensive management and detailed reports benefit operations while improvements are needed in support and maintenance

We have Tanzu and OpenShift. We have OpenShift, Canonical, and the Tanzu one. The Tanzu platform from VMware is a Kubernetes platform. We haven't completely installed Tanzu yet; we installed the vROps part. vRealize Network Insight is beneficial because you can control the East-West traffic. vRealize has a component called NSX, which has East-West traffic controlling and micro-segmentation, that is one of the best options, and we have the layer extension, layer 2 extension possible through NSX. If you have anything accountable in any business, even in a candy business, having proper accountability on what you are selling and buying will save a lot. If you don't know what you're selling and buying, you will end up with a loss. My team does not use the flow analytics feature; we have a security and network monitoring team, which is a different SOC team. I am using it as an administrator internally. We perform different tasks including costing analysis, capacity management, and many other things. vRealize Network Insight has a concern about the maintenance part, as it requires a person to monitor it completely. It's not something you install and your report will be generated automatically. You have to work on this properly to get the insights. vRealize Network Automation, vRealize Operations, and vRealize Network Insight are completely related to the network. I cannot say much about these network aspects because I am on the operations side, but overall, the vRealize suite is good for reporting perspective or any ISO-related documentation; this is very helpful. The product is called vRealize Operations Manager, and now it is referred to as Aria or vAria. I am now a Senior System Specialist. We use different metrics because we have multiple departments, and we can monitor utilization and comparisons with the previous year. On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product."

"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."

"Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features."

"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."

"The solution helps to enrich the data context of our network traffic. It allows me to see what applications are most in use on a slightly historical basis, going back a day or week at tops. It allows me to tune QoS or traffic shaping around what's being used. It saves me from having to unnecessarily upgrade, if I don't need to."

"One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."

"We didn't experience any bugs."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pros

"The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well."

"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."

"I find that the interface of most VMware products is very similar, which I consider an advantage due to its ease of use compared to other tools like Splunk."

"It helps a lot because, until now, we didn't have the tools to figure out the micro level, VM-to-VM kind of traffic; that was not in the current environment. We could not figure out VM-to-VM communication from the other tools. This is the tool which gives us end-to-end transparency."

"It allows us to see how the network devices function as well as to see network glitches or fluctuations or dropping of packets."

"The graphical interface of this environment is so good with all the views, the graphics, and everything in them. It's really easy for me. It doesn't need an engineer to work on it. It's easy enough that anyone can get into the environment and look for issues or look at how communication is going on across the VMs. It's pretty much straightforward."

"compare-to-competition; I would recommend the product. I don't think there is any other product like this on the market right now."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"Knowing that they're coming out with a new user interface, that is an area where there is room for improvement. There are so many variables. They should limit the variables in the user interface and create some classes, like "simple," "novice," and "expert" to narrow down the variables within it."

"They're working on the security areas, so it can provide more insight. What they have is still pretty much IP-concentric. If they were to make it IP and URL, they'd be a little bit ahead on that."

"We couldn't get it set up properly."

"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."

"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."

"Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out. Another room for improvement in the solution is its lack of SaaS offering which some customers were looking for. My company deals in small to medium businesses, mid-market, and some customers wanted the SaaS feature which Plixer Scrutinizer doesn't offer. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for it to have a SaaS offering because my company also deals with educational spaces and smaller businesses that just don't have the staff that can implement this. If there's either a managed service or SaaS-based offering to just make it a little easier for those types of customers, it would be a great addition to Plixer Scrutinizer."

"I wish the reporting side was easier to work with, but it does a decent job. I also wish the reporting side was a little more intuitive or they offered more reporting examples."

"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."

"The UI, even though once you get to know it, it's easier, still it's hard to figure out by yourself. You have to go read, watch videos. It has a lot of data on it. So that is an issue."

"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."

"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."

"If it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, what script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls."

"The solution can be improved by making it more compatible with other brands, allowing for better integration."

"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."

"The product is slightly complex use, while still being user-friendly. It could use more training modules, as it is not a straightforward product."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a recurring maintenance fee after the initial purchase or if we want the license upgrade."

"We recently bought a license upgrade, so we will integrate more exporters. We upgraded from a 25 exporter license to a 50 exporter license. Therefore, there will be more flows, and this will be an extension. I don't know when we will purchase a faster server, because the server that we have is quite new."

"We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."

"There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."

"The license is per device. We have 50 devices."

"Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."

"We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."

"Compared to some of the other tools we have, it's incredibly reasonably priced."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."

"It has brought more money into our company."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plixer Scrutinizer?

I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Plixer Scrutinizer?

I don't have deep enough knowledge to comment on what requires improvements in Plixer Scrutinizer. In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.

See all answers

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

In VMware you have to buy a separate license for it. We have VVF and VCF-type of licenses, and if you want to go with this NSX and sort of higher-end professional services, you need to go with VCF....

See all answers

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

There is room for improvement as not all cases are getting resolved, and we often do not get L3 support directly, having to go through L1 and L2, resulting in delays that usually are a headache for...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 17% of the time

Kentik vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 16% of the time

LogicMonitor vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

DX NetOps vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 11% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 9% of the time

Datadog vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

August 2025

Download Plixer Scrutinizer product report

Buyer's Guide

vRealize Network Insight

July 2025

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

No data available

Arkin

Overview

The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

Plixer

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer vs. vRealize Network Insight

July 2025

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