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Portkey vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Portkey
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
36th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Portkey is 0.3%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.1%
Portkey0.3%
Other98.6%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Shravan Revanna - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Engineer at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
Centralized AI control has standardized our workflows and delivers faster, more reliable features
There are definitely some places where Portkey can be improved. Overall, the experience has been positive, but the first area is analytics and reporting. While the observability feature is excellent, we would like to have richer historical analytics and customizable dashboards. For example, it would be useful to see trends by applications and teams or features over long periods without exporting data to an external BI tool. Another area is governance for large organizations. As AI adoption grows, enterprises need more granular, role-based access control. We would like to see more advanced AI evaluation capability built into the platform itself, including features such as prompt versioning and automated quality scoring and regression testing. Finally, while the platform is supported with multiple providers, we would welcome even more intelligent routing capabilities, such as automatically selecting the best model based on latency, cost, and task complexity using configurable policies. These are not major pain points, but they are enhancements that would make an already strong platform even more valuable for an organization that scales their AI workloads. Documentation and onboarding could be enhanced. Portkey is developer-friendly, but we need more end-to-end references, architecture, and implementation guides for common AI patterns. This would help teams adopt it even faster. I did not give Portkey a perfect score because while it has become a foundational component in our AI stack and solves several operational challenges, I would still like to see deeper analytics, stronger enterprise governance features, and more built-in AI evaluation capabilities, especially for prompt testing, regression analysis, and model benchmarking. I would be comfortable recommending Portkey to any organization that is building multiple AI applications or wants to manage a scalable way to handle LLM providers and produce AI traffic.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Portkey definitely provides a solid alternative solution for the agent and large model hosting platforms, and it is very helpful for us to explore the possibilities across the industry rather than staying with a few mainstream options."
"Overall, Portkey has had a huge business impact in terms of cost savings and operational efficiency."
"Portkey has significantly improved the organization by streamlining the AI processes being followed."
"Portkey is totally stable; it is one of the best software solutions in the market for this purpose."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"SolarWinds SAM is very stable, and we are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues."
 

Cons

"However, one thing I would like to say is that it could have better documentation."
"One major problem I see with Portkey is that when I had not yet started any trial, it started to denote that I had exceeded the prompt limit."
"There are definitely some places where Portkey can be improved."
"The main area for improvement is onboarding and trial experience."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking; without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, and I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
13%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portkey?
Portkey is requiring production to be $49, I guess that is US dollars per month for 100K logs. I would say it is manageable.
What needs improvement with Portkey?
One major problem I see with Portkey is that when I had not yet started any trial, it started to denote that I had exceeded the prompt limit. Users are usually expecting a trial stage with more tok...
What is your primary use case for Portkey?
Our team is searching for an alternative to LiteLLM, which is another monitoring management platform, and we found that Portkey is an alternative solution that we decided to try out. We want to con...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Portkey vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.