PRTG Network Monitor vs Wireshark vs Zabbix comparison

Read 63 Wireshark reviews

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708 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Read 107 Zabbix reviews

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14,223 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

PRTG Network Monitor

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark, and Zabbix based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software.

To learn more, read our detailed Network Monitoring Software Report (Updated: September 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:

Mindshare comparison

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
PRTG Network Monitor	4.1%
Zabbix	11.4%
SolarWinds NPM	4.4%
Other	80.1%

Network Monitoring Software

Network Troubleshooting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Wireshark	13.0%
LinkRunner	12.7%
NetAlly EtherScope nXG	9.7%
Other	64.6%

Network Troubleshooting

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Zabbix	11.4%
SolarWinds NPM	4.4%
LibreNMS	4.4%
Other	79.8%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Adinath Bhokare

Technical Lead at Wipro Limited

Has helped detect server failures in real time and improved incident response through clear dashboards

When I use PRTG Network Monitor, it shows which servers go down or crash, displaying real-time reports and related information. We have configured PRTG Network Monitor to trigger an alert if any sensor or server goes down for more than five minutes. PRTG Network Monitor shows cause and effect clearly. For example, when our internet link failed, it displayed which dependent services were impacted. The feature in PRTG Network Monitor improved communication within my team since everyone can see the same dashboard. It saves me from constant manual checks as everything I care about is automatically tracked. PRTG Network Monitor has positively impacted my organization because it shows cause and effect clearly. We can see the real-time dashboard and take immediate action based on that. PRTG Network Monitor helped us detect the failing RAID controller before it completely collapsed, allowing us to avoid potential data loss.

Provides detailed traffic analysis and helps troubleshoot issues

Vijay Duggal

Network Specialist at Squarepoint Capital

There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. While the solution supports sampling as fine as one millisecond, it requires a copy at that interval. My Python script allows me to achieve a granularity of up to ten microseconds, but I can't go beyond that. When dealing with provisioning on both issues, it would be beneficial if I could go down to the microsecond level, if not the nanosecond. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain.

Enables seamless global client monitoring with reliable remote connectivity

B Ahmed

Manager, Information Technology Zara & Inditex at Cenomi

I use the solution to provide a perfect environment for remote connectivity with my clients. Many tools that I require for system maintenance are included. I can easily monitor all of my clients throughout the world I did not give much thought to it, however, improvements could be made to Zabbix.…

More PRTG Network Monitor pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"It is a central solution in terms of how to actually use it. It has a very easy dashboard. Everything is concise. We are able to create custom sensors. For different parts of the business, we have many products across many environments, and it works for everything."

"PRTG is relatively intuitive and fairly straightforward. It has net flow monitoring and that works all right. I would describe it as a decent middle-of-the-road solution."

"The feature I like is that it can easily do a lot of mapping."

"The solution has excellent redundant features."

"PRTG Network Monitor has positively impacted my organization as we are not seeing any critical issues or major impacts for our applications, our servers, and our networks nowadays."

"PRTG Network Monitor's best features are its flexibility, ease of implementation, user-friendliness, and intuitive interfaces."

"The most valuable feature is the notifications. As long as you spend time and think about what and when you want to be notified, it's always accurate. It is always there. I find things out before my Internet provider."

"The feature to incorporate Voice over IP (VoIP) incidents into network traffic analysis is valuable. Capturing voice or SIP communication allows for examination of interactions between SIP clients and SIP servers. This helps the team investigate or analyze issues related to call center servers and operators."

"Wireshark's best features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."

"The most valuable feature of Wireshark is the ability to choose a destination of flow that has not been working as expected."

"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."

"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."

"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."

"The ability to decrypt traffic and the abundance of filters available are both valuable features."

"I like the filtering feature as we can filter data easily. This feature is also available in tcpdump, but it's a simple piece of software. Wireshark is more advanced and has many features. It allows you to filter a lot of things. The output can be filtered easily. The most important feature is colorization. If I say, "Okay, this particular SMB protocol in red, it will show me red." It's easy to identify that protocol or capture data."

More Wireshark pros

"Simple network monitoring that is easy to install and manage."

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the ease with which we can set it up at customer sites with our custom Zabbix proxy and tools."

"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."

"The solution's design has recently changed and it is visually pleasing with more color, for example, there is blue, black, and white."

"The most valuable feature is that it provides network segregation for server monitoring."

"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system."

"Every new asset placed in the environment can be automatically detected, predicting human failures."

"The solution allows for good integration with other products."

More Zabbix pros

Cons

"There's always room for improvement. The high availability feature is good, but it's an area that PRTG could marginally improve. For example, in PRTG, both servers have a different IP, but it would make things a lot easier if they were bound by a single IP."

"Maybe in the future there will be room for improvement, but currently, there is nothing pressing that I can think of"

"PRTG Network Monitor needs to enhance network performance monitoring."

"I would like to have a VM version that can be installed on a cloud such as Azure. We're using Azure, and we're eliminating on-premise servers. It would be helpful to have a PRTG version that can be installed on the Azure cloud."

"There are some vendor-specific sensors in PRTG Network Monitor, particularly for older hardware, that don't always provide consistent results."

"The inventory of the device should be improved."

"Having a Unix implementation or Unix installation could be an improvement. Right now, it's based just on Windows, and that's a problem for some customers."

"They just released a newer version of the desktop app, a beta version, that I have been trialing out. I prefer the older version, only because of how the layout is designed"

More PRTG Network Monitor cons

"DNS could be improved."

"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."

"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."

"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."

"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."

"It is difficult to scale this solution."

"I would like to see Wireshark improve the ease of application of the command. The command is very powerful, but not easy to apply."

"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."

More Wireshark cons

"We had some scalability issues with a large number of nodes."

"I want Zabbix to improve the UX/UI. Zabbix doesn't use a JavaScript chart for images, and I want them to improve this."

"There is a bit of a learning curve during installation."

"Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products."

"The server monitoring could be better."

"The user interface could be a bit better. They could update it a bit."

"The solution needs to add remote features."

"We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great."

More Zabbix cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for a perpetual license and we have a support fee."

"PRTG Network Monitor is not that expensive, so I like it cost-wise. There's no additional cost apart from the standard licensing fees. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I would rate the cost of PRTG Network Monitor a two."

"I rate the licensing for PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten."

"The price of PRTG Network Monitor is more expensive than other solutions, such as OP Network Manager."

"We pay nothing for it. Its 100 sensors have allowed us to put a magnifying glass on some systems, providing an extra layer of detail. Therefore, our outgoing is nothing and our incoming is a lot of useful data that we can react to proactively."

"The pricing is very low compared to other solutions."

"The pricing is reasonable for the features provided."

"The price is pretty comparable."

More PRTG Network Monitor pricing and cost advice

"The tool is free."

"Wireshark is free of charge, and there's no license involved."

"Wireshark is free software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."

"It is free."

"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"It is free to download and install. It runs on multiple platforms, so how can you go wrong?"

"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."

More Wireshark pricing and cost advice

"It is free, which allows us to reduce costs."

"This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation."

"The tool's licensing is good."

"It is reasonable."

"It is freeware. We still use the free version of Zabbix."

"Zabbix is open-source so if one wishes to implement it in-house, they must have qualified professionals to set up and optimize databases, Linux/Unix OS, PHP, Apache, and depending on what is monitored, a full-stack network and systems administrator may be needed."

"It is a true open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

More Zabbix pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.

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869,089 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user174738

IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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…

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

University

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Hospitality Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	56
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	40

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	31
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	27

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	53
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	34

Questions from the Community

PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it a...

What do you like most about PRTG Network Monitor?

The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PRTG Network Monitor?

PRTG Network Monitor remains affordable until now.

What do you like most about Wireshark?

The GUI is easy to use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Wireshark?

Wireshark is priced at a medium range, not too high, not too low. The pricing could be more flexible, and they might ...

What needs improvement with Wireshark?

The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance. Performance can sometimes be a challenge due...

What do you like most about Zabbix?

The template system in Zabbix is very beneficial as it saves time in configuration.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zabbix?

If you want to save costs, you can use Zabbix.

What needs improvement with Zabbix?

The reporting is lacking because this is an open-source tool, and nowadays, management's expectation is that the repo...

PRTG Enterprise Monitor vs PRTG Network Monitor

Comparisons

Compared 6% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Centreon vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Checkmk vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

LibreNMS vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

More PRTG Network Monitor Competitors

Microsoft Network Monitor vs Wireshark

Compared 22% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Wireshark

Compared 15% of the time

Colasoft Capsa vs Wireshark

Compared 11% of the time

Nagios XI vs Wireshark

Compared 8% of the time

Observer GigaStor vs Wireshark

Compared 3% of the time

More Wireshark Competitors

Checkmk vs Zabbix

Compared 10% of the time

LibreNMS vs Zabbix

Compared 9% of the time

Icinga vs Zabbix

Compared 6% of the time

NetXMS vs Zabbix

Compared 5% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Zabbix

Compared 2% of the time

More Zabbix Competitors

Product Reports

PRTG Network Monitor

Download PRTG Network Monitor product report

Download Wireshark product report

Download Zabbix product report

Overview

PRTG Network Monitor runs on a Windows machine within your network, collecting various statistics from the machines, software, and devices which you designate. PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports. This will let you plan for network expansion, see what applications are using most of your connection, and make sure that no one is hogging the entire network just to torrent videos.

To monitor a large IT environment, it's important to be able to scale PRTG up. Paessler PRTG Enterprise Monitor includes all the proven capabilities of PRTG Network Monitor, which are enhanced by exclusive ITOps Board for a service-oriented, central overview of multiple PRTG servers.

Paessler GmbH

Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer.

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software that provides real-time monitoring and alerting for servers, networks, applications, and services.

It offers a wide range of features including data collection, visualization, and reporting.

With its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, Zabbix helps organizations ensure the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure.

Sample Customers

Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank

Comversion, ADP, Talbots

1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba

Network Monitoring Software