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Pulseway vs SolarWinds NPM 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

Pulseway
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
55th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (17th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (13th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pulseway is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.4%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.4%
Pulseway0.4%
Other96.2%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2132892 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Hogan's Systems Consulting, LLC
Great notifications, a wide variety of features, and excellent monitoring capabilities
It would be nice if it also had a desktop application, similar to the phone app, which would allow me to monitor and control computers from my desktop. It's nice to be able to do things remotely using my phone; however, in many cases, it would be very helpful to be able to do things from a desktop or laptop computer. This would be especially useful for things like remote access to computers. It's too hard to do much on a Windows computer using a tiny phone screen. Being able to do things from a desktop or laptop computer would be much more productive.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The setup is simple."
"It gives you remote control and has a mobile app."
"The solution has great workflow and server modules."
"It has been very helpful to get notifications about various issues with my servers and network to help me take action to resolve problems before they become major issues."
"We like the patching of the window updates in the client's systems. You can automatically do updates with a single click."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"The biggest thing for me is that it provided enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information you need."
"Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades."
"SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users."
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
 

Cons

"There are some bugs or glitches."
"It would be nice if it also had a desktop application, similar to the phone app, which would allow me to monitor and control computers from my desktop."
"They have good technical support but it's not excellent."
"GUI needs to be improved and the solution lacks a process for monitoring VOIP calls."
"The solution does not allow you to make a script for just one customer."
"The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work."
"The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex, and I find it challenging."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds could have a polling engine on the site that would collect the reporting and then manage everything itself."
"I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it a little bit easier to create reports or having a larger assortment of canned reports."
"Currently lacks integration with SMS services."
"My team has had a lot of issues with support."
"The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
8%
Government
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

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...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dell, Canon, Siemens, Harvard University, Northwestern University
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Pulseway vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.