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Security Onion vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
25th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
WhatsUp Gold
Ranking in Log Management
39th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (31st), Network Monitoring Software (23rd), Server Monitoring (14th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (17th), Configuration Management (20th), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Security Onion is 1.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Security Onion1.9%
WhatsUp Gold0.7%
Other97.4%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

HJ
Manager at teshama
Centralized threat monitoring has improved visibility but demands complex setup and configuration
The best features Security Onion offers include acting as the intrusion detection system in my organization and helping me to address traffic, logs, and events happening within the organization. Since Security Onion is an open-source system that integrates with tools like Suricata and Zeek with the ELK stack, it enables threat detection and response capabilities, delivering high-level security measures at a cost, making it suitable for businesses of varying skill levels. These integrations with Suricata and Zeek have greatly impacted our workflow and our team's effectiveness by helping us address issues such as identifying intrusions, evaluating threats, and overseeing log files. This tool is very cost-effective, making it suitable for any size of organization wanting to use it.
EC
Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet
Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains
The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Security Onion has positively impacted my organization by greatly improving our security posture, making alert triage easier to handle, simplifying the analysis of threats, and decreasing the cost of threat analysis and detection."
"The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"Our local support team provides excellent service."
"It is very good at monitoring the network and keeps us up to date on the status of internal devices."
"One thing good about WhatsUp Gold is that it is fairly stable."
"This is a good, stable network monitoring solution for devices."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the visibility it offers of everything in the network and infrastructure."
"We primarily use the solution to check the state of the network, monitoring thousands of devices and all of the internal network, and it is the first tool we use to see the state of the network for real-time monitoring."
"The documentation is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of resources."
 

Cons

"The product is not easy to learn."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"For Security Onion, setting up and configuring the system can be quite challenging for newcomers due to the need for a grasp of networking and security concepts."
"Honestly, I do not particularly like WhatsUp Gold. I think we should get rid of it."
"Pricing is too high relative to how many devices we use. The price list is not linear to number of devices."
"There is a very big gap in the support."
"I haven't had any issue with stability, except during the upgrade to 2017 when we encountered slow responses."
"The initial setup of WhatsUp Gold is a medium range of difficulty levels. However, if it is your first time it could be difficult."
"I think there are a few bugs now. Although they give some resolution for this, we cannot share the network remotely because of our company policy."
"Importing the maps and being able to customize them could be easier."
"I would like to see better integration with switches so that you can see what is connected to each port, what the traffic is, and have a network map automatically generated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"The choice of version depends on the number of points, or devices, that you want to monitor, and this makes the product expensive."
"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."
"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."
"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."
"The price of WhatsUp Gold is good."
"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."
"Pricing is reasonable compared to other products."
"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?
Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...
What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?
It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.
What is your primary use case for WhatsUp Gold?
My use case for WhatsUp Gold includes all device availability checks, bandwidth usage, CPU, and memory usage, as well as alarm notifications.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof
Find out what your peers are saying about Security Onion vs. WhatsUp Gold and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.