Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

SolarWinds NPM vs Stackify comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
Stackify
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
58th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (62nd), Log Management (64th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stackify is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
Moses Arigbede - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up with great custom dashboards but needs to improve non-.NET infrastructure
They need to improve non-.NET infrastructure. We always had difficulty when it comes to reporting or metrics that come from Linux operating systems and Docker containers. For anything that runs within the Unix environment, we always had problems with them, however, if it was a document-based application, Stackify was 100%, it gave everything. Now, the aggregation agent, the metric agent for Stackify for Linux, collects everything. When I say everything, I mean, everything. It collects so much information that we now started to term it as useless data as all that ingestion will just come in and overwhelm your log retention limit for the month and really this spike up your cost at the end of the month. You'll need to do a lot in order to train down the data coming in from all your Linux environments, to get to what you really need, which actually takes some time as well. I would like to be able to see metrics about individual running containers on the host machines. Stackify has not really gotten that right, as far as I'm concerned. Netdata has done a better job and New Relic has also done a better job. They need to improve on that. We need to be able to see the individual resource usage of containers running within a particular host.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"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."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial."
"The deployment is very fast."
"The filter feature on Stackify is one of the features I found valuable. It's awesome. When I want to get the application logs, the solution gives me many filters. For example, if I want to get logs from my test environment, the option is there for me to select the environment from Stackify, and you can also select the particular application, and you'll see the information you need there. The filter feature alone and the fact that Stackify offers a lot of different filters is what I like the most about the solution because I've used other tools with the filter feature, but the filtering was very difficult, versus Stackify that has good filtering. On Stackify, you can filter the information by the last one hour, or the last four hours, and you can also select the date range and specify the timestamp, then the solution will give you the information based on the date range you specified. Another feature I found valuable on Stackify is its rating feature because it tells you how your application is faring. For example, a rating of A means excellent, while a rating of F means very bad, or that your application is not doing well at all. The ratings are from A to F. I also like that Stackify helps you in terms of load management because the solution gives you information on overutilized resources. These are the most valuable features of the solution."
 

Cons

"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds could have a polling engine on the site that would collect the reporting and then manage everything itself."
"It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price."
"The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product."
"Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device."
"The search feature could be improved."
"It should be easily scalable and configurable in different instances."
"I've not used Stackify for a while, and I'm currently using a solution now that's not as good as Stackify. Among the solutions I've been using so far, Stackify has been one of the best for me, but there's always room for improvement. For example, I don't know if it's just me, but when I try to get the log from Stackify, sometimes it doesn't appear in real-time. It takes a few minutes before the logs appear. When I redeploy my solution and the application starts, I don't see the logs immediately, and it would take two to three minutes before I see the logs. I don't know if other customers have a similar experience. It's the wait time for the logs to appear that's a concern for me, could be improved, and is what the Stackify team should be looking into. In terms of any additional feature that I'd like added to the solution, I'm not sure if Stackify has a way to export logs out. I've been trying to do it. On the solution, you can click on a spiral-like icon and it shows you the entire error, and I'd prefer an export button that would let me download the error and save that into a text file, for example, so it'll be available on my local machine for me to reference it, especially because the log keeps going and as you're using the solution, the system keeps pushing messages on to Stackify, so if I'm looking at a particular error at 12:05 PM, for example, by the time I go back to my system and would like to revisit the error at 12:25 PM, on Stackify, the logs would have gone past that level and I won't see it again which makes it difficult. When you now go back to that timestamp, you don't tend to see it immediately, but if the solution had an export feature for me to save that particular error information on my local machine for reference at a later time, I won't have to go back to Stackify. I just go to that log, specifically to that particular export that I've received on my local machine. I can get it and review it, and it would be easier that way versus me going back to Stackify to find that particular error and request that particular information."
"I would like to be able to see metrics about individual running containers on the host machines."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"Price could be improved on"
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"The price is variable. It depends on how much data we have received in that particular month. Usually, it goes up to $2,000, or, at times, $3,000 USD per month."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Media Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
MyRacePass, ClearSale, Newitts, Carbonite, Boston Software, Children's International, Starkwood Media Group, Fewzion
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Stackify and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.