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SolarWinds NPM vs Versa Director 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

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
Versa Director
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
89th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.7%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Versa Director is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
Versa Director0.4%
Other95.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2146131 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Apps Functional Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
A cost-effective solution to monitor customer networks
We are not getting any issues with the integrations. Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management. People must rely on and utilize it to enhance anything they want to increase, as it helps minimize the product. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"SolarWinds makes a great product and their support is second to none!"
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by proactively indicating if we are low on resources for a particular server."
"As far as assisting in being proactive in our network, it's been a great help in helping us maintain a healthy environment and being proactive and making sure things are up to date and upgraded."
"We moved from nGenius to Orion NPM about 3 years ago and are very happy with the performance, features, and pricing, the company is very pro-active, as in adding additional features and being responsive to customer requests."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"The most valuable feature is the vital states of the devices as it provides overall CPU and device health information."
"The most valuable feature of Versa Director is analytics."
"Versa Director is a beneficial product for the environment my company has."
"I think the most valuable functionality is some of the policy pieces that are quite useful."
"Versa Director has easier customer reports, utilization monitoring, graphic shaping monitoring, configuration, template shaping, and deduplication compared to Fortinet and Cisco."
"Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management."
"Versa Director's best feature is the ease of configuration and customer and vendor management."
 

Cons

"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds, and sometimes the performance is slow."
"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 (which have no connection to the public internet)."
"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."
"There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better."
"Network discovery missed many devices."
"Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it."
"The constant flow of new features and re-designing of the product sometimes presents bugs that were not identified."
"SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution, aside from the fact that they had a major hack a couple of years ago and effectively allowed the Russian government to completely hack their code, making everyone vulnerable."
"I think the one area that could be improved is that there are a lot of features; that is also an advantage but it makes things a little difficult, so I'd like to see some simplification so that there is less bloat."
"Versa Director's deployment process is not the best."
"It requires some simplification."
"Versa could be more AI-oriented."
"What needs improvement in Versa Director is maturity because, from an operating point of view, it's not mature enough. You'll still need to do a lot of research on Versa Director, so if it could mature faster, that would be very good."
"Versa Director's on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software are not integrated, so you have to buy a separate subscription for the SSL VPN."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"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 approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"Having to buy separate licenses for the on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software makes Versa Director very costly compared to other solutions like Fortinet and Cisco."
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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
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Construction Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
No data available
 

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...
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Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Versa Networks Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Versa Director and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.