SolarWinds NPM vs Zabbix comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Oct 11, 2022

We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM and Zabbix based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions say deployment is straightforward and easy.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability.

    SolarWinds NPM users like the customization options of the dashboard, alerts, and reports, and say it is a strong tool for monitoring network devices. Users mention the integration capabilities need to be improved.

    Zabbix users say it is a mature solution that integrates well with Microsoft Office but that its UI needs improvement.
  • Pricing: Users of SolarWinds NPM consider the solution to be affordable. Zabbix is open-source and free of charge.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions are satisfied with the technical support.
  • ROI: Reviewers of both products report seeing an ROI.

Comparison Results: In this comparison, Zabbix comes out slightly ahead because it is open-source whereas SolarWinds NPM is not.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds NPM vs. Zabbix Report (Updated: May 2023).
706,951 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Is Zabbix or SolarWinds NPM better for infrastructure monitoring?
Answer: Disclaimer: Following 2+ decades of working with big-vendor IT Ops Mgmt Software - including being technical consultant employed by a global ITOM vendor - I have formed a business focussed on Zabbix. I will do my best to remain neutral. For me, both are flexible, highly configurable, stable solutions with a solid history and reputation. In terms of raw features there very little to choose between them. IT monitoring solutions have, in my opinion, entered a 'Red Queen Game' phase of evolution. This means that big vendors are introducing features purely because other vendors have them rather than because customers need them. In turn, this leads to justifying annual license increases to support features that are not relevant to the vast majority of customers. To balance that statement a little, I'm sure every individual feature in a given product is used somewhere. Big vendors must recoup development costs. For example, if a large multi-national Telco demands a feature then that feature will be developed and incorporated into the product. The cost of that development will be recouped in the following year's maintenance renewal contract and spread across ALL users of the product irrespective of whether a given feature is used. However, I digress. Your question was regarding Zabbix vs. Solarwinds Where there is a significant difference is in the Total Cost of Ownership. Zabbix is a true Open Source solution with zero licensing cost. Paid support is available directly from Zabbix. I can't comment directly on SolarWinds support, however the majority of major vendors typically charge approximately 22% of the original purchase price (plus an annual uplift) for support and maintenance. Zabbix support, directly from Zabbix, is not dependant on the number of devices being monitored. Zabbix's support is based on the number of Zabbix servers and proxies deployed. I believe, albeit only anecdotally, that Zabbix offers better scalability and performance compared to Solarwinds. Where Solarwinds does seem to impress is in the visual side. Graphs and navigation is "prettier" than Zabbix. Both solutions offer agent-based and agentless monitoring, discovery, templates, alerting, correlation etc. In my opinion, because the IT monitoring market has evolved to become almost commoditized there is no "better" or "worse" product. The criteria is no longer which is the better product, but which product meets your specific needs at your specific budget. And don't forget that with any tool you will need to administer and maintain it. At this point, the ability and skills of the administrator needs to be considered as well. For me, it's Zabbix every time but then again, I would say that wouldn't I.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
  • "There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
  • "There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
  • "The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
  • "We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
  • "Quite highly priced"
  • "There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
  • "We pay a yearly licensing fee."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a license required for this solution and we pay annually for our license."
  • "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 reasonable."
  • "There is no license but we need to pay for support."
  • "The solution is free to use but they offer support as a paid service. If you can go read the manuals and do the fine-tuning based on your needs, you do not need to pay anything and you will have a full solution."
  • "Zabbix and Grafana are both open source products, we only needed to go to their website and download the application and we began to use them. The solutions are free."
  • "This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
  • "We pay the subscription for support by year."
  • More Zabbix Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Harikanth N
    it_user1043517 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user1043517 (Head of IT Governance Service at ITGSTORE)
    Real User

    Hello ,

    just to let you know about my modest contribution, indeed its two tools are very practical: The choice of one of the solutions depends on two factors:
    - The price and the competence of the system administrators

    Zabbix is ​​a free tool and requires a strong Linux, Scripting skill for all that is custom supervision. integration with third-party tools ( Grafana Dashbord , Ticketing Tools ...)

    Solarwinds is very intuitive and complete (reporting, view, resources, NOC view) all its features are integrated and easily configurable.

    Regards

    Arsène

    Questions from the Community
    Ask a question

    Earn 20 points

    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer:We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of… more »
    Top Answer:Zabbix is an excellent performance monitoring tool.
    Top Answer:Zabbix is an open-source tool, and it's free to use.
    Top Answer:The integration of the product is not so easy, especially when it comes to the application database. Finding customized… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    The Juniper Mist Premium Analytics cloud service offers network visibility and business intelligence to drive your digital transformation journey. This service provides insights into your network and business operations while overcoming the complex challenges associated with the influx of big data from the multitude of networks and clients.

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    Zabbix is a free software tool traditionally used for monitoring your organization’s IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. Zabbix makes it possible for you to maintain control of your infrastructure by collecting any metric from any source. The solution also offers agentless monitoring, synthetic monitoring, custom collection methods, and data transformation.

    Zabbix offers:

    • Network monitoring
    • Server monitoring
    • Cloud monitoring
    • Application monitoring
    • Service monitoring

    Zabbix Features

    Zabbix has many valuable key features, including:

    Action Log, Anomaly Detection, Auditing, Automated Actions, Availability Reports, Capacity Planning, Custom Scripts, Custom Templates, Data Retrieval, Drill-Down Reports, Encryption, Event Correlation, History Data Analysis, Metric Collection, Multiple Authentication Methods, Multiple Severity Levels, Native WMI Support for Windows Agent, Network Discovery, Notifications, Root Cause Analysis, Trend Prediction, WMI Support, Web Services Widget-based Dashboards, Zero-Maintenance

    Zabbix Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing Zabbix. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Flexible deployment options: Zabbix can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud to help you stay fully in control of your data.

    • Unlimited scalability: Zabbix is scalable to any infrastructure. It can easily scale for your personal home, or can scale for a large enterprise environment.

    • Ready-to-use templates: Zabbix comes with ready-to-use templates which makes it easy to integrate with systems you already use.

    • External vault: Zabbix enables you to keep your data secure and safe by providing an external vault storage option.

    • High availability: By using Zabbix’s high availability solution, you can negate the risk of data loss and gain 24/7 uptime.

    • Partner and vendor-backed: The solution is backed by 250+ global partners and multiple external vendors, giving you confidence in the solution.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Zabbix users.

    PeerSpot user Shibu B., Regional Manager/ Service Delivery at ASPL Info Services, says, "The solution is quite mature and very stable. The monitoring capabilities of the product are excellent.” He also adds, “The solution is very easy to scale and the product is open-source, meaning there aren't any licensing costs associated with it.”

    Julian L., Senior Specialist Critical Infrastructure at an educational organization, comments that the solution is “A complete solution that doesn't cost anything, does what I need it to do, and has easy-to-use templates and very good scalability.” He also mentions “The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good.”

    Faycal N., CEO/Founder at Zen Networks, praises the product, mentioning, “Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources."

    Offer
    Learn more about Juniper Mist Premium Analytics
    Learn more about SolarWinds NPM
    Learn more about Zabbix
    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Bodybuilding.com, LLC., ITtelligent Consulting Services,Eltele AS, Total Server Solutions, LLC., ChinaNetCloud
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization23%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Aerospace/Defense Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Educational Organization17%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise63%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise52%
    Buyer's Guide
    SolarWinds NPM vs. Zabbix
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
    706,951 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 47 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 40 reviews. SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.0, while Zabbix is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "Simple to set up with good visualizations and helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Very mature, easy to scale, and free to use". SolarWinds NPM is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, LogicMonitor, Meraki Dashboard, ManageEngine OpManager and ThousandEyes, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Nagios XI, Nagios Core, Splunk Enterprise Security, Centreon and Checkmk. See our SolarWinds NPM vs. Zabbix report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors, and best Network Monitoring Software vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.