SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Stackify comparison

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Stackify and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor are two prominent solutions in monitoring server and application performance. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has the upper hand with its feature-rich offering, making it a worthwhile investment for users.

Features: Stackify offers seamless integration, efficient performance monitoring capabilities, and intuitive dashboards. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring features, in-depth insights, and broad compatibility with various environments.

Room for Improvement: Stackify could enhance its troubleshooting tools, offer more detailed analytics, and improve user interface customization. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve its complexity, ease of navigation, and manage the steep learning curve.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Stackify is praised for its quick, hassle-free deployment, and responsive customer service. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor often requires a more intricate setup and seasoned IT knowledge, and though effective, its customer support is perceived as less approachable.

Pricing and ROI: Stackify is noted for its competitive pricing and good ROI, especially for small to medium-sized enterprises. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, despite higher setup costs, delivers substantial ROI through its extensive features and reliability, making it a favored choice for larger-scale implementations.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Stackify Report (Updated: September 2025).

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Stackify

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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 Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)

Stackify

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

60th

Average Rating

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (59th), Log Management (58th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stackify is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.3%
Stackify	0.4%
Other	98.3%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

VIVEK PATHAK

Solutions Architect at Airtel

Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring

My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

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Moses Arigbede

Head of DevOps at Partsimony

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"

"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."

"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"The product integrates with Remedy."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

"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."

"The deployment is very fast."

"The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial."

"The solution is stable and reliable."

Cons

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."

"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."

"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."

"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."

"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

"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."

"The search feature could be improved."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

"The product is expensive."

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Media Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...

See all answers

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Comparisons

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Compared 17% of the time

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 15% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

New Relic vs Stackify

Compared 46% of the time

Dynatrace vs Stackify

Compared 23% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Stackify

Compared 18% of the time

Datadog vs Stackify

Compared 14% of the time

More Stackify Competitors

Product Reports

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

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Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM

No data available

Overview

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Stackify is an application performance management (APM) solution that combines application performance monitoring with logs, errors, and reporting. It is a SaaS solution that is developer-focused. Users can quickly scan, identify, and repair issues with applications. Stackify APM offers valuable tools, such as Prefix and Retrace, which help to make it a comprehensive and valuable APM solution. Stackify is now part of the Netreo family of IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM), which is considered one of the fastest-growing IT organizations in the marketplace today.

Stackify Prefix

Stackify Prefix helps developers write better code, faster. The tool examines, tests, and approves code as it is being written. Almost every new application is code-perfect, negating the need for exhausting troubleshooting and frustrating time-consuming code review.

Prefix is able to discover poor-performing SQL queries, ORM queries, potential bottlenecks, and concealed exceptions prior to moving the application into production.

Prefix offers Summary Dashboards, intuitive suggestions, integrated logs, and distributed tracing. Distributed tracing expands visibility to cloud-native applications, microservices, and containers and can also provide additional transparency to cache services, web services, third-party services, and more. Users are able to easily move from logs to traces and back.

This valuable tool ensures developers are able to consistently release the best code possible in the least amount of time, while improving performance, productivity, and profitability.

Prefix is a very robust and easy-to-use tool. It can be used seamlessly with Linux, macOS, and Windows. Prefix integrates well with numerous languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, .Net, and .Net Core.

Stackify Retrace

Stackify Retrace is a user-friendly, trusted APM solution used in more than fifty countries worldwide. Users know that Retrace is able to ensure they can complete quicker, more efficient application development and consistently enhance overall application performance by suggesting important intuitive suggestions users need.

This solution is beneficial to both developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) personnel to learn to improve code and immediately finetune issues by:

Establishing effortless collaboration between Dev and Ops personnel via an easy-to-use GUI dashboard.
Delivering complete transparency of all stages of the application development process, from pre-development to production.
Utilizing performance protocols, such as error tracking, application logs, and code profiling, in real time in order to thoroughly understand how long a code will take to complete various tasks.
Improving overall efficiency and productivity by immediately discovering and repairing application issues.

Retrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) uses both front-end and back-end monitoring to give users a complete picture of what is going on with the applications. This intuitive dashboard displays performance with a complete breakdown of resource usage and integrates the server-side and client traces into one engaging, user-friendly, extensive view.

Retrace is an out-of-the-box solution that works seamlessly with Java stacks, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, .Net, and .Net Core. It is also compatible with many of today’s popular frameworks, such as AWS, Azure, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis, and SQL Server. Additionally, Retrace will work effectively with many cloud providers, containers, and languages, and offers excellent and easy integration with today's favorite tools such as Jira, Slack, Jenkins, and more.

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

MyRacePass, ClearSale, Newitts, Carbonite, Boston Software, Children's International, Starkwood Media Group, Fewzion

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Stackify