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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Stackify comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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 Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)
Stackify
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
60th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (62nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stackify is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.
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

"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"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."
 

Cons

"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"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."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
"I would like to be able to see metrics about individual running containers on the host machines."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Media Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
MyRacePass, ClearSale, Newitts, Carbonite, Boston Software, Children's International, Starkwood Media Group, Fewzion
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Stackify and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
862,514 professionals have used our research since 2012.