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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs VMware vCenter comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 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 Server Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Active Directory Management (9th)
VMware vCenter
Ranking in Server Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 3.3%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vCenter is 1.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vCenter1.9%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Other94.8%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.
VinayKumar7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Data Centre at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Centralized control has improved data center virtualization and streamlined DC DR replication
The pricing of VMware vCenter is high. What was earlier, before it was acquired by Broadcom, was different. Now, Broadcom has acquired it, and the earlier arrangement was that we used to bundle the license and purchase it according to our choice. Now, they bundle it with vSAN, which many organizations may not use. Although we purchase it along with the bundled license, we pay for something which is of no use to us because we have our own storage. If they had separate pricing for each module, organizations could purchase only the modules they need, and the price would lower. For smaller organizations, this can become a huge cost issue. For larger organizations, there is no issue, but for medium-sized organizations, they have to shell out a lot.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"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 has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The DRS, high availability and manageable switches are the most valuable features of VMware vCenter"
"We typically manage VMs after the OS is installed. vCenter simplifies VM management by allowing for the configuration and operation of VMs once an OS, like Windows, is installed."
"The platform is very effective for managing virtual infrastructure. It has improved our virtual infrastructure and virtual machine deployment in several ways."
"The high availability feature is particularly valuable when a host goes down or experiences high usage, as it automatically migrates VMs to other hosts to balance performance."
"One feature I really like about VMware vCenter is its ability to change hosts easily. It is highly available and very useful for our operations."
"It has significantly impacted our organization by facilitating troubleshooting and monitoring processes."
"VMware vCenter has significantly improved our infrastructure management by enabling virtualization. We can virtualize our infrastructure, eliminating the need to access servers physically. Everything can be managed remotely."
"I am using vMotion for live migration and storage migrations. I can use vCenter for both now."
 

Cons

"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"It is not easy to upgrade VMware vCenter from an old version to a new version."
"Sometimes, vCenter management can be difficult if you forget the password. You can't change or recover the password easily. We then have to reinstall vCenter, which means reconfiguring everything. That's a challenge we've encountered."
"The support for the Linux operating system wasn't great when we used it."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"There needs to be improvement in the pricing model, as the host license is already very high, and customers should have more open options for creating automation scenarios out of the box."
"The product's technical support services could be better."
"It could display the status of the storage space in terabytes, the number of VMs, etc."
"We have to buy more VMware products to leverage the centralized management."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"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."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"The solution is pretty expensive for small businesses because there are few lower-scale VMware vCenter solutions."
"The platform is highly-priced."
"The platform is expensive."
"The licensing model was a bit complex, but thanks to the vCenter product usage program, which VMware introduced, it's kind of easy for us to use a pay-as-you-go model."
"The product is expensive."
"The product's three-year license package is inexpensive."
"We utilize the basic licenses of the product."
"The tool used to be worth the money, but after Broadcom acquired it and changed the pricing structure to subscription-only, it became too expensive for us to continue using. Unfortunately, we haven't found any alternative solutions that meet our needs, so this is a significant drawback for us as we explore other options."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
12%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What do you like most about VMware vCenter?
The filtering capabilities also enhance scalability by optimizing resource allocation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware vCenter?
The initial package for VMware vCenter is not less than $10,000, which can be prohibitive for smaller organizations. The licensing model now requires purchasing 96-core solutions, even if fewer cor...
What needs improvement with VMware vCenter?
The pricing of VMware vCenter is high. What was earlier, before it was acquired by Broadcom, was different. Now, Broadcom has acquired it, and the earlier arrangement was that we used to bundle the...
 

Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
1. Amazon 2. Apple 3. ATT 4. Bank of America 5. Cisco Systems 6. CocaCola 7. Dell 8. ebay 9. Facebook 10. Google 11. HP 12. IBM 13. Intel 14. JPMorgan Chase 15. LinkedIn 16. Microsoft 17. Netflix 18. Oracle 19. PayPal 20. SAP 21. Siemens 22. Tesla 23. Toyota 24. Twitter 25. Visa 26. Walmart 27. WeWork 28. World Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. VMware vCenter and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.