We use Netwrix Auditor for auditing, log centralizing, centralizing the logs, log management, and for permission access management, giving permission on shared folders and Active Directory groups.
Netwrix Auditor is an IT auditing and risk visibility solution that provides detailed insight into changes, configurations, and access across critical IT systems. It enables organizations to monitor activity in Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, file servers, databases, and other core infrastructure from a centralized platform.


| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Netwrix Auditor | 1.2% |
| RSA Archer | 5.5% |
| OneTrust GRC | 2.9% |
| Other | 90.4% |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CrowdStrike Falcon | 4.3 | N/A | 97% | 140 interviewsAdd to research |
| Splunk Enterprise Security | 4.2 | N/A | 94% | 402 interviewsAdd to research |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 4 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 102 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 86 |
| Large Enterprise | 163 |
The solution delivers real-time alerting, searchable audit trails, risk assessment dashboards, and automated compliance reporting. Its agentless architecture collects detailed activity data without degrading system performance, helping IT and security teams investigate incidents and respond to audit requests efficiently. Netwrix Auditor strengthens Active Directory security by providing real-time visibility into logons, privilege changes, group membership modifications, Group Policy updates, and other high-risk activities. It detects suspicious behavior, alerts on abnormal access patterns, and helps identify excessive permissions and dormant accounts before they increase risk. Searchable audit trails and risk-based insights support faster investigations and help reduce the likelihood of privilege escalation and unauthorized configuration changes.
Netwrix Auditor also supports least-privilege enforcement, broader security gap analysis across identities and infrastructure, and compliance efforts across on-premises and cloud systems. When integrated with Netwrix Data Classification, it extends visibility into activity around sensitive and regulated data, helping reduce overall data exposure risk.
Key use cases
• Detect suspicious activity and unusual behaviour with customizable real-time alerts
• Identify excessive permissions and reduce risk around sensitive data
• Monitor changes to Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and other critical systems
• Simplify compliance with prebuilt reports aligned with HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, GDPR, and other regulations
• Automate audit and reporting tasks to reduce manual effort
• Accelerate investigations with searchable audit trails and detailed activity records
• Gain centralized visibility across hybrid environments
AT&T, SanDisk, Siemens, Verizon, Electrolux, Allianz, Societe Generale
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Lead - Technical Services at Impetus | 4.5 | I've used Netwrix Auditor for a year and found it robust, flexible, and great for log management and permission auditing, though the UI needs improvement. It saves time and effort, and overall, I’m very satisfied with its features. |
| IT Technical Support Deputy General Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | I use Netwrix Auditor to monitor admin activities and ensure compliance with standards like HIPAA. Its affordability and comprehensive tracking, along with AI modules for security, are valuable. We switched from Quest due to support issues and budget constraints. |
| Vice President Operations at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 4.5 | I utilize Netwrix Auditor for data classification and compliance management, particularly for CMMC regulations. It effectively maintains audit logs and provides a centralized monitoring interface. While it functions well, I hope usability features will improve over time. |
| Director at IP Infotech Pvt. Ltd. | 4.5 | We use Netwrix Auditor as our compliance solution, gaining insight into our infrastructure and adding a security layer. It offers unique features, is easy to deploy, but its Linux compatibility needs improvement compared to more complex competitors. |
| System Administrator at Hariss International | 4.5 | I find Netwrix Auditor valuable for its clear risk reporting, ease of use, scalability, and competitive price. However, I wish its licensing structure was more inclusive and that initial setup documentation was improved. |
| System Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | I use Netwrix Auditor for essential real-time AD monitoring and security, especially for my 2,000 users, finding it provides full control. Setup was simple, but I wish for better log management than just email. Overall, it's highly recommended. |
| ICT Administrator at Innovist Technologies | 4.0 | I use Netwrix Auditor to monitor file servers and Active Directory details. The reporting and notifications are impressive, though it lacks password reset self-service and scalability improvements. Despite these issues, I have experienced a positive return on investment. |
| System Administrator at INSIGHT CREDIT UNION | 5.0 | I find Netwrix Auditor excellent for IT monitoring, valuing its user behavior analysis and risk assessments. It's reliable, scalable, with great support. My only wish is consolidated remediation. I highly recommend this solution. |

We use Netwrix Auditor for auditing, log centralizing, centralizing the logs, log management, and for permission access management, giving permission on shared folders and Active Directory groups.
Netwrix Auditor doesn't have many competitors at the level in which it is placed. All other companies provide auditing solutions but not up to the feature list; it is very broad and robust.
The best features include flexibility to interact directly with MS-SQL.
Real-time alerts help identify potential security threats.
The ability to streamline audits with insights into configuration states is helpful, as the access reviews and audit reports are really insightful. This is a good tool.
The search functionality is available, but comparative to other vendors, this is a bit slower.
Reports are effective; the compliance reports and all the reports are very insightful. That is good.
The areas of improvement include the front end, as the UI should be more intuitive and there should be fewer bugs.
In the UI, we have to adjust and resize our console many times, and sometimes it appears, sometimes you have to close and open it, and sometimes it does not give a scroll bar to navigate.
I've been using it for one year now.
It's stable. It's good.
It's easy to scale out without any problems.
I have not had experience with technical support from Netwrix.
Neutral
The installation of Netwrix Auditor is easy; any technical person can do that. It's not complex.
I see some ROI from Netwrix Auditor for this one year.
The ROI I see is time saving and effort saving.
Regarding saving money, I cannot comment because I don't know the price.
I don't know about the pricing of this, but it is good at this price point because our organization has purchased it, which means it was in budget. We usually do not buy expensive solutions, so the price is also good if we can afford it.
I have not used anything else for auditing apart from Netwrix Auditor.
My advice to people looking to use Netwrix Auditor is to select the correct module for themselves and the correct package and then go for it. Just don't go for the modules they don't need, and utilize all the modules. Don't just purchase and keep it aside. If you have purchased, you should deploy it, because all the features are helpful.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate Netwrix Auditor a nine.

Netwrix Auditor allows me to monitor all admin activities, including user management and privilege access control. It also offers group policy management, integration flexibility, scalability for reporting, and compliance reports for standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others.
The most valuable features of Netwrix Auditor are its affordability compared to similar products and its comprehensive monitoring of admin activities. It can track every admin action in large environments and includes AI modules to detect and prevent unauthorized changes.
The solution currently meets my needs, but there is room for improvement with the introduction of AI functionality as suggested by the vendor. Additionally, expanding capabilities like database activity monitoring for SQL and enterprise databases would enhance security. Integration monitoring and focusing on active directory changes are also areas of potential improvement.
The stability of Netwrix Auditor is fantastic. A ten out of ten. Netwrix Auditor shows stability with no impact on servers or clients, even with large databases like SQL or Oracle. It can save information locally if disconnected and retrieve it once the connection is restored. The agent for the solution is hardened, preventing admins from disabling it or tampering with logs.
I would rate the scalability of Netwrix Auditor as a perfect ten out of ten. In my company, there are around five engineers on my team using the solution.
The technical support for Netwrix Auditor is excellent, with a maximum ticket resolution time of around 24 hours. I'm highly satisfied with both the speed and quality of their services, particularly when requesting support to customize specific reports for my teams based on requirements from the Central Bank of Egypt. I would rate the support as a ten out of ten.
Positive
We used Quest Change Auditor before Netwrix Auditor. We switched to Netwrix due to issues with Quest's support and licensing requirements that didn't fit our budget. Our CIO requested termination of support with Quest because of difficulties with their CEO.
The initial setup of Netwrix Auditor was straightforward. Some functions require agents while others are agentless, simplifying implementation. It consumed minimal server and client resources, and the wizard-based console made it simple to deploy with the help of architectural teams. All required ports were in place, and they covered all critical services and databases effectively. I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as a nine out of ten.
The deployment of Netwrix Auditor took around three weeks, mainly due to the preparation of the environment and servers. The deployment process involved actions such as preparing virtual servers and building databases. Once deployed, it took only about a week to complete. Third-party consultants assisted us with deployment. Only one or two engineers were needed for deployment and maintenance, which could be handled remotely with minimal complexity.
The pricing of Netwrix Auditor varies based on the number of users and devices in our environment, but it is generally very cost-effective compared to other solutions. We don't pay for licenses separately; instead, we only pay for professional services, which are typically on an annual basis. I would rate the affordability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
Before choosing Netwrix Auditor, we evaluated other vendors like ManageEngine for Active Directory, File Share, and SQL. However, we found Netwrix to offer more value for the price, especially with their swap-in program, which covered all our needs without additional implementation or licensing costs.
Netwrix Auditor enhances IT change management processes by providing an overview of all admin activities and specific user actions in the environment, enabling monitoring of critical functions down to each action taken.
Netwrix Auditor has improved compliance and audit readiness by increasing the compliance level and providing dashboards to highlight critical areas. It helps protect you by alerting you about suspicious admin behaviors.
The most valuable features of Netwrix Auditor for identifying and responding to IT security threats are its ability to lock down file systems to minimize risks, detect malicious activity, synchronize data on-premises, enhance team productivity, and generate timely reports.
The user behavior and blind spot analysis feature in Netwrix Auditor has benefited our organization by enabling us to quickly detect suspicious behaviors in our large environment of around 30,000 workstations and 400,000 users.
The data classification and risk analysis feature in Netwrix Auditor has helped in our data protection efforts by leveraging our structured architecture to detect suspicious behavior promptly. It considers critical function criticality and user numbers to detect anomalies even after hours and on weekends.
Before implementing Netwrix Auditor, I recommend focusing on security and leveraging its capabilities to monitor all admin activities effectively. You can rely on Netwrix for database activity monitoring, Active Directory, Exchange, file shares, and more. Additionally, consider integrating Netwrix Change Tracker for file integrity monitoring to enhance your security posture. As for installation, there are no complex prerequisites, but ensuring your network architecture is properly set up is important. Netwrix provides support and guidance to help with this aspect.
Overall, I would rate Netwrix Auditor as a ten out of ten.
The solution is used for data classification by type, auditing access, and for the use of any type of data sets, from file server to SQL server.
It's used for compliance management, auditing, and tracking as a part of the CMMC regulations. For Department of Defense and supply chain organizations, CMMC is the new governing standard, which used to be for NIST 800-71. They're a set of controls and predefined methodologies for organizations to validate what they're doing to prevent bad guys from coming in and good data from going out, inadvertently or intentionally.
There are about 120 people on staff at a given time who use this solution and have access to class-controlled data.
We have evaluated Netwrix Auditor as a product solution to meet compliance management needs for an engagement we're working on. We're a Netwrix partner, and we're resellers.
It maintains audit logs for the duration of time that you wish, as long as you have the storage capacity to do so.
It's a very solid software product that allows you to meet those needs. You simply install the agent and the server in the environment, and you can run the application. For the most part, it does the work for you. There are some classifications that you need to put in place. From there, it provides you with a single pane of glass to monitor, validate, and essentially audit use and data type classifications.
I expect usability features to become more refined over time. I'm interested to see how it evolves and continues to improve.
The stability is solid. There haven't been any hiccups. It's incredibly efficient and functional. It's not disruptive to data sets or any of the features or functionalities in an environment.
It's absolutely scalable. It's going in your infrastructure, so it's only scalable if you're using contemporary operating systems. At some point, I guarantee that there are going to be people who say it's not scalable. But if you look underneath the hood, it's because they aren't managing their infrastructure properly.
We haven't needed to engage tech support.
It's pretty straightforward. You can deploy the environment within four hours and start using it.
If you buy direct, there is a minimum of 150 licenses that must be procured. The price point and barrier of entry is a little bit higher than it would be if you purchased the solution from an authorized reseller partner, rather than buying it and managing yourself.
These are technologies or solutions that we've commoditized as managed security service providers. There's a cost to maintain staff and maintain the solutions. Why not make it an OPEX expense, hire us, pay on a monthly basis, and make sure that your environment is stable, managed, and controlled?
The only area that's a little difficult to understand is the licensing methodology from the direct sale of a client perspective versus a partner perspective. That was more of a barrier for me. I don't think that would be a problem for the average consumer because they're just going to get a quote.
Evaluating and helping the client understand if they want to buy directly and what the cost would be if I partnered with them is a little difficult to navigate straight out of the gate. I want to make sure it's a fair and equitable price point but also make sure that I remain profitable.
I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. The only reason why it isn't a ten is because there are other tool sets that can do everything natively without needing a bolt-on. If you're using G Suite, any other cloud-based platform for hosting your servers, or on-premises servers, it's a great solution.
My advice is to evaluate at least a couple of different solutions to figure out what makes the most sense for you. With Microsoft Office 365, you can achieve similar if not better auditing and controllability of your dataset using the appropriate licensing. If you're managing it yourself and you're not familiar with the Microsoft Purview center or Security Center or effectively managing Azure 80, you're putting yourself at a very serious risk.
By partnering with an organization like mine and allowing us to help you with your compliance management journey, you can meet the same exact audit goals using Microsoft 365 with E5 licensing or G5 licensing on the government side. It's about $38 per user, per month for that particular productivity license, which gives you the complete Office suite: Teams, Outlook, one terabyte per user, SharePoint, OneDrive, et cetera.
Netwrix is our compliance solution. It helps us understand exactly what is happening within our internal infrastructure. It is a proactive solution that provides an additional layer of security.
Netwrix provides features that no other solution on the market does.
The Linux compatibility of this solution could be improved.
I have been using this solution for three years.
I would rate the stability of this solution a nine out of ten.
This is a scalable solution. I would rate it a nine out of ten.
The initial setup is straightforward. I would rate it a nine out of ten.
This solution is reasonably priced. I would rate it a nine out of ten.
The deployment of Netwrix is very easy and it provides features that other solutions do not. Other competitors are more complex.
The most important part of using this solution is your data. You have to fulfill the compliance and data security requirements including GDPR.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

My primary use case for Netwrix Auditor is active directory auditing and file server. Active directories are a big benefit of Netwrix Auditor for system administrators. For example, with active directories, it is easy to change the group policy.
Netwrix Auditor's risk and other security assessments are also beneficial.
What I find the most valuable about Netwrix Auditor is the way it shows risk. The reports are very clear. It is very nice and easy for an experienced user. Netwrix Auditor is very simple and straightforward.
There is room for improvements when it comes to the licensing. Right now, for example, they categorize active directory and server licenses separately. In my opinion, it would be good to include several services under the same license. So, if you got the active directory license, then maybe that could include another service under the same license.
I have been using Netwrix Auditor for almost a year and a half.
Netwrix Auditor's stability has been good for us so far.
Right now, we have 350 licenses at my organization. We are not using all 350 yet. We have some wiggle room. The next time we renew our license, I will increase the number by probably 50 users. When we first started using Netwrix Auditor, we got 300 licenses and have expanded since. So, Netwrix Auditor is scalable.
Netwrix Auditor's technical support is nice.
No we did not previously use a different solution.
I have had some trouble deploying Netwrix Auditor. I would like to see more training documentation in the next release. More specifically, I would like to see documentation that explains the value you need to change in the local group.
We deployed in-house. Our technical team took care of the whole process. The deployment took several hours. This included the integration with the main controller and the main server.
The price of Netwrix Auditor is good and competitive. However, I would like to see more features added to the licenses. More specifically, it would be great to have DNS and DSTP be included under the same license as active directories. This is because I think 95% of companies run DNS and DSTP servers along with the main controller.
I looked into a wide range of other options, but, at the end of the day, Netwrix Auditor was the easiest to use, most straightforward, and it had competitive pricing.
I would you recommend this product to other people who want to start using it.
We use Netwrix Auditor to monitor the Active Directory. Specifically, we use it to understand where user accounts were locked out. We need to know who changed what, who joined it, if a computer in domain is the right name, and if it's the right organization unit to put in. It's very useful since we use it to manage 2,000 users. Without Netwrix, it's impossible to take control of things.
Every week, there is a report for all the logs for the week. It's like a summary that Netwrix offers. You can choose not only to monitor what is changing, but to monitor, for example, who is accessing a shared folder. For this kind of feature, another modification needs to change in the Activity Director and in the domain controller to enable some other event log in order to monitor that.
The biggest benefit I have seen is that it gives you full control and better monitoring.
The most valuable feature is the real-time monitoring. As soon as an event log is generated, Netwrix will report it immediately. For example, a user has joined the domain administrator group. This is an alert without the permission of the administrator, for example. So, it's useful for security.
It makes the Active Directory environment more secure, and the summary report is very useful.
An improvement would be if there was an another way to manage the logs besides email because it's not so practical. Maybe if there was a possibility to access, for example, this solution from a website and there was a section where you could read logs and were able to search for information you need.
I have been using this solution for three years. We use the solution on-premises. I'm the main administrator and the only one in my company who uses Netwrix Auditor.
It performs okay, but sometimes I don't know why alerts stop. It might be from the Netwrix side or from the domain controller side. I don't know, but I think it's a problem with the services that communicate with the agent installed on the domain controller I think.
Initial setup was very simple. It's enough to install the agent on the domain controller and then to configure the solution in another server.
The more complex maintenance is starting the services or the server. If I notice that I haven't received emails from Netwrix for a long time, I just restart the server and it's solved.
The solution was already configured by the previous system administrator.
I tried another open-source solution based in Linux. It was not as sophisticated as Netwrix. The solution got the job done, but there were some features missing, so there was a reason why it was free. Netwrix has more functionalities than this product.
I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. I would recommend it because it's useful. If the person is a system administrator in a big environment with more than maybe 500 or 1,000 users, I really recommend it because it's impossible to monitor all the logs on Active Directory without it.
We use the solution to monitor file servers, Active Directory passwords, expiration dates, etc.
I am impressed with the tool's reporting feature and notifications.
The solution lacks self-service on password reset. It also needs to improve its scalability.
I have been using the product for three years now.
I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.
I would rate the solution's scalability a six out of ten. We have two administrators using the product.
The tool's setup is easy. The tool's deployment took a couple of hours to complete.
I have seen ROI with the product's use.
The tool's price is fair.
I would rate the product an eight out of ten. The tool provides a clear view of network access, the resources being utilized, etc.

We use this solution to monitor our whole IT environment.
I have found user behavior analysis and the ability to run risk assessments important features. Additionally, the interface and online documentation are very good.
When there are issues I would like remediation to be in one place.
I have been using the solution for approximately three years.
The solution is reliable.
The scalability is good. I have added some modules and the latest one was for data classification.
The technical support is very good and they are responsive.
The installation was straightforward and the full deployment took approximately three months.
There is a license for this solution and we are on an annual license. The price is reasonable.
We did evaluate other solutions before we picked this one.
My advice to others is to make sure they spend the time to get to know this tool.
I would recommend this solution to others.
I rate Netwrix Auditor a ten out of ten.