Catchpoint vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

Catchpoint and Cisco are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Catchpoint is ranked #38 with an average rating of 8.0, while Cisco is ranked #46 with an average rating of 8.0. Catchpoint holds a 0.5% mindshare in APM, compared to Cisco’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Catchpoint users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Catchpoint

Read 14 Catchpoint reviews

1,492 Views
910 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

2,152 Views
710 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Catchpoint

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Catchpoint and Accedian Skylight are network performance monitoring tools. Users prefer Catchpoint for its robustness in real-time performance insights, while Accedian Skylight stands out for its precision and effective analytics.

Features: Catchpoint users highlight its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, detailed alert system, and proactive incident management. Accedian Skylight is praised for its precise network performance metrics, efficient analytics engine, and analytical depth.

Room for Improvement: Catchpoint could benefit from a more intuitive onboarding process, enhanced scalability for large enterprises, and a streamlined initial setup. Accedian Skylight could improve with additional integrations, better user training resources, and enhanced ecosystem compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Catchpoint is straightforward to deploy with excellent customer support, making troubleshooting easier. Accedian Skylight offers an easy deployment but scores slightly lower on responsive support services compared to Catchpoint.

Pricing and ROI: Catchpoint is considered more cost-effective, delivering good ROI. Accedian Skylight, while slightly more expensive, is justified by its superior feature set, resulting in high user satisfaction. Catchpoint provides better initial cost savings, whereas Skylight's long-term investment value is perceived higher by users.

To learn more, read our detailed Catchpoint vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

July 2025

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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

Catchpoint

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

38th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

60th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (12th)

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

46th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

44th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

AnmolRai

Technical Consultant Project Lead at Capgemini

Valuable monitoring features enhance ecommerce experience while improvement needed in region-specific insights

As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive similar data for the China market as we do for North America and Asia Pacific, this would be helpful.

Read full review

Pifu Lin

Senior System Engineer at DYNASAFE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD.

Addresses connectivity issues with real-time monitoring while offering good local support

I had prepared for COC and the client. I work as a vendor for a client using Flow Mount for network performance monitoring. I focus on resolving client-side issues related to Packy Performance and quality use. This involves addressing network device issues, specifically Cisco network devices One…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."

"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."

"Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn."

"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."

"One of the features, the scatter plot, is very useful. It shows red dots wherever there are issues."

"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."

"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."

"The solution offers three different ways of slicing data to look for abnormalities."

More Catchpoint pros

"Capturing traffic [is very interesting]. Currently, with our configuration, we don't capture the payload of the packets, just the header. But when we want the body, the payload of the packets, we can do a PCAP, and then analyze it within Wireshark."

"It is about finding operational problems. When sites go down, we try to determine who is at fault. While there is not much finger-pointing, the solution is just trying to analyse when there is an outage and where do we start looking to fix it. The very nature of why organization chooses to use the solution is to accelerate the meantime to resolution and find where problems lie to get them rectified as quickly as possible."

"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."

"This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations."

"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."

"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."

"The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."

"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

Cons

"We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts."

"Trending needs improvement. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends."

"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."

"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."

"The old user version was better, it was more user-friendly."

"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."

"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."

"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."

More Catchpoint cons

"For the PVX, they are in the process of getting the results to export to cloud and SaaS for analytics. They told me that this will happen later this year. Right now, for the most part, I create that data myself."

"It's a bit slow. When I execute a query, something general with a short timeframe that covers one month, for instance, and I do not specify the IP source or IP destination, it can take ages because it has to query the whole database."

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."

"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."

"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs. There are certain bugs, but nothing is insurmountable... It will just take a little bit of time for their user interface to get a little bit better."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."

"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."

"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."

"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."

"The solution was previously well-regarded, but after being acquired by Accedian, the prices have significantly increased. This has made it challenging to sell the product due to its high cost. It is an expensive solution."

"If you look into Riverbed, it's a licensing nightmare. You need to pay for every type of analysis... If you don't look into licensing, Riverbed and SolarWinds are pretty comparable. But if you look into licensing it would not be smart to go for either of them. On the pure, bare-metal basis, it's the same. But when you get the bare metal and a few basic licenses, then you need all those other licenses just to be sure that there's no issue... One of the great things about Skylight is you have them all, and you actually need them all."

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."

"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good. The sensors are low cost. Their model to analytics for sensors is by license, endpoint, or session. With the probes for their analytics, if they get deployed virtually, they are free. The licensing is only based on flows. So, you can effectively deploy probes everywhere in your network. Then, if you want to look at a specific type of traffic, you can enter into it with a very low cost license. You can just use things like spam ports, mirrors, TAPs, and aggregators to optimize what sort of traffic you send to these analysis tools. Then, if you want to start looking at more, you can up your licensed as you go. You are not getting forced into expensive appliances or subscription models."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Retailer

15%

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

36%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?

Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?

The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Catchpoint?

See all answers

What needs improvement with Accedian Skylight?

Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues. I require more tools to file and resolve these issues efficiently.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Accedian Skylight?

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Catchpoint

Compared 21% of the time

Datadog vs Catchpoint

Compared 12% of the time

New Relic vs Catchpoint

Compared 11% of the time

ThousandEyes vs Catchpoint

Compared 10% of the time

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ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 39% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 14% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint

August 2025

Download Catchpoint product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

August 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Also Known As

No data available

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision

Overview

Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs, and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.

Learn more at: https://www.catchpoint.com/

Catchpoint

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is known for its user-friendly approach to network analysis and performance monitoring. It excels in real-time diagnostics, helping organizations quickly resolve network issues and optimize performance effortlessly.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance focuses on comprehensive network troubleshooting and performance monitoring, assisting in identifying bottlenecks and analyzing applications. Real-time data collection and evaluation ensure IT infrastructure efficiency. With active monitoring of latency, jitter, and throughput, users maintain smooth operations across multiple sites and applications. While highly effective, improvements in data handling, protocol support, and dashboard aesthetics are suggested to enhance user experience.

What are the key features of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance?

Flow Matrices: Advanced analysis of network paths and traffic distribution.
SQL and DNS Analysis: In-depth insights into database and domain queries for troubleshooting.
Bandwidth Assessment: Evaluation of network capacity and utilization for performance optimization.
Real-time TWAMP Monitoring: Tracks network performance using Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol.
Application Performance Modules: Monitors the performance of various applications and services.
Customizable Dashboards: Personalized views for tracking critical network metrics and trends.
PCAP Capturing: Detailed packet analysis using tools like Wireshark for deeper insights.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Use: Intuitive design allowing users to swiftly diagnose network issues.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Enhanced visibility of network activity for better control.
Performance Efficiency: Optimization of throughput, reducing downtimes and improving service delivery.
Cost-Effectiveness: Balances features and functionality with competitive pricing for better ROI.

In industries such as telecommunications and finance, where network reliability is crucial, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers critical network performance insights. It supports high-demand environments by providing data-driven decisions, ensuring infrastructures handle increased loads efficiently.

Cisco

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

T-Systems, Thomson Reuters, Bordeaux Metropole, CGI, Citadelle Regional Hospital Center, Lorraine Institute of Oncology, Luxembourg Institute of Health, Groupe BPCE, Group S, Splitpoint, Horus-Net, Audatex, Indexis, Province de Liège, EASI, Spie Batignolles, Faymonville

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

July 2025

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